The Futuristic Empire That Never Existed | Mia Mulder 

I stg if I hear one more person say "They drove horses and buggies" I dare them go build a wagon and travel the oregon trail. Do it. You won't make it because it actually takes an insane amount of skill to upkeep moving wooden parts.

I love/hate conspiracy theories like this, because it's always about two minutes between "An alternate history, with free energy and giants? That sounds wonderfully creative!" And "It's just more racism, isn't it?" ...but damn, those two minutes are magical and full of promise.

The "horse and buggy" thing is funny. Like what, "these people didn't have internal combustion engines! how could they have built big cathedrals?"

I have always felt like we should value beautiful sturdy architecture not because of some moral reason, but simply because having great architecture around puts you in such a great mood and also when things are built to be functional and last it saves everyone money in the long run. You don't have to worry as much about shelling out thousands of dollars on random repairs every year.

"We can't build cathedrals anymore." Meanwhile in Barcelona....Sagrada Familia, they are literally still building it right now!

engagement engagement engagement i'm getting married to the algorithm

For thousands of years, all was well in the Tartarian Empire with their whimsical Beaux-Arts towers, wacky Neo-Gothic turretes and Art-Nouveau ornaments. But then, the Le Corbusier nation attacked.

.*a few centuries from now* “Are we expected to believe that people who rode around in vehicles with primitive explosion engines that ran on dead dinosaur goo built these giant skyscrapers? Please.”

"The boats ran on free energy" yeah, it was called wind

"are we expected to believe people did this with a hammer and a chistle?" What do you call this specific kind of disbelief in human ingenuity bred by modern technology? 🤔

Every time you play that clip of someone saying they used horse and buggies just makes me think of a video I watched of like 50 something Amish dudes straight up lifting a barn or something - I get that it’s not the same as a cathedral but like, people make due ya know

As a person who lost his (2nd story, already raised) home in February to flooding in the worst climate event our region has ever seen, I can absolutely confirm that water-go-up events exist and are undesirable.

There is one reason for buried buildings that you forgot to mention: The ground is growing in many places. Erosion by wind and water will slowly transport material from higher regions into lower regions where it gets deposited. I saw that in the German city of Trier, which was founded around the year 0 by the Romans. Our tour guide told us that the ground in that region grows by roughly 10cm per century. 2000 years, aka 20 centuries, will then result in 2m of rise. And what do you know - the entrance level of the Roman buildings was about 2m under today's ground, while the medieval entrance level was about 1m under today's ground level. (There is a watch tower in a park where they have dug away the dirt around the original entrance so that you can see the difference.) And all without a mudflood!

This whole "theory" boils down to "This doesn't LOOK like it would have been made by people I regard as stupid uncultured savages, so it MUST have been made by some anceint advanced civilization sometime in the past" In other words, it is Atlantis, just bigger. Or how we created gods, just smaller.

This is very interesting to me because, as a Russian without a particular interest in conspiracy theories, I always thought of "Great Tartaria" as a particularly fringe version of the "primordial Russian global empire" theory and had no idea it got so much traction outside Russia. Just a slight quibble around 43:24 : this isn't really the same generic sense of the term "Ta(r)taria" as used by the old Western European cartographers. In Soviet usage "Tataria" very specifically referred to the administrative entity whose full name was the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which corresponds to the modern Republic of Tatarstan. Some Russian speakers still use "Tataria" as the short form place name, but this usage is generally frowned upon in the region itself with most Tatar people using "Tatarstan" in all languages. Since calling Tatar people "Tartars" in English only really started getting pushback in recent decades, it's not surprising that a CIA document from 1957 would have used the spelling "Tartaria" for what was "Tataria" in the original. But yeah, this is very obviously referring to attempts by the Soviet Union at the time to whitewash the history of relations between the Russian state and the Turkic-speaking Muslim Tatars in order to strengthen "inter-ethnic cohesion" and minimize the threat of the Tatars' opposition to the USSR as the continuation of the Russian state. Since the original Soviet document is supposed to be from 1944, this threat would have been seen as more than just hypothetical at the time, as Nazi Germany was exploiting the nationalist feelings of Tatars and other ethnic groups of the larger Volga area to recruit fighters for its Idel-Ural Legion.

