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Atlas of the Year 1000
This dazzling book takes us on a voyage of discovery around the world at the turn of the last millennium, when for the first time the world was in essence a unity. Islam bridged Eurasia, western Europe, and North Africa. Vikings, with links to Scandinavia and Russia, had just arrived in North America. These and other peoples reached out to create links and put isolated cultures unwittingly in touch. John Man vividly captures these epochal events, and depicts the colorful peoples that defined the world's mix of stability and change, of isolation and contact. In an immensely learned portrayal, he traces enduring cultural strands that became part of the world as we know it today. In text, maps, and pictures, most in color, and drawing on the expertise of two dozen consultants, John Man has created a concise compendium of all the major cultures of the lost millennial world of 1000. In some cultures--Europe, Islam, China, and Japan--written records contain a vast range of materials, often revealing sharply focused details of life and personality. Here lie startling contrasts with today's world, and even foreshadowing of the future that are equally astonishing in their familiarity. For nonliterate cultures--in the United States, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Africa--this book draws on a wealth of archeological research, some of it made available to nonspecialists for the first time.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 1999
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About the author
John Man
74 books262 followersJohn Anthony Garnet Man is a British historian and travel writer. His special interests are China, Mongolia and the history of written communication. He takes particular pleasure in combining historical narrative with personal experience.
He studied German and French at Keble College, Oxford, before doing two postgraduate courses, a diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, completing the latter in 1968. After working in journalism with Reuters and in publishing with Time-Life Books, he turned to writing, with occasional forays into film, TV and radio.
In the 1990s, he began a trilogy on the three major revolutions in writing: writing itself, the alphabet and printing with movable type. This has so far resulted in two books, Alpha Beta and The Gutenberg Revolution, both republished in 2009. The third, on the origin of writing, is on hold, because it depends on access to Iraq.
He returned to the subject of Mongolia with Gobi: Tracking the Desert, the first book on the region since the 1920s. Work in Mongolia led to Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, which has so far appeared in 18 languages. Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China completed a trilogy on Asian leaders. A revised edition of his book on Genghis Khan, with the results of an expedition up the mountain on which he is supposed to be buried, was upcoming in autumn 2010.
The Terracotta Army coincided with the British Museum exhibition (September 2007- April 2008). This was followed by The Great Wall. The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan combines history and leadership theory. Xanadu: Marco Polo and the Discovery of the East was published in autumn 2009, and Samurai: The Last Warrior, the story of Saigō Takamori's doomed 1877 rebellion against the Japanese emperor, was published in February 2011.
In 2007 John Man was awarded Mongolia's Friendship Medal for his contributions to UK-Mongolian relations.
He studied German and French at Keble College, Oxford, before doing two postgraduate courses, a diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, completing the latter in 1968. After working in journalism with Reuters and in publishing with Time-Life Books, he turned to writing, with occasional forays into film, TV and radio.
In the 1990s, he began a trilogy on the three major revolutions in writing: writing itself, the alphabet and printing with movable type. This has so far resulted in two books, Alpha Beta and The Gutenberg Revolution, both republished in 2009. The third, on the origin of writing, is on hold, because it depends on access to Iraq.
He returned to the subject of Mongolia with Gobi: Tracking the Desert, the first book on the region since the 1920s. Work in Mongolia led to Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, which has so far appeared in 18 languages. Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China completed a trilogy on Asian leaders. A revised edition of his book on Genghis Khan, with the results of an expedition up the mountain on which he is supposed to be buried, was upcoming in autumn 2010.
The Terracotta Army coincided with the British Museum exhibition (September 2007- April 2008). This was followed by The Great Wall. The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan combines history and leadership theory. Xanadu: Marco Polo and the Discovery of the East was published in autumn 2009, and Samurai: The Last Warrior, the story of Saigō Takamori's doomed 1877 rebellion against the Japanese emperor, was published in February 2011.
In 2007 John Man was awarded Mongolia's Friendship Medal for his contributions to UK-Mongolian relations.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 19, 2024
Read this for a history class. The information it provides is interesting but there simply isn't enough it; I'd much rather stick with Kevin Reilly's The Human Journey.
