How Myths Are Evaluated Against Geography
Myths on Maps is a research project that examines historical and mythological narratives by placing them under explicit geographic, environmental, and archaeological constraints. Rather than asking what a myth means, this project asks a simpler and more restrictive question:
What, if anything, survives when a narrative is forced to exist on a real map?
This site is not concerned with validating legends, recovering lost civilizations, or reconciling myth with belief. It is concerned with testing claims—often popular, sometimes ancient—against physical reality.
What This Project Does
Myths on Maps operates on a small number of non-negotiable principles:
- Maps come first.
Geography, paleogeography, bathymetry, and climate history establish the outer limits of what is possible. - Narratives are treated as compressed information.
Myths, epics, and legends are approached as culturally transmitted material that may encode routes, environments, or logistical knowledge—not as allegory by default. - Physical constraints override textual interpretation.
If a narrative requires coastlines, sea levels, migration paths, or technologies that did not exist, the narrative fails regardless of literary elegance. - Failure is an acceptable and documented outcome.
Hypotheses that collapse under scrutiny are retained as examples of how and why they failed. - Survival does not imply endorsement.
When an element of a myth survives geographic testing, it is preserved only to the extent that evidence supports it—and no further.
What This Project Does Not Do
To avoid ambiguity, Myths on Maps explicitly does not engage in the following:
- No hyperdiffusion or “global lost civilization” models
- No single origin culture explaining worldwide mythologies
- No symbolic reinterpretation used to rescue failed spatial claims
- No archaeological silence treated as positive evidence
- No modern ideological, theosophical, or esoteric systems used as historical sources
- No attempts to prove that a myth is “true” in a literal or spiritual sense
If a claim requires special pleading, selective sourcing, or suspension of known physical limits, it is rejected.
Primary Constraints Used
All investigations on this site are bounded by the same constraint hierarchy:
- Paleogeography
Sea levels, exposed continental shelves, coastlines, and land bridges appropriate to the period under discussion. - Paleoclimate and Ecology
Habitability, prevailing winds, ocean currents, rainfall regimes, and resource availability. - Navigation and Technology
What kinds of vessels, routes, and logistical chains were plausibly available. - Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence
Settlement timing, material culture, and language transmission—used conservatively.
Narratives are allowed to exist only within these limits.
Acceptable Outcomes
Each project on this site will arrive at one of the following outcomes:
- Rejection: the claim cannot be reconciled with geography or evidence
- Partial Survival: a limited element of the narrative aligns with real-world constraints
- Indeterminate: evidence is insufficient, and the question remains open
There is no preferred outcome. Rejection is not failure; it is resolution.
Why Maps Come First
Maps are uniquely unforgiving.
A text can be reinterpreted indefinitely. A map cannot. Coastlines either existed or they did not. Distances either could be traversed or they could not. Environmental conditions either permitted sustained movement or they forbade it.
By starting with maps—modern, paleogeographic, and reconstructed—this project uses geography as a filter that removes speculation before it can harden into belief.
A Note on Scope
Myths on Maps is intentionally narrow. It does not attempt to explain all myths, nor does it claim that myths must have historical origins. Some narratives are symbolic, theological, or literary, and are treated as such.
This project exists only where a claim intersects with physical space.