The Timeline

While I've made a few dev diaries, concerning specific regions, I've never really zoomed out to show the big picture: the entire world in the earliest start dates. I aim to change that here.

The world in 3000 BC is a very different place to how it is later: most of the familiar cultures haven't formed yet, and settled civilisation is limited to a narrow area in the Middle East around a few river valleys. Iron working is a startling technology of the far-flung future, and, if writing was around, you'd probably be seeing ancient bronzepunk novels.

Actually, Bronzepunk would be pretty cool. It would be sort of like the Flintstones, except that it takes itself seriously somehow and has no dinosaurs. I'll set my amazing Bronzepunk novel in an alternate universe where iron doesn't real, but somehow all modern technology is developed using only primitive metalworking techniques. Most of the technology in the book will be normal modern technology, however, but with some hieroglyphs glued on.

One thousand years later, the world will look like this:

So just imagine this but with more yellow and less of the other colours, probably. I don't know, I'm not a history.

A first question is that how will this be dealt with. Because paradox is a bunch of philistines, the game engine doesn't support BCE dates, so I need to shift the 0 point of the calendar somewhere. Totally arbitrarily, I'm going to set the zero point at 4,000 BCE, meaning that conversion from the normal calender to the common era one is just a matter of adding four thousand. Handy.

So, zipping around the world:

Britain is primarily tribal, but with some hunter-gathers still present, especially in the cooler north where agriculture is harder. In southern Britain, there is the Windmill Hill culture, which is centred around Windmill Hill and responsible for building the earliest stages of Stonehenge among other things, and in northern Britain, there is the Grooved Ware culture, centred on Orkney.

In the Denmark region, the remnants of the tribal Funnelbeaker culture hang on, being displaced from most of the continent by their Globular Amphora successors. Further north and to the east, along the coast of Sweden, there are the hunter-gatherers of the Pitted Ware culture.

In Northern France, there is the Seine-Oise-Marne culture, in eastern France, there is the Linear Pottery Culture, and in southern France, there is the Véraza culture.

Spain is in some kind of weird grey zone where it's just described as megalithic but with no Wikipedia links to specific culture names. Maybe, just for fun, I'll make them all Vasconic, to mess with the linguists. The Basque will rise again 5000 years ago! Again, these guys are all tribal - the chiefdoms and copper-working swept in from the south-east of Europe and still hasn't hit the west yet.

Okay, enough bullshitting about the important parts of the world. Time to go

*puts on sunglasses*

Chalcolithic

It just doesn't have the same ring as medieval.

Unless you have a phobia of pottery, in which case "going Chalcolithic" would be absolutely terrifying. Also yeah TW:Chalcolithic Pottery and stuff.

And, in today's environment, those Chalcolithic folk are down in the Middle East and the Nile.

So, first civilisation is Minoa. This wasn't really a term they used for themselves, instead named after the probably fictional King Minos, but I don't care. It's their fault for writing in Linear A and not leaving any convenient translations around. They could have done a Rosetta Stone in hieroglyphs, but no. That would be too convenient for those high-and-mighty "Minoans", wouldn't it?

I can't even type these fuckers because my computer doesn't have the right fonts. That's how awful Linear A is. On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know any good Linear A fonts?

Since they built palaces, they were probably a monarchy, so that's their government type in-game. This is the extent of their grand dominion:

Connoisseurs of Cretan bronze age history, feel free to shout at me about how wrong I am in the comments section.

 The blue provinces (all two of them) are the Minoans. Bronzeworking still hasn't fully reached continental Greece, but it's started doing so, in over the next 200 years Greece will enter the Bronze age and have tons of wonderful chiefdoms that didn't both to exhaustively write down all of their territorial changes in terms of CK2 counties.

Further down is Egypt, comprising a unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. If I was a masochist, I would extend the timeline back to the days of Upper and Lower Egypt, but I'm not; not even my trusty Geacron goes that far back (for those keeping track, that means that I'm almost certainly going to do this).

Connoisseurs of Egyptian bronze age history, feel free to shout at me about how wrong I am in the comments section.

And, going north, you have the city-state of Ebla, seat of Levantine civilisation, and apparently site of the first recorded war between countries in history; between Ebla and Sumer.

Connoisseurs of Levantine bronze age history, feel free to shout at me about how wrong I am in the comments section.

Speaking of Sumer, here it is, the only state society in 3000 BC that isn't a monarchy, but instead a theocracy, being ruled by a priest-king from the clergy.

Connoisseurs of Mesopotamian bronze age history, feel free to shout at me about how wrong I am in the comments section.

 So, that settles the major empires of the timeline extended world in the earliest start date. Here's the rest of the stock Crusader Kings 2 map, for comparison:

The meaning of each colour is left as an exercise for the reader. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure it out.