Open Veils · Answer
Where was tartar?
Within contrarian and alternative history circles, 'Tartaria' is not merely a cartographic convenience but a proposed lost civilization — a technologically advanced, mud-flood-erased empire whose architectural and cultural fingerprints allegedly survive worldwide. Researchers like Jon Levi and Autodidactic Press argue the official historical record systematically erases or misdates Tartarian infrastructure. The mud flood and reset hypothesis, circulated widely in independent research communities, holds that a catastrophic 19th-century event buried Tartarian cities, with subsequent regimes rewriting the timeline.
Evidence
- Within the alternative history tradition, however, the question of Tartary's location is inseparable from the question of its suppression.
- Matthew LaCroix and others in the alternative ancient history community argue that Tartarian cultural remnants — ornate star-fort cities, Moorish-Gothic hybrid architecture — appear on every continent, suggesting a pre-reset global civilization rather than a regional nomadic confederation.
- Randall Carlson's catastrophism framework, while not specifically Tartaria-focused, provides a geological backdrop: late Younger Dryas or early Holocene cataclysms capable of erasing civilizational layers.
- Researchers associated with the mud flood hypothesis — including Jon Levi and the Autodidactic channel — point to 18th and early 19th century European maps where 'Grand Tartary' or 'Chinese Tartary' occupies enormous swaths of Asia as evidence of a coherent polity, not a vague geographical placeholder.
- The mud flood thesis holds that a catastrophic reset event buried ground floors of these structures across Europe, Russia, and North America, explaining uniform architectural styles that orthodox history attributes to disconnected local traditions.