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Sharrukin-of-Akkad — Foundations of Danassos (version 1.0)
#achaea #aegean #alternatehistory #ancient #bronzeage #crete #fantasy #mediterranean #minoan #map
Published: 2015-02-26 21:44:02 +0000 UTC; Views: 3396; Favourites: 43; Downloads: 17
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My muse grabbed me hard today, and wouldn't let go until I got this map down out of my head and into pixels. I don't think there's a Muse of Cartography, but Clio the Muse of History will probably do, assuming she generates weird alternate histories when she gets drunk on nectar.This is from the same alternate-history-fantasy setting that gave rise to the Kingdoms of Gallia map I published a few days ago. Here we can see one of the major points of divergence for the setting. The civilization we miscall "Minoan" didn't collapse quite so thoroughly toward the end of the Bronze Age - it was a bit stronger, it lasted a bit longer, and it put up a bit more of a fight against the encroaching Achaeans. Most importantly, it created an offshoot on the island of Sicily that preserved much more of its cultural and religious tradition into later history. The city-state of Danassos, founded where our Original History saw the Greek city of Syracuse, ended up having considerable influence for many centuries to come.
Really happy with how this one turned out. I've learned how to apply several more of the tools available in both Inkscape and Photoshop while working on it.
Technical notes: The underlying map image (land and ocean outlines) was produced from a Google Earth snapshot using Photoshop. In particular, the sandstone texture for the land outlines was created from scratch. I then embedded the processed image into Inkscape and used that to create and overlay the political map elements. I considered adding a scale and a legend, but the map is conceptually fairly simple, so I decided to keep it as uncluttered as possible. Applied Photoshop again to the finished image for final conversion into JPEG format.
© 2015 by Sharrukin-of-Akkad (Jon F. Zeigler). All rights reserved. You may not copy, alter, or repost this work without my express written permission, nor may you in any other way treat this work as your own.
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Comments: 8
Nice map!
Just a nitpick, but I dunno if the Minoans would have called their country "Kriti". Something akin to the Egyptian "Keftiu" or the Hebrew "Caphtor" seems more likely to me, since those were labels used by the Minoans' contemporaries. But I suppose they are too obscure for readers to recognize.
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Probably so. I was going (mostly) with Greek for the nomenclature on the map, since we don't have very much of the Minoan language to work with. Although I thought about using Millawanda for Miletos.
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I understand. I agree, native Minoan vocabulary is hard to come by right now.
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Well, it's a map derived from an "alternate history," a speculative exercise in which we look at the way things happened in real history and then think about how they might have happened differently. A lot of science fiction or fantasy stories work from premises like that. It's one way to get a backdrop for the story that's like our own world, and so is somewhat familiar to the reader, but that can still be different in interesting ways.
In this case, the "how might it have gone differently" involves having the "Minoan" civilization of Crete survive more fully into later history. Greek-speaking peoples still arrive in the region, and eventually still occupy the Aegean islands and Crete. But before that process is finished, there's a migration of "Minoan" peoples across to Sicily and southern Italy, where they remain somewhat independent.
Does that help?
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aha... somehow. Interesting... and what's the point behind this process?
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Well, as I said, some science-fiction or fantasy authors put together alternate histories to build settings for their fiction. There's an author named Harry Turtledove who's famous for it - he's written dozens of novels based on alternate histories where the American Civil War went differently, or World War II, or Byzantine history (he holds a doctorate in that last subject, and that's how he got started writing fiction). This is more or less my intention - for years I've had the idea of bringing "Minoan" characters into conflict with classical-era Greek society, and the only way to do that is to bend the way history actually proceeded.
Building alternate histories can be just a hobby or an intellectual exercise, of course, a way for people who enjoy the study of real history to play with ideas. In fact, some professional historians have been known to engage in it - they call it "counterfactual" history.
If you'd like to see more examples, have a look at the Alternate-History group here on dA. That looks like the most active group involved with the concept.
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hahah ok thanks
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