Guided tours
Each one is a route through the world, read a stop at a time. The map moves with the narration, and you can leave at any point and keep the map where it stands.
A Single Year: 1175
The year never moves. Only the camera does.
Every other tour travels through time. This one refuses to. Hold the timeline still at 1175 and go around the world instead: two of the century’s great Aristotelians in one Spanish city, a Chinese scholar rebuilding Confucianism, Norse gods being written into books as their religion ends, and one civilisation none of the others knows exists.
Gods Who Emigrated
Deities travel with the people carrying them
Gods move along trade routes, with armies, with sailors, and in the holds of slave ships. Follow a set of them out of Mesopotamia, across the Mediterranean, into the Roman empire, and then across the Atlantic with people who had no say in the crossing.
Monsters at the Edge of the Map
The beast always lives just past where you have been
Watch the monsters retreat at exactly the speed the map fills in: out of the forest next door, onto the shipping lane, past the end of the trade route, into the deep water, and finally onto the last unclimbed ground on Earth.
The Argument That Crossed Three Religions
Athens to Baghdad to Córdoba to Paris, over sixteen centuries
One body of lecture notes, copied and argued over by Greeks, Syriac Christians, Muslims, Jews and Latin Christians in turn. Follow the physical journey of Aristotle’s texts and the fight they started: attacked from Khorasan, defended from al-Andalus, and read in Latin a century later.
When the Gods Grew Quiet
How explaining the world stopped being a story about someone
For two thousand years the answer to why anything happens was a name and a fight. Then, within a few generations, people in four places that had never heard of each other started giving reasons instead. This is the turn, and the price someone paid for it.
Who Am I?
Twenty-four centuries of looking inward and disagreeing
Everyone on this tour went looking for the self. One found no owner behind the experience, one found a room he could get lost in, one found it identical with everything, and one suspended a man in midair with his senses switched off to see what was left. It ends more or less where it started.