I've been playing a fair bit of Civilization V: Brave New World recently (a great game, BTW), and one of my favourite parts of the game is the animated map at the end of the game showing the rise and fall of the (virtual) civilations across the globe, and the associated charts showing their dominance through time. Around 1932, John Sparks made a real-world chart for our actual historic civilizations for McNally (now out of print, sadly), and it stood more than six feet tall! (Photo via DataVis.ca)
Here's a detail of just the first 500 years of civilized history:
You could spend hours browsing the whole thing, and luckily The New Atlantis provides a high-resolution version of the complete image. Why not catch up on your world history this weekend?
We'll be back on Monday, live from the JSM conference in Montréal. See you then!
beautiful! I wish the chart could be extended up to 2013. we can't see the resurgence of China and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Posted by: David | August 03, 2013 at 07:09
Nice! :) Do they mention how power is calculated in this chart?
Posted by: mitchus | August 05, 2013 at 02:22