Tartary

[quadibloc]

I bumped into a YouTube video which claimed that the ancient land of Tartary... disappeared from encyclopedias and the like in 1920.
It turns out there's a pseudo-scientific theory claiming that several modern bridges in Russia are really ancient bridges from mediaeval Tartary that were made by a lost advanced civilization. This is called the "Mud Flood" theory.
Anyways, I found the 1927 edition of a historical atlas that put Tartary on the map, and these maps, in the Mollweide projection, now illustrate my web site.

[daan]

You are welcome to include links.

I should make a list of things that do not have pseudoscientific claims attached to them. It might be short.

— daan

[Milo]

I should make a list of things that do not have pseudoscientific claims attached to them.

It's pretty hard to prove that nobody has ever make a claim about something. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all. Therefore, such a list would itself be pseudoscientific...

[daan]

I was hoping someone would notice the irony!

— daan

[quadibloc]

You are welcome to include links.

Sorry;
http://www.quadibloc.com/maps/mps0404.htm
is the page on my site to which I was referring.

[PeteD]

Until I clicked on the link, I didn't realize it was a historical map you were talking about. (I see you said so in your first post, but I must have missed it when I first read it.) I know it's silly, but I thought you meant there was a map showing Tartary as a contemporary state in the age of the Soviet Union!

The label on the map shows Tartary as occupying roughly the area of the Golden Horde, whose inhabitants were commonly referred to as Tatars by outsiders. While the population was ethnically diverse, some of the inhabitants also self-identified as Tatars, and millions still do today.

By 1490, the Golden Horde had disintegrated into a number of smaller khanates. Labelling each of these individually on the map may have been impractical, while using the label "Golden Horde" would have been misleading as it would imply that the Golden Horde still existed as a unified state in 1490. Given that, is the use of the label "Tartary" to denote the land of the Tatars really so bad?

[quadibloc]

Given that, is the use of the label "Tartary" to denote the land of the Tatars really so bad?

I'm not claiming that there was anything wrong with using that geographical designation.
I noted there's a claim that it fell into disuse, and that this ties into some rather preposterous claims about ancient Tartaria, but that's a theory some modern people came up with, so it doesn't reflect on the people who made maps in the past that showed Tartary.

[PeteD]

Ah OK, I misunderstood. I thought you meant it was like Thule or Hy-Brasil or the Island of California in that it disappeared from maps and encyclopaedias because it was found not to have existed in the first place.