Map Thread XXI

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Merovingian

4EC99C86-5A4F-454D-A776-48F0F720A2CA.jpeg

I present to you, of all things, a Lebanon-wank. Don’t ask me why.

The French colonial administrators of Syria and Lebanon decide to merge the two into a single country. Said country gains independence around 1945 as the Republic of Phoenicia(has as much to do with ancient Phoenicia as modern Ghana has to do with the Ghana Empire). It went through a series of corrupt and incompetent leaders before finally coming to be ruled by Antoun Saadeh, who held the country together by brutally suppressing any opposition. When Saadeh died in 1974, the country collapsed into a sectarian civil war.

The civil war ended in 1987, when the country was reunified by a coalition of opposition groups and reorganized as the Phoenician Democratic Republic. The new democratic government wasn’t actually all that democratic, but it rebuilt the country after the bloody civil war. As of 2022, it has a growing economy and is fairly stable by the standards of the region, but there have been increasing worries that it is sliding back into dictatorship. Similar to South Africa, it has three capitals; Beruit(executive), Damascus(legislative), and Aleppo(judicial).
 

spoonzandforkz

cornycator said:
View attachment 763933

A sort of sequel/reboot thingy to an old map I made.

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It has been almost five centuries since the Targaryens have landed in the lands of Japan, and the subsequent conquest of China by Aegon The Conqueror, also known as the Tianli Emperor. Now, the empire his descendants has inherited stretches from the mountains of far east Siberia, to the Champa Sea, its power and wealth the envy of the world. Recently however, its might is beginning to wane. While their technology has been developing at a steady rate, there have been several new powerful states who are ready to undermine their hegemony all around them. Adding to this, the dragons which the Xia nation is known for has gone extinct after some painful gradual decades the power of the Targaryens is now up to its most crucial test.

Of course, running an empire this vast by an ethnic minority has never been easy, even if said ethnic minority used to have access to dragons. After centuries of living in the same state, the various cultures throughout the Xia have begun to resemble each other more and more. Chinese has been widely adopted as the lingua franca, and learning it is very important for one to climb the empire's social and political ladder. This of course, has led to a lot of Sinicization, especially recently. In fact, it has become so widespread that as far as Venice, some variant of Chinese can be heard.

Chinese, of the Mandarin variant, is the language of court. It is also the language spoken by most of the Westerosi-descended upper aristocracy. While the Targaryens and Westerosi has suited themselves to the Han ways this is not a one way streak. Westerosi culture has also spread in the empire, adapted into local environments. This can be seen in the dresses and outfits, particularly among the native aristocracy, as they have emulated the Westerosi way of living to gain more status. For the Targaryens, they have all but abandoned incest, even more so recently as they no longer need to keep their blood pure to become dragontamers. Also, a Targaryen emperor usually their Westerosi name alongside their Chinese era name, but the Westerosi one has been all but forgotten (example: the aforementioned Aegon I, also called the "Tianli Emperor").

In this universe, there was never a period of technological isolationism for East Asia. The spirit of the Treasure Fleet still remains, and the Xia are very eager to showcase their advancements and might to the rest of the world, which they consider to be their rightful dominion. Back when they still had the dragons, it is tradition for Targaryen princes (and some princesses) to journey the world with their winged beasts. This is how the Xia are able to know so much of the world so early. Due to this, many islands of the Eastern Ocean have been discovered, particularly Huawai, which was contacted a century ago. Though the dragons are now gone, there have been renewed interest in exploring the far eastern ocean, especially due to recent competition. Lately, there have been rumors of a massive continent east of the empire, according to the Europeans.

The disappearance of the dragons have also forced the Targaryens to adopt more new measures to protect their rule. The main goal of Xia foreign policy was to keep any nearby powerful states from forming or lasting long. However recently powerful countries such as the Oirat Khanate and Ruthenia have been disturbing the Xia-led order. Add to this, the recent arrival of the Europeans and the tributary-commandery system is starting to get eroded. While the tributary system is being expanded to India, one can only wait to see how strong this will hold up. The Emperors have also ramped up the relocation and migrant campaigns, as can be seen in Jurchenia.

