I am pretty sure that at some point over 500 years SOMEBODY would have said SOMETHING... unless there is a narrative that is served by confusion. While I will admit Columbus's travels were closer to the earlier land companies like Muscovy I am confident that all these religious/government organized conglomerates (there were a shockingly large amount of them) who had the goal of "opening trade with natives" and ended up dealing with genocides of said natives are all interrelated.
I strongly believe The Roman Empire existed, depending whose definition you want to go by I would buy that it has existed a bunch of times, sometimes with multiple iterations ongoing simultaneously. Granted, I am entirely convinced that the timelines were rearranged and they existed far closer to modern day than what is portrayed, but the fact that the concept of antiquity lost falls apart the moment any sort of scrutiny is cast upon it is a different subject than whether or not there was a Roman Empire.
If you want a summarized overarching theory, there was a giant nation that covered most of Asia called Tartarie. Check out 18th century maps for examples, my local library was able to pull out an old one that sated my skepticism. They seemed to be one of, if not the greatest powers in the world and are commonly known as steppe people today. You have probably heard of The Silk Road? This confederation of nations (though the mongols were at the heart, many peoples constituted the extensive lands) ran Asia and had pushed in to Europe until... something happened. Starting in the 1800s people stop talking about this once gigantic nation, and by the 1900s it has been forgotten entirely. Then you start looking at what has happened to the peoples who used to populate these lands and it paints one fuck of an ugly picture. Ukraine, Iraq, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Romania, Korea, it is fucking mind blowing how you can basically figure out the borders of this ancient nation just by looking at what areas have had a terrible last century or two.
Some fuckery happened. I can not tell you exactly what, but it feels like WW1 was the last gasp of these peoples and since then it has just been cleanup duty. The more I have dug the more nonsense I find to support the theory, like how the antagonists in WW1 were often labeled "The Huns". Kaiser Wilheim's speech feels like a shit explanation compared to the enemy being literally people who had Hun blood in their ancestry. Or how anyone who slept through high school history can name tons of ancient civilizations that did not have a fraction of the reach of these Tartarians but in all my talks I have found one fucking person who had actually heard of the damned place before? They were in maps and books in the 1800s and they dominated Asia in a way nobody ever has and then all of a sudden they are gone and nobody knows who the fuck they were. Oh, and to tie this to the beginning of my post... those land companies I mentioned? Their armies were often bigger than those of the nations where they claimed to represent. They were not creating trade routes, mofos were "inheriting" them.
I could be crazy... but the flag of the East India Trade Company
...and the first official flag of the US...
seem just a bit too similar to be coincidence to me.
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