

Animated map of 5000 years of empires that controlled the Middle East - theoneill
http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf?

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

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DanielBMarkham
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.

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dkasper
Question: Why is this on hacker news?

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theoneill
"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>

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

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ivankirigin
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.

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pg
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.

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ivankirigin
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...](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/countycart3070large.png)

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

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Kaizyn
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?

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ivankirigin
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.

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

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

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

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tokipin
booooooooooooooooooooooooring

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

