Histomap: Visualizing the 4000 year history of global power (2021)
visualcapitalist.com
visualcapitalist.com
But more than poking fun at the specific issues in this attempt (and there are many to be sure), I strongly suspect that there's no way to even responsibly attempt such an endeavor. Quantitative data is simply lacking for much of history. Population demographics for well-attested areas such as the Roman Empire at its height is difficult to establish, but if you try to apply it to, say, pre-Columbian North America, the estimates vary by orders of magnitude. GDP estimates are even worse--even today, there are many countries where GDP may be over 25% off, and any number before 1500 may as well be pulled out of an ass.
The bigger question is if it's even reasonable to attempt to condense "power" into something quantitative. Economic power doesn't necessarily lend itself to diplomatic power: the US became the world's largest economic power sometime in the late 19th century, yet it remained a diplomatic lightweight pretty much until the climax of WWI.
This region has the best geography to create massive populations. And massive amounts of people generally correlated with massive powers. The only exception to this was during the early periods of globalization that culminated in Colonialism.
Empires do wither out but their populations do not mostly disappear; which gives "re-birth" to other empires. China-India were always the center of the world but the same couldn't be said for their empires.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China
The nation-state is a very recent idea.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_flags_over_Texas
[1] To be fair it looks like Austin has only had 5 flags flying over it, counting from the earliest Missions.
1800s timeline of 6000 years, 27"x276" paper: https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Synchronological-Chart-Map-Hist...
Higher resolution Histomap (10MB vs 4MB), https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...
Without context this map seems to be ridiculously wrong, until you learn that it was created in 1931 by an American, and as a product of that time includes all possible Eurocentric biases. For example, on that map thousands of years of American history are missing. Inka? Aztecs? Mali in Africa? Khmer empire in South-East Asia? Majapahit?
It would be interesting to see more modern visualization that has more focus on cultural and technological achievements rather than on wars and power games.
Inventions and discoveries sounds as something as close to "objective" as we can get. Cultural would be interesting, but I believe more heavily dependent on the author of the comparison than the achievements.
And thanks for the link with _context_!
One rendering of Wikipedia events: https://histography.io
To be exact, peak of cossacks was about 1655 year (yes, unions with Poland and Lithuanian), after which happen quasi-voluntary merge with Russians, and from that time nearly constantly exists Ukrainian anti-empire resistance, mostly eliminated only in mid 1950s, with build of Kakhovka dam, which just flood cossacks.