File talk:Georgian empire with tributaries.png

Accuracy of map

@Ercwlff: FYI, your map is mentioned in a recent post by a historian (or budding historian at least, says he's in the last stages of his PhD) here: https://acoup.blog/2022/12/09/meet-a-historian-james-baillie-on-digital-humanities-and-the-medieval-caucasus/ The context in the post is more about how Tamar seemingly didn't have as much control over even internal Georgia as described by a simplified map like this. However, I asked in the comments section below (can be seen if scrolled down) about the edits made to this map on Shah-Armens and Trebizond... the author says that they're not an expert on Shah-Armens (take with a grain of salt, he clearly knows a ton on the topic), but indicated that he didn't think the relationship was that close to being a tributary. Trebizond is more complicated, but it seems more like them being an "ally" rather than a "dependency", although admittedly dependency is a vague term, and a Georgian army certainly did stop by at one point. Anyway, would you have any complaints about removing Shah-Armens at least from the tributaries? Or alternatively citing where you're getting this more powerful version of Georgia's influence from (ideally not Georgian nationalists)? SnowFire (talk) 07:25, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

tell him i was 14 when i made it -Ercwlff (talk) 01:17, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

The map is inspired by File:Maps of the Armenian Empire of Tigranes.gif. It is not based on the research of certain polities' relationship with the Georgian throne, but rather is a compilation of maps that had existed before. It's not fantastical. Classics like Javakhishvili consider the Shah-Armens were dependency and have depicted so on his map (which also is present in Georgian Soviet Encyclopedia). I am not going to dive into their half-researched. I will remove them from the map only if you prove that not even for a short period of time they were subordinate to Georgians. -Ercwlff (talk) 01:33, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I think the point is a 1965 source like the Georgian Soviet Encyclopedia might be dated here, but it's something. Anyway, the issue is that maps are generally usually a single point in time, or else will use things like different colorations and a legend to show growth over time. It would be more helpful to either pick a single year, or else to annotate on the legend when exactly you're claiming Shah-Armens was a tributary. Also, I think you have the proof reversed - I can't prove a negative. Rather, there needs to be evidence of when exactly Shah-Armens was a tributary (lest there be unsubstantiated claims that Georgia also ruled random other lands that can't be disproven). SnowFire (talk) 07:02, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Shah-Armens were not vassals of Georgia.

Source: Gocha Japaridze, Georgia and the Islamic world of the Near East in the first third of the XII-XIII centuries, Tbilisi, 1995, p. 172. 149.3.83.160 10:00, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

However, Javakhishvili and Berdzenishvili argued the opposite. 149.3.83.160 14:32, 1 August 2023 (UTC)