Friends of History Beware: This is a Preposterous Map
The above map is preposterous. I came across it online. I do not know its author, but it is clearly problematic, giving people some very wrong ideas. It presents us with a Europe of current borders and proposes to give the year for the founding of each country. While some of the years are reasonable in the literal sense of the founding a modern state ( Ireland 1916 ), others are pure nonsense, such as the suggestion that Greece was founded in 330 , the year Constantine I established the new capital of the Roman Empire at Constantinople . The modern state of Greece was founded in 1821 and has been notable for distancing itself from its Byzantine past and leaning on the heritage of Athens. Much of the preposterousness of the map arises from the inconsistent application of “rules of thumb.” Germany (1871) and Italy (1861) are based on the official founding of the modern state, while Ukraine (1119) and Russia...