Like... They know that the time frame they're talking about for the fall of Tartaria is just barely outside living memory, right? Forget the history books, at the short end of that 100-300 year window you could just ask your grandparents if they remembered it or if *their* grandparents told them about it.

In response to the TikTok that went "you expect me to believe that they built this with a hammer and chisel? 🤨": The Inca would build a lot of their most important buildings without mortar. They would file the bricks down in ways that would allow them to slot almost perfectly together like legos and as a result they were virtually earthquake-proof. So uhhhhhh yeah if Machu Picchu can be built without mortar I'm pretty sure we probably could build something like that building with a hammer and chisel

With the things with cities built upwards it's just reminding me of discworld. "Most of Ankh Morpork was, in fact, built on Ankh Morpork"

Educational system failure. This is what happens when people stop reading books. What young people don’t realize is that there are usually hundreds of books written about any random Wikipedia page subject. There is vast information out there. Today people only read the “Cliffs Notes”

Conspiracy theories that boil down to "I am too stupid to do that, so all those I see as more primitive than myself could not do that either" are always... Fun.

It occurs to me, how much of this stuff is coming from America? As a Scottish person the idea that the apocalypse happened 300 years ago sounds absurdly recent. We still have some pretty serious social problems stemming from grudges that started 500 years ago. America however is such a new country that 300 years ago being pre history might make more sense.

I love how people forget that these ornate buildings often took multiple generations of people to make, some who saw the beginning of the project, but not the end, and vice versa.

It was often said that Anch-Morpork was built on loam. What Anch-Morpork was really built on, was Anch-Morpork.

MiniMinuteman has some good stuff on this, that most conspiracies like this basically consist of people going "Doesn't this thing look kinda like this other, completely unrelated thing? Really makes you think, huh" with basically no understanding of the actual process that creates either thing

You see, there once a species of humans that had blood infused with Tartar sauce, the natural food of the gods, allowing them to reach heights unattainable by ketchup infused humans (which is what blood actually is).

I'm an urban planner and I have a gf who loves old architecture despite not being in that field at all, and it's always kinda hard to explain her that we don't build XIXth century Wilhelmian Era style buildings because of economics, of improved pay for construction workers, of resource shortages and of shifts in societal makeups. It's pretty easy to build yourself a hostel in Paris France when you know you can pour a lot of budget in it since it'll be inhabited by three generations and two branches of the family, when the sculptor has a ton of barely paid apprentices, when we've barely scrapped the surface of quarries because most houses are (well) made of mud, wood, clay bricks and hay

I'm watching this immediately after rewatching the New Chronology video, so when you mentioned Anatoly Fomenko, I shouted "GODDAMMIT! YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THIS MATH NERD!"

The thing that gets me about the people going on about how they "just had horses and buggies" is like, okay and....were they supposed to be magically using cars instead? There isn't much improvement to be made to a buggy, and you can't technologically upgrade a horse.

This reminds me of the "Helen Keller was a fraud" BS. I'm a disabled, wheelchair-using disability advocate and educator...so I guess I would go there. But I think the similarities are still there. It always comes down to, "I don't know much about this thing, and I generally have a low opinion of groups I'm not familiar with, so that translates to my being unable to imagine people I consider lesser doing something I also cannot imagine myself doing." I.e. "I couldn't make a bulding like that, no WAY people did 200yrs ago," (even though humans 10,000yrs ago had the same brains that we now do trigonometry and particle physics and paint photorealism with). Or with Helen Keller, "I know very little about the disability community and since it doesn't benefit me directly I have no desire to learn, so I am going to assume HK was the only deafblind person who ever learned to speak and write even though there are deadass *deafblind TikTokkers.*" Hubris is a cruel mistress, my dude. Have a little real curiosity about your fellow humans and don't approach everything with an air of superiority just because you're afraid to do the work to be genuinely informed. At the very least, stop and consider: if it was found out for absolute certain, undeniable proof, it is 100% that the narrative you are about to post turns out to be completely wrong, are you going to look like a ghoul? Embarrassingly gullible? Fabulous take, per usual, Mia.

