Cultures of Eurasia

Each zone is coded on eight axes. Three — governance, gender, freedom — drive the visible green→amber→umber hue (see composite formula). Four are rendered as overlays on top of that hue: aggression (crimson), internal violence (ash-grey), artistic peak (cool shimmer), and recovery (violet). Creativity is tracked but does not affect colour, because creative flourishing has historically been largely independent of political form (Old Kingdom Egypt, Tang China, Heian Japan). Every scalar axis runs from 0 to 1.

Governance e

Raised by: hereditary monarchs, codified law imposed top-down, standing armies, taxation extracting from a producing class, imperial conquest. Does not trigger: sacred kingship mediated by a priesthood (ma'at in Egypt, me in Sumer); these hold the axis at 0.35–0.55. Scale: 0–0.2 consensus / kin-based; 0.3–0.5 sacred or distributed authority; 0.6–0.8 bureaucratic monarchy / empire; 0.9+ totalitarian.

Gender g

Raised by: legal codes restricting women's property and movement, veiling and seclusion, erasure of female deities, patrilineal inheritance displacing matrilineal or bilateral systems, female infanticide, exclusion from public ritual. Scale: 0–0.15 matrilineal or fully bilateral; 0.2–0.4 patrilineal but with significant female legal/property/ritual standing (Celtic Iron Age, pre-Han China, ancient Egypt); 0.5–0.7 women legally subordinate but not erased (Roman law, medieval Europe); 0.8+ full legal exclusion (post-Hammurabi Mesopotamia, classical Athens, post-Manu India, Wahhabi codification).

Freedom f

Raised by: chattel slave markets — the buying and selling of human beings as commodities; rigid hereditary caste; mass deportation; debt-bondage made permanent and inheritable. Does not trigger: war-captive labour, corvée, temporary serfdom, redemption-ransomable captivity, or domestic dependency without a market in human persons. Pre-Akkadian Mesopotamian temple labour was extractive but not chattel; the Akkadian empire's slave market is the first unambiguous f ≥ 0.5 anchor.

Creativity c

Raised by: censorship, book burning, executed dissidents, mandatory orthodoxy, suppression of foreign ideas. Tracked but de-coupled from hue: highly authoritarian states have repeatedly produced exceptional art (the pyramids, Versailles, Soviet film), and highly egalitarian societies have not always produced canonical works. Surfaced in the inspector.

Aggression va

Crimson overlay ( #e00020). Raised only when this zone is the aggressor — outward conquest, colonisation, genocide abroad, systemic warfare initiated from within. Being conquered does not raise a zone's va. Canonical anchors: Akkad (−2334, va=0.60), Neo-Assyria (−800, va=0.68), Chinggis (1206, va=0.98), Caesar's Gaul (−50, va=0.72), early European colonial expansion (1500, va=0.72), Nazi Germany (1940, va=0.90), Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022, va=0.92).

Internal violence vi

Ash-grey overlay ( #2a2e36). Raised by state repression of a zone's own population: purges, gulag systems, political terror, domestic genocide, mass surveillance states. A zone can be internally repressive without being outwardly expansive (late-Romanov / Stalinist Russia), outwardly expansive without being internally terroristic (most early empires), or both (Nazi Germany, contemporary Russia).

Artistic peak a

Cool-shimmer additive overlay ( #e6f4ff). Raised by documented florescence in literature, visual art, music, or philosophy. Treated as orthogonal to the composite. Togglable from the footer. Canonical peaks: Classical Athens (−500, a=0.82), Tang Chang'an (700, a=0.85), Heian Japan (1000, a=0.85), Persian lyric apex (1200, a=0.80), Italian Renaissance (1450, a=0.85), Russian golden age (1820, a=0.80).

Recovery r

Violet overlay ( #7846f0). Raised by: democratic franchise, abolition of chattel slavery, women's legal and property rights, decriminalisation of dissent, codification of human and labour rights. The inverse of regression. Begins to register globally only after ~1789 and accelerates after 1945.

