Beforethe Ruins
A reference atlas for the histories we film.
- Episodes
- 01
- Works cited
- 08
- Channel
- YouTube
Latest sheet
The Entire History of the Ottoman Empire
Six centuries, three continents, thirty-six sultans. The episode compresses them into twenty-one minutes; this page is where the compression is unpacked, qualified and sourced.
What this is
The films compress centuries into minutes. This is where the compression gets undone — the chronology in order, the institutions named properly, and every claim traceable to a book you can go and read.
Reference, not commentary
Each episode expands into a companion page carrying the full chronology, a reference table of the facts worth having to hand, and a working bibliography. Written to be consulted rather than scrolled.
Original maps and chronologies
Interactive territorial maps and scrubable timelines are in production for episode one. They are built here from primary boundary data rather than borrowed, which is the point of building them at all.
Sources in the open
Bibliographies are structured data, not a paragraph at the bottom of a page. The production process behind the films, including where machine assistance is used, is set out in full on the method page.