As a British person watching your videos for the first time, I got to 8:58 and spat out my tea, my monocle fell out and I almost dropped my crumpet. Top show old bean, subscribed.

the way those people talk about the "disappearance of Tartaria" being the "fault" of "them"/"parasites" along with how they go on about how "advanced and free it was" gives me very heavy Andrew Ryan and Rapture vibes, and Comstock and Columbia vibes (especially adding in the all the racism and "white giant ancestors" stuff), from all three current Bioshock games.

architect here, along with mia's great explanation of the economic aspect i would also like to encourage people who are interested in architecture to understand the different types of stress (compression, tensile, shear, bending, etc.) present in structures and its relation to their form and materials, and how our understanding of those evolved over time. i know it may sound boring but if you can understand that you would definitely not see modern concrete and steel buildings as lesser in complexity and technology compared to older ones, and you will get why certain structural typologies repeat across different cultures throughout history.

Mia: ‘Welcome, 100,000 people, to me talking about concrete economics’ 100,000 people: ‘FINALLY’

the preoccupation with world fairs is particularly mindboggling. every reference i can ever remember about them--as far back as memory allows, anyway--has almost always been immediately followed up with "but they were basically plaster and wire sculptures and most of them would have fallen over in a year. their fragility has always been a core component of their mythos. also those fairs weren't a egalitarian celebration of knowledge and ingenuity, it was industrial-age international propoganda. simple as.

As an archtecture student, this tartaria teory makes me wanna scream >:( these idiots are absolutely ignorant about the process of construction and it's history. Also, I hope we get a crossover of Lemuria+Tartaria, the two cartography mistakes theories, from the conspiracy guys in the future. It would be funny. (Sry, if there are any english mistakes in my comment)

I believe the "Tartars" referenced in that CIA document actually refer specifically to the modern Tatar ethnic minority in Russia. That's why Muslim religious identity is also mentioned. They're Muslims, and the Soviet Union was pretty darn anti-islam. It wasn't merely a general term but used in reference to a specific ethnic minority. Incidentally the Tartaria conspiracy theorists are through their sheer ignorance completely erasing the actual histories of various Asian ethnic groups.

Read the title as "Terraria" gamer brain Rot reaching critical mass

What I've learned from watching Miniminuteman videos is that tiktok conspiracy theorists absolutely LOVE to say "doesn't this LOOK like X?" and never even attempt to find any further evidence than that

When you said Nikolai Levashov was an occultist, I really wasn’t surprised. There are so many parallels between Tartaria and Hyperborea, another weird ethnonationalistic mythology based around a race of fictional übermensch ancestors who had advanced fantasy technology. Funnily enough, also created by another Russian occultist called Helena Blavatsky. Weird as fuck lol.

I feel like almost every “popular” conspiracy theory is antisemitic to a degree 😅 Loved the video 🤘🏻

I’ve unironically just learned more about European history than I ever did in American high school. Thanks, Mia.

Basically, Tartar was a generic catch-all term to refer to a variety of places, peoples and powers ...and these people read it as if Tartar was instead a unified, national power which makes otherwise harmless, menial assertions look like major untold events

Loved the section of your video dedicated to settlements needing to bury considerable sections of previous architectural solutions. As an archaeologist, i have to say that humans tend to do that a lot! In fact, my master's thesis took advantage of that to date a roman site. Amazing vid, as usual!

This reminds me of a guy who wrote an essay about how the Theatro Amazonas had to be an ancient structure built by aliens, less than 10 years after its actual construction.

We are doomed as a species when relatively recent history like this is obscured and forgotten. Like there is one thing for the misunderstanding of how the pyramids are built, that happened a long time ago. but a lot of things and buildings here either have written modern English on why, how and for whom they where built, or photos.

We actually ARE still building elaborate structures of the kinds familiar to us from past ages. Barcelona's famous Sagrada Familia basilica is still unfinished- it's been under construction since 1882, with work scheduled to finish in 2026. Most ancient buildings need regular restoration to keep them in good shape, and many have been substantially restored following disasters- e.g. they're currently rebuilding the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris following the fire in 2019. In Berlin they recently completed a building called the Humboldt Forum, which is used to house a museum, but is a ground-up reconstruction of the 300-year-old Berlin Royal Palace, which was completely destroyed in WWII. Other than the stone being cleaner, it looks almost indistinguishable from the surrounding baroque buildings.