Violence — legacy v

Red overlay (#d20f0f). Pre-v0.6 unified violence axis, retained as a fallback for anchors not yet split into va and vi. Render uses va if present and falls back to v otherwise.

The hue mapped onto the map is the unweighted mean of three axes:

degradation = (e + g + f) / 3

This composite indexes the seven-stop colour ramp. The four overlay axes (aggression, internal violence, artistic peak, recovery) apply on top of the composite hue (see colour encoding). Equal weighting embodies the framework's claim that political, gender, and labour subordination form a single patriarchal complex rather than three independent measures.

A perceptually-tuned seven-stop ramp from verdant green to near-black umber, on a parchment basemap (#f5f0e8). Each overlay axis occupies a distinct hue family from the base ramp and from each other — red, grey, cool-white, violet — so any combination remains readable.

1. #2a9e00 — t=0.00 verdant matriarchal baseline
2. #8cb900 — t=0.15 olive (early stratification)
3. #b8a019 — t=0.30 yellow-olive (transitional)
4. #d4600a — t=0.48 deep amber (patriarchalising)
5. #a83610 — t=0.65 sienna (entrenched)
6. #7a2808 — t=0.82 umber (codified patriarchy)
7. #3a1208 — t=1.00 near-black (total degradation)

• Aggression (#e00020) — interpolates the composite toward crimson at va × 0.82.
• Internal violence (#2a2e36) — interpolates toward ash-grey at vi × 0.70.
• Recovery (#7846f0) — interpolates toward luminous violet at r × 0.72; brightens its base.
• Artistic peak (#e6f4ff, additive) — pushes each channel toward (230, 244, 255) at a × opacity × 0.55. Togglable.

Overlays stack: aggression, then internal violence, then recovery, then artistic shimmer. Russia in 2022 reads as mauve-red (va=0.92, vi=0.75, r=0.05).

The dataset is structured as 87 zones × an irregular sequence of dated anchor points (1050 anchors total in v0.20). For any year between two anchors, axis values are linearly interpolated; render-time uses smoothstep easing. Before a zone's first anchor, the first anchor is held; after a zone's last historical anchor (always ≤2026), the projection engine takes over.

Anchor placement follows the historical record's actual rhythm rather than a uniform grid. Each anchor records up to eight axis values plus optional metadata: era label, prose note, primary source, confidence tier.

Each anchor carries a confidence tier. Pre-3000 BCE anchors are predominantly medium or low; post-1850 anchors are predominantly high. The framework does not smooth over this asymmetry; the inspector reveals the tier directly.

• high: legislative, demographic, or unambiguous archaeological record.
• medium: consensus archaeological or textual reading with at least two corroborating primary sources.
• low: single-source or contested reading; reasonable scholars disagree.
• speculative: theoretical inference from comparative anthropology where direct evidence is absent (used sparingly, mostly pre-6000 BCE).

The basemap is a Robinson-projected world rotated −2.05° with a 1.1805× fine-scale to recentre Eurasia. Calibration constants: MAP_ROTATION = −2.05°, FINE_SCALE = 1.1805, POST_DX = −39.22, POST_DY = −7.44, calibrated against a 1600 × 710.875 reference. Coastlines from Natural Earth (land-50m.json, countries-50m.json; both public-domain). Zones are rendered as rotated ellipses (rx, ry in degrees), clipped to the land mask, then dimmed by the year's interpolated axis values.

v0.9 eastern pan crop. Lambert Conformal Conic centred on Kyiv (31°E) is conformal but only well-behaved within roughly ±90° of the central meridian. v0.9 tightens the eastward pan limit to 135°E so Japan, Korea, eastern China and Southeast Asia stay visible without distortion; the Russian Far East (Sakhalin, Kamchatka) is excluded. A future v1.0 may switch to Robinson or Equal Earth at high zoom.