October 29, 2023
It is often said the year 1000 has no real significance, that it acquires significance only from its zeroes, from our determination to read significance into birthdays and big numbers. Far from it; the time has a real historical significance, rooted in the way human society developed, from scattered diversity to today’s ‘one world.’
By pure coincidence, the year 1000, or thereabouts, marked the first time in human history that it was possible to pass an object, or a message, right around the world. This had, of course, been almost possible for a long time. Although no culture knew what the world looked like, and few had any idea of its size, almost every habitable region had been peopled for thousands of years and almost every culture had a neighbor or two. Messages and artefacts had been passed between neighbors, across continents and between continents. Such messages- pottery styles, agricultural techniques, new technologies, religions- are the stuff of cultural diffusion.
History can be a boring subject in the wrong hands, or most of the white, cis, Eurocentric men who wrote it, and so presenting it in this format is a much better way. 1000 seems so very long ago but in the span of geologic time, it is a blip, a few breaths, a breeze. I naturally want to also know 3000, what has happened, and 4000, also, too, please. Etc.
Something about history’s mystery is celebrated here: one example is how different cultures may have recorded in their ordinary time, not even knowing or caring it was 1000. Judaism recorded it as 3761 years from creation, Islam as 378 from Muhammad’s’ emigration to Medina, Nepal 4095 of the Thakuri dynasty. When Ethiopians arrive in the US, it is hard to translate dates of vaccines since they use an orthodox calendar.
Things I learned: Tiahuanaco in Bolivia was founded in the year 200, and had almost 1500 years of settled civilization by 1000 and housed 40,000 people and perhaps were the ancestors of today’s Aymaras. They created a pyramid structure of 140 million adobe blocks forming a rectangle 250 yards long and 60 feet high, and created the Nazca Lines, the giant geoglyphs on the land.
Working on some family genealogy, I was interested in Germany’s position in 1000, and was surprised some of the names were the same such as the Duchy of Carniola; my father’s people settled the area now in Slovenia around 1330 so shouldn’t have been. Ottos I-III had ideas of recreating Charlemagne’s empire of France, Germany and northern Italy, a type of 1000 year Reich of the past, the holy Roman Empire. Trying to find traces of my family, I was shocked to learn in another source there were several family names in the list of HRE emperors, and I wondered if my grandfather knew this. I just don’t know where they originated in Germany to tie any threads.
Islam's sweep of desert countries was illuminating also, from Baghdad at its heart, the beauty of language of the Koran, Islamic enslavement of Slavs, Turks, and sub-Saharan Africans and the break away of northern Africa to a group called the Fatimids, a new sect of Islam which fell in 1171.
A thought experiment, assuming peaceful progress, perfect translation in fantasy: in 1000 Islam derived gold from sub-Saharan Africa. The message heads quickly south, across the Sahara, and down the Nile, being carried on through the continent by Bantu farmers and herders, until it reaches the Khoisan in the Kalahari desert. Islam also trades with Byzantium, which is in close touch with proto-Russia, for reasons of commerce and religion for Russia is just now in the process of adapting Byzantium’s Orthodox Christianity. The Rus, dominating the north-south trade routes along the major rivers, still have close dealings with their ancestral Viking culture. Not only are the Vikings everywhere around Europe’s coasts- this message would echo round Europe like a gunshot in the Grand Canyon- but they also commute regularly to Iceland which has just colonized Greenland. Greenland Vikings are at this moment doing their best to establish a colony on Newfoundland, and are trading with Inuit from northern Canada.