If there actually were a Tartaria, the 'modern empires' wouldn't be hiding it, they would be fighting over who would actually be the proper heir to that Empire. See: the various iterations of the Holy Roman Empire.

Is it just me, or is this a redux of Atlantis/antediluvian age mythology? Because it feels like a lot of the tropes from that in regards to hidden histories/ancient advanced races (human or otherwise) that you see in those conspiracies seems to be repeated here.

I love your work! This is very interesting, although my soul leaves my body everytime I hear "We're expected to believe people build this with a hammer and chisel." Like yes, yes people did build that with a hammer and chisel

Mia everytime you upload a new video it feels like the portics of heaven have openned up to the earth to greet us mortals with weirdass conspiracy theories and aesthetic lofi music

At 37:30, I can't believe you got through "sometimes a dike is going to leak a lot" with a straight face

People don't want to believe that people that lived so simple are smarter then they will ever be

As a Seattleite, I am very glad you brought up underground Seattle--it was definitely my first thought! Also, as an archaeologist who specializes in the 19th century US, the tiktoks from this theory were physically painful for me to watch :') Loved your reading of the appeal of this theory to people, though. Aesthetic moralism is something I have definitely seen, but didn't have a word for, before

I'm glad you mentioned Seattle. Having grown up there, I'd been educated from an early age about the regrading that happened in the city's history. Anyone who walks in certain parts of downtown and sees the glass cubes embedded in the sidewalk will have questions about that which tour guides are happy to explain. Incidentally, if you visit Seattle, there have a version of the Underground Tour after dark called the "Underworld Tour". It's the same as the normal tour, except it's 21+, they talk about the old Seattle vice industries, and it comes with an included cocktail at the end of the tour. I recommend it. It's one of the few "tourist traps" in town that I think of as worth the time and money to do.

There are actual historical pictures of the cologne cathedral being built with nails and hammers by ordinary humans. It's totally possible to build things like that, it just takes time.

Can't wait for people in 300 years talking about the empire state building and the Burj Kalifa like "what? Are we expected to believe they built this when they didn't even have energy-tachyon power and matter reconstruction technology? Get real"

@17:33 I love how the fact Tartary has a flag on this panel is used as evidence of its existence as a state or empire even though the same panel has a pirate flag on it. And not just anywhere, the 'Pirates' flag is just to the lower left. Also, that flag is literally the flag of Qazan, a Turkic city conquered by Russia and renamed Kazan because Russians don't do q.

Mia: let's talk about European cartography Me: *buckles up*

Of course, the ancient world had infinite energy! It's not like industrialization, automation, and the invention of petrochemical-dependent machines designed to transport half a dozen people across a continent twice a year but consistently used to move one person across a neighborhood every single day have dramatically increased society's energy needs, that's just silly! /s

You literally haven't debunked a single thing..

wait Fomenko started all this stuff? That's so crazy. I knew of him because he wrote a well loved math textbook. It's always weird when faces come back for vastly different reasons

Just popping in to say that “Tartaria and the Mud Flood” sounds like the name of a one-hit-wonder band from the 80’s

Thanks for this excellent discussion on the Tartaria theories circulating online. The 'lost empire' seemed to be very strange to me from the outset, and your reasoned presentation, as a person with a solid background in history, offers the viewers a foundation of sorts - free of rabbit holes and quagmires.

I’m less than five minutes in and am FLABBERGASTED by what I’m hearing! I’m literally doing homework for my ancient history class and if this civilization existed, we would see it LONG, LONG BEFORE it was supposed to have fallen. Plus, a large amount of the ~pretty architecture~ and ~ruins under cities~ from “200” years ago is MUCH. MUCH MUCH MUCH OLDER. How would a mud flood even work. Where did this society originate. How did they not have squabbles with the other ancient powerhouses of their time. How didn’t other cultures make notes of them. How come we have ancient ruins from Greece and Rome and Sumer and Babylon- even cities that were BURNED TO THE GROUND, but this MYSTERY EMPIRE is either STILL STANDING IN MAJOR CITIES, or is completely SWALLOWED BY DIRT THAT APPARENTLY FLOODED THE WORLD CENTURIES AFTER ROME FELL. Edit: I’m a bit farther in and a few of my questions have been answered so I’m glad that these conspiracy theorists actually looked for answers to these questions… even if they’re wrong- but it turns out my history class is actually literally learning about the Mongols right this minute and I just started a video and it calls them Tartars for the first time this unit. I wish I started it when I started this video I would’ve lost my mind.