Recent incidents have also poked some holes into the Xia order. In the Song Kingdom, a peasant claimed that he received a divine visions that told him he will be the one to lead a popular revolution against the Targaryens. He of course, started a large-scale uprising. While the government has dealt with rebellions like these plenty, this one would end up disastrously. After being defeated multiple times, the rebels and their leader Lin Changhui, fled to the city of Chongqing. The locals are sympathetic to the rebels, and refused to cooperate with the Emperor's Mongol army that was sent in to the city to search. Tensions soon boiled over, and what just started as a minor scuffle spiraled into a mass extermination of a third of the city, some 100,000 people. News of this atrocity spread quickly throughout the empire, and to the Zhiyuan Emperor who was residing in Fuzhou. This led many to be outraged at the Xia regime and demanded that something be done. The court has been scrambling for a way to save face.
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Fascinating and quite a pretty map!

It's amusing and ironic that China being conquered by outsiders conversely leads to a Sino-wank itself, but I suppose when one looks at history, and how China reached it's greatest territorial extent under the Yuan and Qing dynasties, that might not be too far off the mark.

More of a cultural than political question, but I'm curious. What do people in this world think of the cultural similiarities between the old Westerosi and Europeans/British? The Westerosi might essentially be Chinese now, but I'd imagine at least some old Valyrian and Common Tongue texts would survive into the present day, and gvien how the latter is essentially modern English mixed with minor retro-Medievalisms, you'd imagine once there's regular cross-cultural contact and transmission between Europe and China, scholars from both ends will likely be pointing out the odd similarities... (or, more noticeably at first given the great global voyages, how the Targaryen dragons match up essentially one-to-one with Western concepts of winged flying reptiles)
 

cornycator

FighterJetAsparagus said:
Fascinating and quite a pretty map!

It's amusing and ironic that China being conquered by outsiders conversely leads to a Sino-wank itself, but I suppose when one looks at history, and how China reached it's greatest territorial extent under the Yuan and Qing dynasties, that might not be too far off the mark.

More of a cultural than political question, but I'm curious. What do people in this world think of the cultural similiarities between the old Westerosi and Europeans/British? The Westerosi might essentially be Chinese now, but I'd imagine at least some old Valyrian and Common Tongue texts would survive into the present day, and gvien how the latter is essentially modern English mixed with minor retro-Medievalisms, you'd imagine once there's regular cross-cultural contact and transmission between Europe and China, scholars from both ends will likely be pointing out the odd similarities... (or, more noticeably at first given the great global voyages, how the Targaryen dragons match up essentially one-to-one with Western concepts of winged flying reptiles)
Click to expand...
I originally wanted to write more stuff about culture, but didn't have enough space. The general rule is, the closer to the Pacific Ocean, the greater the Westerosi influence. Regarding similarities with Europeans, at this vaguely it can only be vaguely spotted by westerners, in the customs and dresses. But I imagine in the modern era people will start noticing how much more European the original Xia ruling class was. There might be also some spicy racial arguments that are birthed....
 

spoonzandforkz

cornycator said:
I originally wanted to write more stuff about culture, but didn't have enough space. The general rule is, the closer to the Pacific Ocean, the greater the Westerosi influence. Regarding similarities with Europeans, at this vaguely it can only be vaguely spotted by westerners, in the customs and dresses. But I imagine in the modern era people will start noticing how much more European the original Xia ruling class was. There might be also some spicy racial arguments that are birthed....
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I imagine the relative powers and positions of Europe and China will be a major factor in deciding modern cultural theories and memes regarding that kind of stuff. If Europe comes to dominate the world as extensively as it did OTL, I well imagine there'll be all sorts of kooks making crazy conspiracy theories about the original Xia.

But then, the Chinese here seem to be a much more important and internationally proactive player (and with apparently dialects of Chinese being spoken as far west as Venice - notably not Valyrian or the Common Tongue), so I'm not as sure about total European dominance being as preordained or as pronounced in history, if likely still pretty darn important. (With a POD this late, Targaryen conquests in the East aren't likely going to hinder European naval exploration and colonisation all that much, besides maybe in in the Indian and the Pacific Oceans where China will be the head honcho to a rather greater extent than OTL)

And while the Westerosi/Valyrians are based off mostly on high Medieval Europeans/Romans (especially Wars-of-the-Roses-England), they still differ from Europeans in some respects, what with the whole "white-haired purple-eyed thingy" and different religions, etc, and in any case the Chinese seem to have successfully assimilated and incorporated the Westerosi wholesale, so they may well claim them as "their own".

But yes, the mysterious appearance of dragon-wielding purple-eyed freaks with weird connections to a proto-futuristic English in the East will likely be a topic of fierce debate confusing philosophers and thinkers for centuries to come...
 

fernerdave

TheRedSaurian said:
View attachment 765110

About a month ago I had a sudden urge to jump on the manifesting-america-anywhere-but-west bandwagon on r/imaginarymaps and made this.