Here the message divides, one route heading south, through the cultures of the eastern woodlands, through the arid southwest via the town dwellers of Chaco Canyon, to Central America, and thence to the Andes and down the Amazon. In the north, the Inuit of the Thule culture pass word to their relatives in Alaska, who paddle it across the Bering Strait to northeast Siberia. Inuit there obtain iron from the borders between China and Siberia. The message flows east through China to Korea and Japan, and west following long established Silk Road routes to Central Asia, then down through India, where the expansive Chola empire transmits it to Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, messengers are advancing southward through Southeast Asia, via the Khmer Empire of Cambodia. Offshore, two local trade kingdoms, linked by Arab, Chinese, and Indian traders, crate alternative routes through land and sea through the Indonesian archipelago. There is a hesitation, perhaps, about the penetration of New Guinea. But then comes a sudden impetus as the words passes along Pacific island chains to the Polynesian frontier, even with carried with the first settles to the virgin land of New Zealand. Back to the north and west, on the coast of northern Australia, traders are just beginning to exploit sea cucumbers, much prizes as a delicacy in China, then as now. Australian Aboriginals carry the message across the continent. North of the Hindu Kush, where we left one of our Silk Road messengers, it is a small step through Muslim Afghanistan back into the heart of the Muslim world.
Imagine this all occurred at walking pace, 24 hours a day. Our message has covered 35,000 miles in one year, right around the world plus another 10,000 miles for the twists and turns. If we allow for our path to divide and radiate at crucial points, a year or two would be enough for global diffusion. Easter Islanders, cut off centuries earlier after their arrival on their remote home, must remain in ignorance, and so perhaps must the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and some Amazonian tribesmen, and numerous tiny isolated communities in Siberia, the Himalayas, the Philippines. But to all intents and purposes, the world is one already.
A cursory glance a the Americas in 1000 reveals a peculiarity about the continent: large-scale civilizations in the south and center, nothing comparable in the north. All indigenous Americans shared a similar genetic inheritance and were equally talented, intelligent and motivated. A similar questions arises after comparing Old World and New; why did great civilizations emerge so much earlier in Eurasia than in the Americas? The answer is the same in both cases: access to the right crops and animals. With domesticated crops and animals, people can settle, intensify food production, make cities, create wealth…
By pure coincidence, the year 1000, or thereabouts, marked the first time in human history that it was possible to pass an object, or a message, right around the world. This had, of course, been almost possible for a long time. Although no culture knew what the world looked like, and few had any idea of its size, almost every habitable region had been peopled for thousands of years and almost every culture had a neighbor or two. Messages and artefacts had been passed between neighbors, across continents and between continents. Such messages- pottery styles, agricultural techniques, new technologies, religions- are the stuff of cultural diffusion.
History can be a boring subject in the wrong hands, or most of the white, cis, Eurocentric men who wrote it, and so presenting it in this format is a much better way. 1000 seems so very long ago but in the span of geologic time, it is a blip, a few breaths, a breeze. I naturally want to also know 3000, what has happened, and 4000, also, too, please. Etc.
Something about history’s mystery is celebrated here: one example is how different cultures may have recorded in their ordinary time, not even knowing or caring it was 1000. Judaism recorded it as 3761 years from creation, Islam as 378 from Muhammad’s’ emigration to Medina, Nepal 4095 of the Thakuri dynasty. When Ethiopians arrive in the US, it is hard to translate dates of vaccines since they use an orthodox calendar.
Things I learned: Tiahuanaco in Bolivia was founded in the year 200, and had almost 1500 years of settled civilization by 1000 and housed 40,000 people and perhaps were the ancestors of today’s Aymaras. They created a pyramid structure of 140 million adobe blocks forming a rectangle 250 yards long and 60 feet high, and created the Nazca Lines, the giant geoglyphs on the land.
Working on some family genealogy, I was interested in Germany’s position in 1000, and was surprised some of the names were the same such as the Duchy of Carniola; my father’s people settled the area now in Slovenia around 1330 so shouldn’t have been. Ottos I-III had ideas of recreating Charlemagne’s empire of France, Germany and northern Italy, a type of 1000 year Reich of the past, the holy Roman Empire. Trying to find traces of my family, I was shocked to learn in another source there were several family names in the list of HRE emperors, and I wondered if my grandfather knew this. I just don’t know where they originated in Germany to tie any threads.
Islam's sweep of desert countries was illuminating also, from Baghdad at its heart, the beauty of language of the Koran, Islamic enslavement of Slavs, Turks, and sub-Saharan Africans and the break away of northern Africa to a group called the Fatimids, a new sect of Islam which fell in 1171.