I know there’s plenty of people who are actually very cautious about critical thinking and healthy skepticism and genuine research love themselves some conspiracy theories. I used to as well when I was younger, but seeing where this conspiracy stuff leads people who don’t know how to do real research or fact check for the past 6 years has sucked all the fun out of all such content for me that isn’t dedicated to debunking it. The way narratives and lore are fed to people under the guise of “history” is so stressful.

Every time I watch a Mia Mulder video, I try desperately to find a Mulder and Scully joke, but I never find one. I know there's one out there, I want to believe

For as far as i know, "tartarus" was also used to refer to someone who came from the worlds edges in anchient rome and greece, cause tartarus is placed there in greek mitology. As well as "barbarus" was used to refer to someone who speaks an unknown language, so they sound like "bar bar" when they talk

Honestly I thought it was a joke poking fun at the racist and colonial nature of the ancient aliens theory, by pointing it at white people when I first saw it

Having read too much late 19th and early 20th century speculations about Atlantis, there's just way too many similarities (especially the pyramid building white giants). I'm sure it's a result of direct influence but it'd also be interesting to see a comparison of conditions surrounding advocates of both ideas. Also, can't wait for a fantasy author to deconstruct this mythos the way Robert E Howard tore down Atlantis.

Always thoroughly enjoyed Mia's essays but lately I feel she's getting better and better in terms of pacing, editing, exposition... Keep up!

I find the idea that building scyscrapers out of little but glass, steel, and concrete is somehow not insanely impressive, kinda fascinating. Brain dead, but fascinating

Mia on 21.06: "And today Tartaria believers are basically not at all aligned with Russia or Russian interests or believing that Russia is supposedly this ancient empire." Me: "Bet they've kept the 'blaming the Jews' part though!" Fascinating video as always! Thank you! P.S. "svarogiches" on 18.55 should be spelled Svarozhitses or Svarozhiches, I believe. As in sons of Svarog - or maybe Levashov meant the Svarozhich symbols - hard to know without digging deeper into his nonsense.

I like the idea of alternate history and entertain it lightly now and again as a mental plaything, but WOW OOOF ouch it's rough to hear people say things like: "I acknowledge this old building is cool, but I don't think THESE people made it, yannow? They clearly needed help to do it." It has the same exact energy as Chariots of the Gods/Ancient Aliens, where I'm kinda vibing to the rap about Mayans in space capsules, but I lose the thread when they claim: "well, obviously THEY couldn't manage, that, because, yannow (racism)? So did it for reasons." Like nah, you turned some cool mental image I had going of sleek sci-fi space ports in jungles and made it into some boring rag about invading aliens helping "those" humans as if they wouldn't have known rocks from kernels of corn without intervention. Like, scientology did it, it's corporate-tier boring to say aliens did it, and that deus ex-machina only exists because this kind of conspiracy theorist is too racist or otherwise too stuck in some other bias to have a full range of imagination that maybe people did do more on their own without . The way it dismisses the actual effort and intelligence of the actual historical people at the time is as chilling as their imagination is lacking. It's bad alt history fanfic, too, so it's especially a deep letdown when this half-baked tripe is taken as fact.

Basements and foundation = secret houses no one lives in for some mysterious reason

You’re hilarious! You obviously had a great studying this. Thank you my dear!❤

Mudflooders confuse me so much, like how do you seemingly have a curiosity and a passion for the past while doing literally zero research on history?

