File talk:Alter Orient 1500BC.svg

Add Nubia?

Hey @Enyavar: thank you so much for making this series of maps. These are so much better than the others that exist! However, I was trying to add them to various English Wikipedia articles on Ancient Egypt. Another user reverted (reasonably) on the grounds that these maps don't show Nubia. Would it be possible for you to make new versions of these that go a bit further south? Botterweg14 (talk) 21:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, yes I think I should work on the map series again. I really dislike the background map, but it needs to be greyscale, faint and correct. Switching out the background map, even just for a slightly larger extent, means to redo each and every placement of city-points and their texts, not to mention the borders. So as thing stand, there won't be any maps showing a larger extent than this one here. But yes, that map goes further to the south.

Please understand that there is another major problem: where was Nubia? I don't think we have even approximate borders, do we? Which are the prominent settlements, and their names [modern names]? Also, which were the major cultures in Iran and Central Asia in 1500 BC, 1900 BC, 2600 BC? Where would I draw the borders, especially for each new century? That is the reason why, when I did produce the whole series, I limited myself to the smaller extents of egypt/greece/anatolia/mesopotamia. I finally realized that more was needed for context, and I enlarged the background map for the second series, but that second series starts at 600 BC, as linked above. Even my rendering of that specific "Median Empire" is highly speculative, as far as I know. --Enyavar (talk) 07:23, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply! Regarding the borders, I feel your pain. One of the things I appreciate about your maps is that they represent the fuzzyness of ancient borders, but of course there's still judgment calls and gaps in our knowledge. I don't have any hugely useful suggestions for you, but you could solicit thoughts from the English Wikipedia user who objected to your maps, whose username is Alssr. I can't guarantee they will have useful information, but they do appear to edit with much confidence. Botterweg14 (talk) 22:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)