The histomap is an interesting thought experiment - however one should remember that it's execution is very flawed. There are almost no consistent markers of what makes a civilisation more or less prominent. Not the amount of territory, not population, not military prowess or cultural and artistic legacies or economics. If any one of those standards were applied to the histomap it would change dramatically. The only standard is how important John B. Sparks thinks a society was, with a lot of bias to his own context.

One can see this flaw reveal itself in the Histomap. Look at China - it alone lasts consistently and continually throughout the entire length. It begins the histomap a contemporary of Ancient Egypt and by the end it stands with New Zealand and the US. For much of that period it had the largest population in the world, the largest economy in the world, it developed writing independently, it fundamentally shaped the culture of one of the most populous regions of the world - for large periods of written history it was the single most powerful political entity in the world. Yet on the histomap it largely stays the same, scarcely ever being more influential than the US, regardless of what the situation in China or East Asia was actually like. Hell, China in the Three Kingdoms, a period of warfare and division - is given greater prominence than China in the Song dynasty, a veritable Golden Age of Chinese prosperity, economic development, artistic,cultural and political prominence. The only explanation for this is that Sparks either has very strange opinions on Chinese dynastic history - or that he's just ignorant of the topic at hand. It is likely that he knew of the Three Kingdoms period through literature, and thus mistakenly placed it as a pinnacle of Chinese influence.

Likewise India is barely there, despite being the birthplace of several major world religions, despite it's long written history, despite the enormous influence it has had upon the art, language, culture and political history of the world.

Even moreso - entire parts of the world are missing. Where are the Mesoamerican and Andean civilisations? The Mayans, the Aztecs, the Tarascans, the Olmecs, Zapotecs and Incas? None of them earn even a glance. John B. Sparks would have known about these societies, he simply chose not to include them.

No Sub-Saharan African empires, societies or peoples even make the list, despite various societies like Benin or the Mali empire easily meeting the criteria of many of the societies on this list (and surpassing many of them).

The map shows what a relatively history conscious English-speaking man in the 1930s might have seen the past to be like - one in which Classical societies like Rome, Egypt and Greece predominate the ancient world, and Western Europeans dominate the rest. This is not just biased - but erroneous. Any consistent measure and application of standards to measure the prominence of certain societies would look nothing like this.

Do we even have enough of a record of the Huns to classify them so closely related to the Mongols?