The Tartaria Conspiracy, Part 1: The Lost Country

Tartary appears across Asia on European maps for about three hundred years, then disappears from them during the 1800s. Researchers in the Tartaria movement describe it as a lost world empire erased from the record. This first episode opens the maps themselves to look at the names, images and small details that give rise to that theory.

The material includes original scans held by the Library of Congress, Stanford, Princeton, the David Rumsey Map Collection and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. A 1570 atlas map, the 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica and later maps offer different places to follow the name. The episode also reads historical map labels referring to Gog and Magog and to Arsareth, where the map text places the ten lost tribes of Israel.

From there, the discussion turns to Mercator’s North Pole, an island named in the Treaty of Paris, and a reindeer sleigh on a map of Asia. A town at the edge of a map brings the focus to a possible connection with Montreal. We tell the theory the way its researchers tell it, then show the record, and you decide. The maps and their wording stay at the center of that comparison.

In this episode

A 1570 atlas map labeling Tartary as the kingdom of the Great Khan
Historical map labels referring to Gog and Magog and to Arsareth as the land of the ten lost tribes of Israel
The Tartary entry in the 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the disappearance of the name across empires
Mercator’s 1595 North Pole map, with magnetic rock and four seas flowing into a whirlpool
A nonexistent island used in the 1783 Treaty of Paris to define the border between the United States and British North America, now Canada
A reindeer-sleigh figure on a 1608 map of Asia that online viewers call Santa Claus
A town at a map’s edge and the village on Montreal’s island that may explain its name