A portal opens in OTL Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1800. The portal leads to the same place but in the Late Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. America subsequently gets the idea that it is their God-given duty to pacify and settle the lands on the other side of this portal (the Washtenaw Gate, as they call it) and this occupies most of their attention from then onwards. A luckier Napoleon doesn't sell Louisiana, and America stays more or less within their 1800 borders. After all, they have all the land they could ever want waiting for them through the gate...

With America busy, Mexico ends up absorbing Oregon, the Caribbean, and Florida and makes Lower Louisiana and several South American nations into client states. France spends most of the 19th century trying to conquer Europe more frequently and more zealously than they did OTL, and are only stopped when a puppet state they carved out of Germany leads a coalition against them in the 1890s and punishes them severely. Fascism (somewhat different from ours, but same name) takes hold in France in the late 1910s, and in the 1920s they and their allies overrun most of Europe with ideas of Latin racial superiority. Due to America not really caring, Soviet Russia has to defeat France by itself, and by 1933, France is in pieces, Russia is imploding, and the shiny new Union of Socialist European States is forcing itself onto the world stage.
The world of 2022 is polarised between Mexico And Friends and the USES' world-spanning alliance system of communist states, with the US being the most important neutral state.

The world on the other side of the Washtenaw Gate is an interesting one, mainly because much of it is controlled by intelligent troodontids called the Kihan, who evolved in Asia. Most of proto-North America is under US control, with Kihan states in the west and south. Of particular concern is the Šikīnye Empire, a Kihan state based in proto-Iran that has managed to reverse-engineer a huge amount of human tech (with a few innovations of their own) and explode across Eurasia. The US has accepted many refugees, especially persecuted minorities, throughout history because of it having a convenient dumping ground for them, and most pastside non-US human states are descended from those refugees.

The future looks uncertain, as the Mexican-European cold war heats up, and American scholars worry about the asteroid impact in Mexico that, pastside, doesn't seem to have happened yet.

I might eventually make a map of the presentside of the gate, but no promises.

(Credit to Kaiphranos for the inexplicable-rip-in-spacetime-in-Ann-Arbor idea!)
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Nice scenario but Ann Arbor and washtenaw county were from the 1820s By 1837 , I bet Michigan gets Toledo!
 

PobreCesar

Almost one hundred years ago, what would now be considered almost a minor miracle happened. An alternate history anthology, which had no fixed rules on the subject, was nevertheless published without a single mention of an Austro-German painter who shall go unnamed. This, of course, was If; or, History Rewritten an anthology of alternate history essays from a range of figures including G.K. Chesterton and Winston Churchill (whose contribution I have previously covered). Here I am concerned primarily with the work of Phillip Guedalla, who wrote on what would have happened if "the Moors in Spain had won", by which he means "the Emirate of Granada had survived to the present day". Apparently they would have kept their monarchy, forged a "far flung" empire, and invented a device that neutralizes the butterfly effect. I have attempted to compensate for this last by incorporating ideas from several other stories in the collection, for which I am indebted to (among others) messieurs Van Loon, Fisher, & Maurois.
Mandate for Spain.png
 
Sarthak

Sarthak

The Asian Giants

ocVhGB8.png

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The year is 1600 AD. For around a century now, five Empires have dominated the politics of Asia. In the land of the Shahanshahs, Zikanid Iran stands proud and tall, deriving its origins to the Achaemenid Empire under the Great House of Zik/Zikan. In India, the Newars of Nepal firmly established the Empire of Nepala under the Malla Dynasty, ushering a new era of Buddhist renaissance to the subcontinent. In the East Indies, Majapahit rules supreme, ruling the waves and the straits trade. In the lands of Taizong and Bai Hu, the Great Ming stands proud as the Celestial Leader of All Under Heaven, ruling from Central Asia to even the New World under their Fusangese Colonies. To the frozen north, the Yakutian Horde stands prideful of its victories against the Slavs of Eastern Europe. But as European powers start to slowly encroach upon Asia, these Empires will face difficulties from Europe, but can they survive the test of time? Only the Heavens knows.........

Thoughts and Comments?
 