The map can be zoomed and panned in-place. Use the + / − / reset controls in the upper-right of the stage, the mouse wheel (cursor-anchored), or double-click to zoom in (shift + double-click to zoom out). Drag inside the map to pan; tap-or-click without movement still opens the zone inspector. Keyboard: + in, − out, 0 reset.

The default view is the calibrated Ukraine-centred LCC frame. At any zoom, you can pan east to reveal China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, or pan west for Iberia and the Maghreb. Current zoom and pan are written into the URL as vz, vpx, vpy; e.g. ?y=1450&vz=2.5&vpx=−0.30&vpy=−0.20 reproduces an exact view at an exact year.

A separate point-layer of 95 sites from Eridu (~−5400) to St Petersburg (1703). Each city has a foundation, peak, decline, and end year, and the glyph fades across that lifecycle. Roles (capital / cultural / economic / religious) are coded as glyph variants. Togglable from the footer.

Tier-gated visibility. Each city carries a static tier 1–3:

• Tier 1 (26) — visible at every zoom: universally-recognised capitals (Uruk, Babylon, Memphis, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Chang'an, Beijing, Kyoto, Delhi, Paris, London, Moscow…).
• Tier 2 (37) — visible at zoom ≥ 1.5×: regional capitals (Ur, Sparta, Damascus, Córdoba, Bukhara, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Lahore, Varanasi, Aksum, Timbuktu…).
• Tier 3 (32) — visible at zoom ≥ 2.5×: specialist or short-lived sites (Eridu, Kanesh, Palmyra, Ctesiphon, Taxila, Quanzhou, Dunhuang, Lalibela, Great Zimbabwe, Jenne-jeno…).

Some regions host successive polities so distinct in social form that a single parent zone flattens them. Temporal subzones are child polygons with their own start/end window that override the parent during their period. v0.12–v0.20 covers Italy/W.Med, Anatolia, Russia, India, Japan and others — 35+ subzones in total.

v0.21 is an architectural refactor with no new regional data. Three things change:

1. Layer registry. Cultures, cities and zones are now described against a single contract (getAll, hitTest, locationKey, tooltipBody, searchKeys) in layers.js. New layers can be added without touching the hover or search code paths.
2. Year-aware hover. Successive phases at the same site (Troy I → III–V → VI–VII; Carthage Punic → Roman → Late Antique) are folded into one hover group keyed on rounded lon/lat. The dispatcher picks the currently active phase as the primary, with earlier and later phases listed in an expandable stack. The previous behaviour — dynasties and states showing as active long after they ended — is fixed.
3. Search. A diacritic-folded substring index across every registered layer is bound to the header search field and to ⌘K / Ctrl + K. Selecting a result jumps the time slider, centres the map, and opens the inspector via a single goto() call. Successive sessions can extend the index by registering more layers; nothing is hard-coded.

Planned layers (stub registered, data lands v0.24). The footer reserves disabled toggles for two future point-layers, with their schemas locked in figures.js and pantheon.js:

• Figures — philosophers, religious figures, artists, statesmen, scientists, mystics. Each entry carries a flourishing window (fl_start…fl_end), a representative location, a tradition tag, and a primary source.
• Pantheon — gods, goddesses and divine figures across traditions, anchored at their primary cult-centre with attested-start / attested-end years. Feminine entries that disappear coincident with a zone's gender-axis rise will be cross-flagged in the inspector as female-deity erasure markers — one of the named patriarchalisation signals.

v0.21 also corrects two long-standing details: the hover tooltip now sits 8 px from the pointer (was 14 px), and the legacy time.graphics dating used in cultures.js is scheduled for verification against current scholarship in v0.27.

Every axis defaults to low. The default reading of any society for which no positive evidence of stratification, slavery, or gender hierarchy exists is egalitarian and matristic, not the reverse. Three motivations:

1. Empirical: the documented egalitarianism of contemporary forager societies (Hadza, Mbuti, Aka, Agta, !Kung; Knight 2008, Boehm 1999) and the absence of fortifications, individual high-status burials, or markers of slavery in the Neolithic record.
2. Methodological: a society's silence in the archaeological record is not evidence of subordination; the burden of proof falls on positive markers (warrior burials, fortifications, codified law, slave-markets, female-deity erasure).
3. Political: the alternative — reading patriarchy backwards into all of human prehistory — is itself a partisan move with documented Victorian provenance.

