Family research · Empires hub · a different kind of hub
Every other hub in this atlas groups modern countries by geography — the Balkans, West Africa, the Caribbean. This hub is different. It groups eight major transnational empires that each, at their height, spanned dozens of today's modern countries: Ancient Egypt, Rome, Persia, the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Mughals, Britain, and Spain. Until now, each of these has appeared in this atlas only as brief ruling-context mentions scattered across many separate country pages — the Mongol Empire alone shows up as a passing reference on roughly twenty different pages, but never once as its own story. Here, each empire finally gets a real, full-depth timeline of its own, on its own page, the same paint-ready format as every country page in this atlas.
These pages cross-link both ways: each empire page links forward to whichever modern country continues or descends from its story (Ottoman → Turkey, Persian → Iran, Egyptian → modern Egypt), and this hub links out to all eight. Four are live now; the other four are being built in parallel and will go live shortly — their cards below already point to the right pages.
Why a separate hub at all? Every regional hub in this atlas — the Balkans, the Caucasus, West Africa — is built around modern political geography: the countries that exist on today's map, grouped by where they sit. Empires don't fit that model. The Ottoman Empire alone shaped the ruling history of the Balkans, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, Egypt, and North Africa all at once; the Mongol Empire touched pages from Eastern Europe to East Asia to Central Asia. Splitting each empire's story into fragments scattered across a dozen country pages does a disservice to how genuinely transnational these powers were — so this hub tells each one once, properly, as its own throughline, and links out to the modern countries that continue or descend from it.
Each empire page below follows this atlas's full-depth format: a newest-first timeline of real flags and reconstructed royal emblems where no flag survives, a paint guide with hex swatches for every entry, and a "Reading the tags" legend. Four empires are live now (Ancient Egypt, Rome, Persia, the Ottomans); the Mongol, Mughal, British, and Spanish empires are being built in parallel and will go live at their linked filenames shortly.
This hub is one phase in a larger set. See the region-wide hubs and the index here: