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Comment by 4ndrewl | Hacker News Reader

I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.

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There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it.

The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)

China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.

Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?

Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.

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