Pre-Uruk Mesopotamia, pre-dynastic Egypt, Neolithic Europe, Jōmon Japan, the Indus Valley, Hemudu/Yangshao China and Maritime Southeast Asia are therefore deep green. Break-points are marked with specificity: Uruk expansion's end (~−3100), Akkad (−2334), Akhenaten (−1353), the Mycenaean takeover of Crete (−1450), Yamnaya (−3400), Aryan incursions, the Yahwist turn (~−700), and Roman chattel imposition on Ptolemaic Egypt (~200 CE).

Years after 2026 are not forecasts. They are three conditional narratives applied as analytic functions to each zone's 2026 state. Hatched year-banner marks projection territory. Horizon 2200; branch year 2026.

Recovery deepens

Democratic norms strengthen, gender and labour rights consolidate globally, surveillance and inequality recede. Function: r→0.95, e→0.05, g→0.05, f→0.03 with smoothstep easing; speed scales with starting r. Violence decays on a 50-year timescale.

Authoritarian regression

Surveillance states, populist autocracies and creative censorship spread. Function: e→0.80, c→0.85 (censorship leads), g and f lag, r→0.10. Speed inversely scales with starting r.

Collapse & reset

Climate, energy descent or systemic war forces partial state breakdown. Two-phase violence: peaks ~2082, decays to 0.15 by 2200. Function: e→0.30 (de-centralisation), gender often entrenches in chaos, partial r-recovery in late phase.

The scenarios probe the framework's reach and make the structural claims falsifiable. They are not forecasts; the dataset's empirical anchors end at 2026.

1. The Gimbutas problem. The deep-green pre-Yamnaya Europe rests on a reading of Old European archaeology — absence of fortifications, female figurines, collective burials — that has been controversial since Marija Gimbutas first formulated it. The Kurgan migration itself is now firmly supported by ancient-DNA work (Haak et al. 2015; Lazaridis et al. 2025). The religious overlay — goddess-centred matristic spirituality — remains contested. Treated as low-to-medium confidence.
2. The matrilineal-baseline claim. The presumption rule's strong form — that the original human kin-group was matrilineal — follows Knight 2008 and is supported by comparative ethnography of contemporary foragers, but it is not consensus. A weaker form — bilateral with significant matricentric elements — would change few anchor values.
3. The Axial Age as “immune response.” The framework treats 800–200 BCE as a coordinated reaction to the patriarchal-sacrificial complex, drawing on Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation, 2006) and Robert Bellah (Religion in Human Evolution, 2011). Critics — including Mullins et al. (2018) — argue the simultaneity is overstated. The map records the period as a partial recovery; readers persuaded by the critics may discount this layer entirely.
4. Minoan Crete. The framework reads Bronze-Age Crete (~−2000 to −1450) as relatively egalitarian and matristic, on the strength of the Knossos frescoes, female cult imagery, absence of monumental ruler-iconography, and palace architecture as redistributive. Mainstream Aegean archaeology — Cherry, Bennet, Driessen, others — would code Minoan society as a stratified palatial economy. The egalitarian-matristic reading is a defensible minority position. Confidence is therefore low-to-medium; the Mycenaean takeover (~−1450) is much better supported.
5. Theoretical non-neutrality. The framework is partisan, by design and openly so. The presumption rule, the Pontic-steppe causal narrative, the four-pillar matriarchal-studies definition, and the “recovery” reading of the modern era are all positions in live scholarly debates. Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000) is the most rigorous feminist critique of the deep-green pre-patriarchal baseline; readers should treat it as the principal counter-text. The colour ramp, axes, and dataset are public; alternative codings are welcome.
6. The chattel/war-captive distinction. The framework sets a high bar for the freedom axis. Some scholars would code earlier societies (Old Kingdom Egypt, Shang dynasty) higher than this framework does on grounds that ritualised dependency is functionally slavery. The framework reserves f ≥ 0.5 for unambiguous market-mediated chattel.
7. Zone granularity. Even with v0.12–v0.20's temporal subzones, some regions with divergent sub-trajectories — the Indus Valley vs. Vedic-period Doab, southern China before unification, the Maghreb vs. Sahel — are still smoothed under one composite. Further subdivision is planned.
8. Projection epistemic status. The three scenarios are illustrative, not Bayesian, not statistical, not forecasts. The slider that extends past 2026 is for thought-experimental use only.
9. Editorial coverage is incomplete — tracked transparently. Of 1050 anchors across 87 zones, roughly 53 % currently carry a per-anchor primary-source key, and roughly 50 % of violence-bearing anchors have been split from the legacy v axis into aggression (va) / internal violence (vi). Coverage rises monotonically with each release. The inspector flags individual anchors with needs source / needs va·vi split badges; the footer TODO button downloads a JSON snapshot of every flagged anchor. Per-region passes completed so far:
   Coverage by regional pass

