Maps of War: Mid East

[Petra]

Short on analysis, but cool anyway.

Watch 5,000 years of Mid-East history unfold in 90 seconds! :yup:


http://www.mapsofwar.com/index.html

[viscousmemories]

Cool.

[Ymir's blood]

Definitely cool. I do wish they'd not shifted the camera angle so much and also had left the remnants of empires on the map. It would have been nice to see the old alongside the new.

[Ensign Steve]

The last second or so of the clip is an instant replay of all the empires on top of each other, blood.

[Ymir's blood]

Damn, that's hot. :yowza:

[godfry n. glad]

I viewed, enjoyed and went and offered up my critical comments. I see that others had made similar comments prior.

The presentation of the Israelite kingdom, as they show it prior to the expansion of the Assyrian empire, is a crass fiction. Eretz Y'Israel never existed as they showed it.

They aslo missed the Parthian, Sassanid, Arascid, and Timurid empires, all of which controlled much of the Fertile Crescent and Persia in the post-Roman world. The Parthians conquered Jerusalem in the century before the arrival of the Romans.

Although they show "The Caliphate", it's not particularly accurate, because there were several different Caliphates, each with unique boundaries.

[angrybellsprout]

The thing that got me was how they had Egypt running all the way up to modern Lebanon. So really if they wanted to, according to that map, they could pull the 'ancestoral rights' card on Israel and take all of 'Egypt's' land back.

[godfry n. glad]

Yeah... Well they show the Roman Empire as holding the entirety of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, too. They had possession of it two or three times, but could not hold it for any appreciable length of time against the Parthians. The story was the same for the Roman experience with the Sassanids, who succeeded the Parthians as the rulers of Persia and its vassal states.

[Watser?]

I viewed, enjoyed and went and offered up my critical comments. I see that others had made similar comments prior.

The presentation of the Israelite kingdom, as they show it prior to the expansion of the Assyrian empire, is a crass fiction. Eretz Y'Israel never existed as they showed it.

They aslo missed the Parthian, Sassanid, Arascid, and Timurid empires, all of which controlled much of the Fertile Crescent and Persia in the post-Roman world. The Parthians conquered Jerusalem in the century before the arrival of the Romans.

Although they show "The Caliphate", it's not particularly accurate, because there were several different Caliphates, each with unique boundaries.

Haha, yeah that was a joke. Actually there is barely proof for the existence of any kind of Jewish kingdom until just prior to the Assyrian invasion.

They missed the Mamluk state as well.

Anyway, you can still see the Middle East has a very mixed population ethnically, especially in Syria and among the Palestinians.

[godfry n. glad]

Yeah, I'm just reading about the Romans captured in 53 BC at Carrhae and basically transported to the other side of the Parthian empire, to what is now Uzbekistan. They may have been the first Romans ever to meet Han Chinese. The thing is, they were mostly Gauls. Celts. Mercenaries recruited by Crassus.

[Clutch Munny]

Where are you reading that, gng? Sounds interesting.

[peepnklown]

That was AWSOME!

[godfry n. glad]

Where are you reading that, gng? Sounds interesting.

http://www.abbeys.com.au/images/graphic/9622177212.jpg

Silk Road: Monks, Warriors & Merchants, by Luce Boulnois, translated by Helen Loveday.

I'm now more than half way through a 570 page tome (including bibliography, index, and comparative list of placenames), and I'm just covering the Polos. It's a well written book. An excellent collection of pix (of which I've seen some of the places in actuality) and a superlative collection of maps. It even has sections on resources for travelling the Silk Roads and a section of recommended collections of Silk Road, i.e., Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Persian, artifacts...museums. Largely, it is a history of the axis of transactional activity across the EurAsian continental mass.

I have a passing interest in the spacial movement of peoples, migratory behavior, over time. The Turks, for example, can be traced back to the Tangut area of eastern Siberia, north of the Mongolian plateau. Nomads, pastoral peoples, barbarians. Combine that with an interest in economic exchange...well, it's a hobby. Of sorts. It keeps me off the streets.

[Petra]

Speaking of books, I saw a book that looked interesting at a friend's house and I've borrowed it. Unfortunately, it'll be about 3 or 4 weeks before I get enough time to start reading it! It's called White Gold, by Giles Milton. Have you read it, godfry? (Or any one else, for that matter). If so, what did you think of it?