I realise it's beside the point but the idea of a "pro-Judaic Romanov dynasty" is too fucking funny

We don’t build places like that anymore for a pretty simple reason: it’s not practical. It’s too expensive, both the materials and the labor, takes too much space, and it would take too long to build (Notre Dame took 200 years), even with modern technology. This reminds of that saying, “The most simple answer is usually the right one”. It’s not aliens or a lost civilization, is just not worth it. But that’s no fun so yes tell me more about this mud thing 😃

A note about the 60s and 70s. Post World Wars, art and thought was extremely anti-tradition. My ex's mom went to art school and was often chastized for drawing and liking realistic paintings. She purposefully protested in some classes and dropped out of others when the teacher got snobby about "REAL art". I like a lot of modern art, but I can see why there was a huge anti-modern backlash because of how nasty modern art crtics were about older art! Maintainable decor is prohibitively expensive! I live in places with TONS of gorgeous Victorian (and older) homes. In the mid century, a LOT of people stripped the gingerbread and flourishes off their house because the labor to repair, paint and maintain them is SO costly. My house is one of these, possibly older than 1900, but very little decor left. Someone remodeled and decided to remove all the fancy stuff because it was too much of a pain to maintain.

I used to follow conspiracies a lot when an ex-friend fell deep into them. But this is one I had never heard of so thanks for the deep dive into it! Awesome video as always.

I just heard instead of "Tartarian Empire", "Targaryan Empire" and it all makes sense now

I don't really care what your videos are about I just find it really pleasent to listen to the sound of your voice.

Seeing Stargate SG-1 referenced makes me SO HAPPY

Mia Mulder out here being the dope sequel to Fox Mulder. Covering conspiracies and opening minds

Another fun thing about cartography- They lied. On purpose, and a lot. Before any sort of real IP laws, it became a really efficient way to prove someone was cheating and copying your maps. If they published an atlas with your fake city or mountain range, they sucked and obviously everyone should be buying your maps instead.

Tartaria was destroyed when it was caught in the crossfire of the Finno-Korean Hyperwar.

your uploads have so much effort they're all like an hour + long amazing quality keep up the good work

I love that you put a picture of Lewis Hamilton there. As a lifelong F1 fan in the United States who feels like nobody here watches this sport, I felt very seen.

Cavity magnetrons don't generate power, the turn power you must provide into microwaves. And they're made of metal not stone, stone cavity magnetrons wouldn't work, and the circle patterns are just an idealised crossection, real magnetrons have stuff both sides of the circles to work, so those stone windows wouldn't remotely work as a magnetron. Some very bizarre theories out there. Anyway, thank you for the good video, I enjoyed it a lot. Always happy to see you post!

Tartaria seems to be like Asian Wakanda and I think thats great. Maybe this is all just part of the Nathan Drake Expanded Universe. The centre of Tartarian power is actually in Shambala. They have a secret pact with Wakanda and Atlantis and the Seven Cities of Gold to stay hidden and to protect us from the horrible secrets they protect. Actually this is starting to sound more like Harry Potter fanfiction.

Theres a bit of people like this in archeological circles and its so frustrating. Because like archeology constantly stress that people of the ancient past are the same speices as we are now. They were just as smart as we are now. we just have the benefits of millions of smart people who came before ourselves

I cant believe in 37:30 Mia uses the word "dike" and leak together and she did not even consider to make any lesbiana joke. It feels like such a missed opportunity 😢😢. On the whole great video as always 😊

You’re telling me that people who invented cellphones rode around in combustion based cars? Unlikely.

I desperately need you to tackle Armoured Skeptics "history is a lie" series. No one else has touched it and I'm pretty convinced he's trying to start a cult.

I am so used to seeing maps with the UK in the middle, that seeing Sweden in the middle, making everything just *slightly* off, is so weird

The fact that they think the "empire" fell as recently as 100 years ago.... like bro if your curious about it ask your grandma lol

The "What's the deal with the Mongolian Empire" joke made me laugh so loud I woke up my roomate xD

This is the first time the algorithm has popped you into my feed, really intereting video, gonna go check out some more, thanks!

The tartarian empire absolutely existed --- it's not even a question. The question is about the building specific structures aspect. Many cultures throughout history talk about their existence, including China, Russia, Scandinavia and other European countries and cultures. We know what their country flag looked like as it was recorded by the Chinese 200-300 years ago. We know they were very tall and white, according to these same cultures. We have their written language, which is similar to runes and most likely how runes originated, called Tartarian Script. They 100% existed. Don't believe the claim they built all these modern buildings, but they absolutely existed, and were more advanced technologically, especially in terms of architecture and engineering.

People who have never built anything, claiming they know what was possible and impossible to build. These people are the epitome of DK.