   • v0.20 Greece / Aegean / Italy (8 zones, 100 % sourced + va·vi split): parents z_aegean, z_med_w; subzones z_etruscan, z_rome_republic, z_rome_empire, z_italy_renaissance, z_italy_fascist, z_italy_republic. Anchored on Marinatos 1993; Goodison & Morris 1998; Cline 2014; Pomeroy 1995; Hansen 1991; Hopkins 1978; Scheidel 2009; Bonfante 1986; Haynes 2000; Najemy 2008; Hibbert 1979; Burke 1987; Baxandall 1972; Martines 1979; Brown 1971; Wickham 2005; Mack Smith 1997; Bosworth 2002; Knox 1982; Ginsborg 2003; Treadgold 1997; Haldon 1990; Clogg 2013; Mazower 2001; Gallant 2016.
   • v0.19 India (10 zones, 100 % sourced + va·vi split): z_aryavarta, z_magadha, z_dravidian, z_central_india + dynastic subzones z_india_maurya/_gupta/_sultanate/_mughal/_raj/_republic. Organised around Bronkhorst's (2007/2011/2016) Greater Magadha thesis; supplemented by Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 2002; Wright 2010; Witzel 2003; Jamison & Brereton 2014; Parpola 2015; Olivelle 1998/2005; Thapar 2002; Kulke & Rothermund 2010; Doniger 2009; Pollock 2006; Ali 2004; Schopen 1997; Gombrich 2009; Bellah 2011; Champakalakshmi 1996; Veluthat 2009; Ramaswamy 2007; Eaton 2019; Asher & Talbot 2006; Alam & Subrahmanyam 2004; Truschke 2017; Dirks 2001; Davis 2001; Sen 2010; Metcalf 2006; Guha 2007; Sen 2005; Jaffrelot 2021; V-Dem 2024; Freedom House.
   • v0.18 Steppe / Indo-European corridor (5 zones, 100 % sourced + va·vi split, 90 anchors): z_pontic_steppe, z_c_asia_w, z_c_asia_e, z_mongolia, z_volga_ural. Anchored on Anthony 2007; Gimbutas 1991; Haak 2015; Lazaridis 2025; Reich 2018; Outram 2009; Kuzmina 2007; Kelekna 2009; Frachetti 2008; Christian 1998; Khazanov 1994; Sinor 1990; Honeychurch 2015; Barfield 1989; Di Cosmo 2002; Allsen 2001; May 2012; Jackson 2017; Manz 1989/2007; Golden 2011; Rolle 1989; Martin 2004; Kotkin 2017; V-Dem 2024; Zenz 2020.
   • v0.17 China (11 zones, 100 % sourced + va·vi split, 104 anchors): z_china_n, z_china_s, dynastic subzones z_china_shang/_zhou/_qinhan/_tang/_song/_yuan/_ming/_qing/_prc. Anchored on Liu & Chen 2012; Campbell 2014; Bagley 1999; Hsu & Linduff 1988; Pines 2009/2014; Lewis 2007/2009; Kuhn 2009; Mote 1999; Elliott 2001; Platt 2012; Dikötter 2010; MacFarquhar & Schoenhals 2006; Vogel 2011; Zenz 2020; Spence 1990; Brook 2010; Rowe 2009; Ebrey 1993; Hinsch 2002; Twitchett 1979; Bielenstein 1980; Rossabi 1988; von Glahn 2016; V-Dem 2024; Freedom House.
   • v0.16 Egypt (5 zones, 100 % sourced + va·vi split, 44 anchors): Wengrow 2006; Robins 1993; Silverman 1995; Baines & Yoffee 1998; Trigger et al. 1983; Cooney 2018; Hornung 1999; Redford 1992; Manning 2010; Bagnall 1993; Petry 1981; Cole 2007; Hopwood 1991.
   • v0.15 Mesopotamia: Pollock 1999; Algaze 2008; Asher-Greve & Westenholz 2013; Stol 2016; Roth 1997; Steinkeller 2015; Larsen 2015; Michel 2020; Oded 1979; Bahrani 2008; Jursa 2010; with Göttner-Abendroth's framing.
10. Artistic-peak coverage (v0.6). Ninety-six anchors across twenty-nine zones is dense in regions with strong art-historical scholarship (China, Japan, Persia, Italy, classical Greece) and sparse elsewhere. The Volga–Ural zone carries no peaks intentionally; nomadic art histories are coded inside their respective steppe zones. Confidence on artistic-peak anchors defaults to medium; further calibration is welcome.

