Tartaria Part 2 🗺️ Tartaria, or Tartary, really does appear on hundreds of historical European maps from the 13th through the 19th centuries. The Library of Congress documents maps showing “Tartaria” stretching across enormous portions of northern and central Asia. But here’s where the rabbit hole gets interesting: it wasn’t consistently drawn as one country. Different maps placed different regions under names like Great Tartary, Western Tartary, Eastern Tartary, Chinese Tartary, Muscovite Tartary, and Independent Tartary. (Library of Congress Blogs) So what happened to it? The conventional historical explanation is that “Tartary” was a broad European geographic label for territories inhabited by numerous peoples, rather than the name of a single unified nation-state. As European geographic knowledge improved and political control changed, maps increasingly replaced the enormous “Tartary” label with more specific names such as Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Turkestan, and Russian or Chinese territories. By the late 19th century, the term had largely disappeared from modern cartography. (Library of Congress Blogs) But that explanation creates another question. Why were old maps sometimes so confident in labeling enormous regions “Tartary”? Why do some maps depict Great Tartary, rulers, subdivisions, cities, and borders? And why does a name that appears repeatedly across centuries eventually vanish from modern maps? Is this simply the evolution of cartography and political geography, or are we looking at pieces of history that were misunderstood, renamed, absorbed, or lost? And then the rabbit hole gets even deeper. If geographical names can disappear, political boundaries can change, records can be lost, and historical narratives can be rewritten by whoever preserves the archives, how much of the past are we actually seeing? Are we looking at an ordinary case of historical evolution, or is there something much bigger hiding underneath the surface? Was history altered? Were civilizations forgotten? And, at the most extreme end of the rabbit hole, are we living inside a version of history that was constructed for us? Tartaria Part 2. The map is real. The questions are real. The theories are where things get wild. 🐇🕳️ #Tartaria #Tartary #RabbitHole #HiddenHistory #Matrix - @rabbit_hole_addicts