The Truth about Tartaria: Listening for a Lost Song

A Gentle Investigation

Whispers of a Lost Civilization of Tartaria call to the part of us that loves puzzles. We follow not to argue, but to understand. What patterns repeat? What timelines rhyme? What structures sing of skills we barely remember?

History of the Tartarian Empire

When exploring the History of the Tartarian Empire, keep two tools close: curiosity and context. Photographs, maps, and architecture can point to mysteries and also to mundane explanations. Both deserve patience. Compassionate skepticism honors truth wherever it lives.

Primary Source: Early Modern Geography’s “Great Tartary”

The name Tartary (or Tartaria) appears frequently in European maps from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. One useful primary document is “A New Map of Great Tartary” (John Cary, London, 1806)—a well‑preserved example in the British Library map collection. It labels a vast, vague region stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific: Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet, and parts of Manchuria.

Cary’s map illustrates how Tartary was never a nation but a cartographic placeholder—an umbrella term Europeans used for lands beyond their direct knowledge. In similar atlases, the people of these regions might be called Tatars or Tartars, blending multiple ethnicities: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic. Contemporary geographers like Guillaume de L’Isle (1716) or Gerardus Mercator (1595) used the term with the same fuzziness.

The map thus functions as a window onto European epistemology: it embodies the limits of Enlightenment geography, where speculative boundaries compensated for firsthand exploration. In that sense, it’s a genuine primary representation of “Tartaria”—but emphatically not evidence of a lost empire.

Scholarly Analysis: The Mythology of Geography

Historian Matthew P. Romaniello’s “Russia and the Making of the European Far East: 1500–1800” (in The Russian Review, 2019) provides a crucial scholarly anchor. Romaniello argues that “Tartary” persisted on maps long after detailed Russian territorial control spread through Siberia. This endurance, he writes, shows how “the imagined geography of Tartary outlived its administrative usefulness… a conceptual rather than political space.”

His analysis situates “Tartary” in a broader European tradition of mythic geography—labels that combined ethnography, rumor, and fantasy. Pre‑modern Europeans populated such unlabeled interiors with Scythians, Amazons, and monstrous races; “Tartary” filled that role east of Muscovy. Maps and travelogues recycled the term without consistent borders, turning it into a geographic ghost of empire.

Romaniello’s conclusion reinforces a central scholarly consensus: there was never a Tartarian nation-state, imperial bureaucracy, or cultural cohesion—just diverse steppe polities (Mongol khanates, Qing vassals, Siberian tribes, etc.) that Europeans subsumed under one enormous term for convenience.

Independent Investigation: Unraveling the “Tartarian Empire” Movement

For a modern independent analyst, David Ewing Jr., a researcher in digital mythologies and architectural symbols, offers an instructive case. Though not affiliated with universities, Ewing has gained attention for methodically examining internet “Tartaria” claims. His 2022 independent report “Decoding the Lost Empire: Tracing the Internet’s New Atlantis” dissects how amateur historians reinterpret 18th–19th century architecture—large domes, Greco‑Roman facades, and buried lower floors—as “evidence” of a technologically advanced global civilization erased by a mysterious “mud flood.”

Ewing’s approach combines open‑source investigation (city planning archives, construction dates, newspaper clippings) with fact‑checking methods inspired by digital forensics. By tracing architectural styles through documented builders and building permits, he demonstrates that alleged “Tartarian” structures were, in reality, products of the Industrial Age’s neoclassical revival. His conclusion: the “Tartarian Empire” online narrative thrives not from material evidence but from aesthetic pattern recognition amplified through the visual logic of YouTube and TikTok.

Crucially, Ewing’s tone is less derisive than diagnostic: he attributes the persistence of the myth to a mixture of distrust in academic institutions and a genuine hunger for wonder—an irresistible cocktail in the digital age.

Triangulating the Three Perspectives

Be sure to check out:

Unveiling the Forgotten Empire and The Origin of Tartaria 

Walk the line between wonder and rigor at thegatewayoflight.com 

Tartaria Gateway of Light gathers explorations and resources.