The framework synthesises a specific lineage of feminist-anthropological and steppe-archaeological work, anchored by:

• Heide Göttner-Abendroth — modern matriarchal studies; the framework's primary theoretical anchor for the four-pillar definition of matriarchy (economic, social, political, cultural-spiritual).
• Marija Gimbutas — the Kurgan hypothesis and the reading of Old European symbolism as goddess-centred.
• Chris Knight — matrilineal priority in early human kinship; the brother–sister bond as the original kin-organising relation.
• David Anthony — the steppe-pastoralist origins of Indo-European expansion; the chariot horizon.
• David Graeber & David Wengrow — the explicit call for a “conceptual shift” in deep-history narrative.
• Johannes Bronkhorst — the Greater Magadha thesis: that Śramaṇa traditions are not derivatives of Vedic religion but a parallel tradition with non-Aryan roots.
• Riane Eisler — the dominator-vs-partnership civilisational arc.
• Karen Armstrong & Robert Bellah — the Axial Age as response to a crisis of sacrificial violence. (Sceptical counter-readings: Mullins, Hoyer et al. 2018.)
• Cynthia Eller — not an anchor of this framework but its principal in-tradition critic; The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000). Cited because the framework's rebuttal is methodological (the presumption rule treats absence of evidence as default low) rather than empirical.
• Val Plumwood — the “standpoint of mastery” and “denied dependency” as the philosophical residue of the patriarchal complex.

The framework does not follow René Girard's universal-mechanism reading of sacrifice; it historicises sacrifice as a phase rather than a permanent feature of culture. See Violence and the Sacred (1972) for the alternative reading.

Below: works directly informing axis definitions and zone anchor values. The companion essay The Dawn of Our Interior (Svanemyr, pending publication) carries the fuller, prose-organised reference list.

Svanemyr, Vegar. Cultures of Eurasia: An Eight-Axis Visual Atlas, 6000 BCE–2026 CE (v0.23 working). 2026. https://eurasia.thoughtfree.com.

Companion essay: Svanemyr, Vegar. The Dawn of Our Interior (pending publication). Code and dataset will be released under CC BY 4.0 at v1.0; a stable Zenodo DOI will accompany the v1.0 release alongside the essay. Until then, this is a working draft — cite with the version stamp.