Animated map of 5000 years of empires that controlled the Middle East | Hacker News Reader

Animated map of 5000 years of empires that controlled the Middle East

mapsofwar.com

48 pointstheoneill35 comments

A minor nitpick: the northwest of the Iberian peninsula, the Romanic-Swabian kingdom of Gallaecia, was never conquered by the Caliphate.

Also there were at one point three Caliphates. The idea of a single Caliphate wasn't reality? If I recall correctly, there were always strongmen laying claim to the title.

Question: Why is this on hacker news?

Beat me to it.

Somebody posted it?

"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

It's stuff like this that keeps me coming here.

Great app. Simple, probably not that much behind it, but conveys a lot of data directly into the user's reptilian brain. Makes me wonder how I could incorporate a technique like this into my own apps.

Oh, and the content was interesting, too.

beyond any other obvious reason as others pointed out, the rise and fall of empires is something totally revelanD in the startup world.

I agree with you. I've been banging the drum of content diversity but I feel that old Digg/reddit submissions that are no doubt interesting to hackers is something that will detract from the value of the overall focus, which is mainly geeky-startup (at least that's what I see) stuff.

For some reason, content like this makes a periodic appearance every few months. A tutorial by IBM on how to better utilize command line tools is another.

Just one step from collections of interesting pictures. Here, all context is lost. History without context is rubbish.

Even if you have no idea what these different empires were, it's interesting to see the pattern of conquests in this region. And if you do know what most of them were, it's fascinating to see things usually covered in different books all together one after another.

The main fault I'd find with this is that time doesn't flow at a constant rate. Also it would be interesting to watch the way territories shrank as well as the way they expanded.

Showing all the territories, as they expand and contract, would be much more information. Also, the smooth growth of empires just isn't the way it happens. The quick snaps of change would be both more accurate and dramatic.

The time constant is an interesting aspect. If it were tunable, you might get bored in the past and overwhelmed as time progressed to modernity.

Globally, it would be interesting to see colonization through the end of the cold war.

Another interesting map might be a heat map of home prices over an area like NYC's 5 boroughs. Lots of people treat gentrification like some kind of war, so using a similar visualization would be appropriate.

Another map that would be interesting, even over the same time period and region, is total or per capita wealth within an empire. The best visualization would involve the area of the territory shrinking or growing like these scaled cartograms: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/countycart3070l...

update: Normalizing wealth per capita by the number of slaves would be an interesting measure ancient productivity

What an excellent idea. One problem: what records do you suggest we use that shows the breakdown by empire of the total and per capita ownership of slaves?

The populations are roughly known. In the roman empire, I think the numbers were something around 1:2:2 for citizens, regulars, and slaves. It's also difficult to measure wealth. Should we use gold?

Rate of technological advancement would probably be the best measure.

There are a fair number of records from ancient times, with huge holes.

I just spent 2 hours learning about whole empires that I had never heard of. Joys of a great american education.

"Joys of a great american education."

I learned about all of those listed in a public high school AP European History class.

The generalizations about American education are a bit broad. It's fair to say it is extremely unevenly distributed. It's also fair to say the US has the best university system in the world. Just look at where people try to go to study.

I agree, I learned all about these in school.

I also learned about a fair number of them from church...

Some people are little more than karma bots (or maybe they are bots) - skim all the top articles from the major sites and reintroduce them randomly at semi-regular intervals (proportional to ranking at reintroduction).

I would say this goes for major news organizations too.

- EDIT -

Aha, it isn't a bot!

Perhaps you can write a bot like this. And then sell your karma-drunken account to a PR company.

(Obviously this would not work on our enlightened side - but only with the unwashed masses of social news.)

I'd vote it up, sounds like a useful thing. But then I'm just a fool like that.

The quant-fund of the social news world.

Heh, nice.

Please introduce me to a PR company that will buy karma-drunken accounts. So far, the only thing I've thought of is eBay and I haven't quite had the resolve.

Time to move on?

- EDIT -

Downmodder, I'm asking rms why he wants to sell his account.

Nah, it's just that the karma doesn't mean anything to me, I'd come back with a different account.

Do you get any other privileges with such high karma, or is the color change it?

just the color change

For some reason, content like this makes a periodic appearance every few months.

Because its kinda cool, kinda geeky and with broad appeal: a common denominator. Its been on Reddit many, many times also, for the same reason. There is nothing wrong with that, its an unavoidable characteristic of systems like this (unless you particularly wanted to make an effort to avoid dupes).

Though I agree it could be waaay better executed by someone with enough time and data on their hands. The first time I saw it I really wanted to abstract the idea to a general system into which you simply feed structured historical data, and people can generate custom interactive map-reports. Wonder if there is much of a market for such a thing, it'd be really cool for educational purposes.

That IBM tutorial was great...

I agree. I've seen it 4 times over the past year.

Will the same map in a few years include the American empire? Afganistan, Iraq, (maybe) Iran...

No one's going to conquer Afghanistan - certainly not the U.S.

Kingdom of Israel ? That's more biblical myth than real history.

booooooooooooooooooooooooring

to me the ugly flash ruins it, it would have been uber in SVG

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