A thought experiment, assuming peaceful progress, perfect translation in fantasy: in 1000 Islam derived gold from sub-Saharan Africa. The message heads quickly south, across the Sahara, and down the Nile, being carried on through the continent by Bantu farmers and herders, until it reaches the Khoisan in the Kalahari desert. Islam also trades with Byzantium, which is in close touch with proto-Russia, for reasons of commerce and religion for Russia is just now in the process of adapting Byzantium’s Orthodox Christianity. The Rus, dominating the north-south trade routes along the major rivers, still have close dealings with their ancestral Viking culture. Not only are the Vikings everywhere around Europe’s coasts- this message would echo round Europe like a gunshot in the Grand Canyon- but they also commute regularly to Iceland which has just colonized Greenland. Greenland Vikings are at this moment doing their best to establish a colony on Newfoundland, and are trading with Inuit from northern Canada.
Here the message divides, one route heading south, through the cultures of the eastern woodlands, through the arid southwest via the town dwellers of Chaco Canyon, to Central America, and thence to the Andes and down the Amazon. In the north, the Inuit of the Thule culture pass word to their relatives in Alaska, who paddle it across the Bering Strait to northeast Siberia. Inuit there obtain iron from the borders between China and Siberia. The message flows east through China to Korea and Japan, and west following long established Silk Road routes to Central Asia, then down through India, where the expansive Chola empire transmits it to Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, messengers are advancing southward through Southeast Asia, via the Khmer Empire of Cambodia. Offshore, two local trade kingdoms, linked by Arab, Chinese, and Indian traders, crate alternative routes through land and sea through the Indonesian archipelago. There is a hesitation, perhaps, about the penetration of New Guinea. But then comes a sudden impetus as the words passes along Pacific island chains to the Polynesian frontier, even with carried with the first settles to the virgin land of New Zealand. Back to the north and west, on the coast of northern Australia, traders are just beginning to exploit sea cucumbers, much prizes as a delicacy in China, then as now. Australian Aboriginals carry the message across the continent. North of the Hindu Kush, where we left one of our Silk Road messengers, it is a small step through Muslim Afghanistan back into the heart of the Muslim world.
Imagine this all occurred at walking pace, 24 hours a day. Our message has covered 35,000 miles in one year, right around the world plus another 10,000 miles for the twists and turns. If we allow for our path to divide and radiate at crucial points, a year or two would be enough for global diffusion. Easter Islanders, cut off centuries earlier after their arrival on their remote home, must remain in ignorance, and so perhaps must the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and some Amazonian tribesmen, and numerous tiny isolated communities in Siberia, the Himalayas, the Philippines. But to all intents and purposes, the world is one already.
A cursory glance a the Americas in 1000 reveals a peculiarity about the continent: large-scale civilizations in the south and center, nothing comparable in the north. All indigenous Americans shared a similar genetic inheritance and were equally talented, intelligent and motivated. A similar questions arises after comparing Old World and New; why did great civilizations emerge so much earlier in Eurasia than in the Americas? The answer is the same in both cases: access to the right crops and animals. With domesticated crops and animals, people can settle, intensify food production, make cities, create wealth…
February 24, 2019
Summary: Inherently intriguing to see the regions of the world at a particular point in time, but flawed by bizarre editing.
Good: A snapshot of the world around about the year 1000. Love having a clear view of how civilizations around the world compared 1000 years ago. Atlas is loosely used in this title. While maps are shown, it is best though of as a brief history text which is an atlas by virtue of presenting that history region by region. I found this aspect of the book inherently interesting.
Bad: It needed an edit, badly. Or, it was edited with a stringent goal of page-fitting. I say that because, in nearly all cases, chapters take up two facing pages of the book with a few taking up 4 pages. Never an odd number of pages.
The chapter on the Nordic region ends with a sentence that is obviously supposed to continue to another page. Let me quote the prior sentence and the one in question, "When the Norwegian king tried to restake a claim in 1066, the English proved too strong - only to fall to the armies of another claimant with Viking blood, William of Normandy. But by now the Normans were". And it literally ends page 43 there. Turn to page 44 and you are the start of the Celtic region and the sentence does not continue. It does not continue anywhere in the book.