Analytical Engine

सार्थक (Sārthākā) said:
The Asian Giants

ocVhGB8.png

​
The year is 1600 AD. For around a century now, five Empires have dominated the politics of Asia. In the land of the Shahanshahs, Zikanid Iran stands proud and tall, deriving its origins to the Achaemenid Empire under the Great House of Zik/Zikan. In India, the Newars of Nepal firmly established the Empire of Nepala under the Malla Dynasty, ushering a new era of Buddhist renaissance to the subcontinent. In the East Indies, Majapahit rules supreme, ruling the waves and the straits trade. In the lands of Taizong and Bai Hu, the Great Ming stands proud as the Celestial Leader of All Under Heaven, ruling from Central Asia to even the New World under their Fusangese Colonies. To the frozen north, the Yakutian Horde stands prideful of its victories against the Slavs of Eastern Europe. But as European powers start to slowly encroach upon Asia, these Empires will face difficulties from Europe, but can they survive the test of time? Only the Heavens knows.........

Thoughts and Comments?
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I think you might have outdone yourself in how gigantic this Nepal is. :p
 

WheelyWheelyLegsNoFeely

PobreCesar said:
Almost one hundred years ago, what would now be considered almost a minor miracle happened. An alternate history anthology, which had no fixed rules on the subject, was nevertheless published without a single mention of an Austro-German painter who shall go unnamed. This, of course, was If; or, History Rewritten an anthology of alternate history essays from a range of figures including G.K. Chesterton and Winston Churchill (whose contribution I have previously covered). Here I am concerned primarily with the work of Phillip Guedalla, who wrote on what would have happened if "the Moors in Spain had won", by which he means "the Emirate of Granada had survived to the present day". Apparently they would have kept their monarchy, forged a "far flung" empire, and invented a device that neutralizes the butterfly effect. I have attempted to compensate for this last by incorporating ideas from several other stories in the collection, for which I am indebted to (among others) messieurs Van Loon, Fisher, & Maurois. View attachment 765601
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I knew about Churchill’s timeline, but I wasn’t aware that Chesterton wrote one too. What was his about?
 
Xlicer

Xlicer

सार्थक (Sārthākā) said:
The Asian Giants

ocVhGB8.png

​
The year is 1600 AD. For around a century now, five Empires have dominated the politics of Asia. In the land of the Shahanshahs, Zikanid Iran stands proud and tall, deriving its origins to the Achaemenid Empire under the Great House of Zik/Zikan. In India, the Newars of Nepal firmly established the Empire of Nepala under the Malla Dynasty, ushering a new era of Buddhist renaissance to the subcontinent. In the East Indies, Majapahit rules supreme, ruling the waves and the straits trade. In the lands of Taizong and Bai Hu, the Great Ming stands proud as the Celestial Leader of All Under Heaven, ruling from Central Asia to even the New World under their Fusangese Colonies. To the frozen north, the Yakutian Horde stands prideful of its victories against the Slavs of Eastern Europe. But as European powers start to slowly encroach upon Asia, these Empires will face difficulties from Europe, but can they survive the test of time? Only the Heavens knows.........

Thoughts and Comments?
Click to expand...
I don't think I have ever seen a Nepal that big before. Nice
 
Xlicer

Xlicer

On The Crossing of Prophets: Europa 700 A.D.
A religiously divided Europe, A chart for the Map Telephone Project (MTP) by @H2O27#7165

dfb0mim-8b5a5df2-bcc3-4107-afe4-faa0c534bd0f.png

DeviantArt Link

My entry map for the Map Telephone Project (TMP). Hosted on a discord server by mainly users from the /r/Imaginarymaps server. If anyone wishes to look at the other maps submitted there:
https://imgur.com/a/UEAlO3P
. The main difference to other map telephone games was that in this one the next person have to draw their map 100 years after the last map (Unless someone skipped then the next person will have to add up another 100 years (or more) to their map), The map as usual on these types of games was made in just a week so I apologize for all the grammatical errors it has (I wanted to fix them but lost the .svg file I used to make it somehow) and if it looks ugly (personally I think it does, I'm not really that proud of the (metallic?) artstyle I went for it). A think that horever I'm proud is how somehow it ended up lining up with the previous entries despite me not knowing how they looked like.

Hope you all enjoy it. Also credits and special shoutout to Swaylius and his TL Flavo Et Purpura for the names, borders, and kingdoms in North Africa. And for that matter checkout his latest map also, it is good and deserves more attention.

And thanks to H2O27 for organizing the game and all other game participants. Remember to check out the other entries. It was fun!
 
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Xlicer

Xlicer

DracoLazarus said:
Um... Neustria is as a rule of thumb centered around the Seine river ? Your Neustria is more of an Austrasia ?
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Yeah. That was an oversight of my part. Was just looking at old divisions of the Frankish Kingdom for reference, and didn't really put much thought at the names.
 
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