For the Americas, Cahokia is described as the "Capital of the Eastern Woodlands, yet nothing about the natives residing east of the Appalachians is even briefly mentioned, nor depicted on the maps. South-western, Pacific coastal, Great Plains and Inuit civilizations are also discussed, but nothing else. Maybe it was cut like the continuation of the paragraph above.
As mentioned by others, numerous places are called out in the text, but are not shown on the maps.
Good: A snapshot of the world around about the year 1000. Love having a clear view of how civilizations around the world compared 1000 years ago. Atlas is loosely used in this title. While maps are shown, it is best though of as a brief history text which is an atlas by virtue of presenting that history region by region. I found this aspect of the book inherently interesting.
Bad: It needed an edit, badly. Or, it was edited with a stringent goal of page-fitting. I say that because, in nearly all cases, chapters take up two facing pages of the book with a few taking up 4 pages. Never an odd number of pages.
The chapter on the Nordic region ends with a sentence that is obviously supposed to continue to another page. Let me quote the prior sentence and the one in question, "When the Norwegian king tried to restake a claim in 1066, the English proved too strong - only to fall to the armies of another claimant with Viking blood, William of Normandy. But by now the Normans were". And it literally ends page 43 there. Turn to page 44 and you are the start of the Celtic region and the sentence does not continue. It does not continue anywhere in the book.
For the Americas, Cahokia is described as the "Capital of the Eastern Woodlands, yet nothing about the natives residing east of the Appalachians is even briefly mentioned, nor depicted on the maps. South-western, Pacific coastal, Great Plains and Inuit civilizations are also discussed, but nothing else. Maybe it was cut like the continuation of the paragraph above.
As mentioned by others, numerous places are called out in the text, but are not shown on the maps.
January 11, 2026
Published in 1999, 'Atlas of the Year 1000' is an informative roundup of the geo-political makeup of the world in the year 1000, nicely written by an accomplished historian. It suffers from some terrible editing and typos in places - perhaps it was rushed to get it into print during the rash of books released that jumped on the bandwagon of the approaching millennium. Whatever the reasons, it remains a well written summary, and a great primer for further reading on any of the many areas of interest.
July 29, 2025
Richly illustrated, tightly organized, and approximately 144 pages, Man delivers accessible maps, historical vignettes, and archaeological insights that contrast cultures from the Americas, Europe, the Islamic world, Africa, and beyond.
September 18, 2015
I made slow progress on this one, but it was well worth it in the end. I think my problem with it was that, like with short story collections, I would just start to get into a 2-4 page narrative and then have to abruptly move on. But I really enjoyed this cross-sectional view of the world at a given point in time, and I especially enjoyed the bits of history on Africa and Oceania it presented, since I am comparatively unfamiliar with those regions. I don't think it worked very well as an atlas though; it felt more like there were a series of very short but dense summaries of regional history, accompanied by loosely related maps. But the writing didn't really reference the maps very much, and often places referenced in the text that seemed important wouldn't be shown on the maps.
September 9, 2011
Beautiful maps, interesting explanatory text of said maps, handsomely designed, focus on an extremely event-worthy time in history all over the world, what's not to like about this book? Something of a spoiler: the author doesn't literally focus solely on the single year 1000, but the period around 1000. 'Atlas of the approximate year 1000' just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, though.
April 29, 2013
Interesting view of the whole world at a moment in time, rather than our usual histories which focus on one story.
The premise is so similar to Jared Diamond's brilliant Guns, Germs & Steel, published 2 yrs before this one, that I expected to see it in the bibliography; but wasn't. Although Diamond takes 10,000BC as a starting point.
The premise is so similar to Jared Diamond's brilliant Guns, Germs & Steel, published 2 yrs before this one, that I expected to see it in the bibliography; but wasn't. Although Diamond takes 10,000BC as a starting point.
September 24, 2011
I really enjoyed learning more about the Cahokia Mounds, very fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews