If you’re using free Natural Earth rasters as a base layer for your historical cartography needs (and why wouldn’t you be?), you might find it helpful to add an extra layer of vegetation to create more consistency with satellite views:
Here’s the original Natural Earth 2, where you can see that vegetated areas are much lighter-toned:
Vegetation also punches up a regional view by adding realistic coloring. Note especially the darker areas along the eastern and northern Mediterranean coast:
Compared to the original:
Even on more-minimalist maps, vegetation can convey information without adding distracting detail. For example, here’s water, hillshading, and vegetation on a neutral background:
Try it yourself
The vegetation data in the above maps is derived from a 2023 article in Nature that plots idealized vegetation coverage.
You can find the CC-BY-licensed data at Zenodo. The output file is “Full TGB potential Map of ensembled mean merged.tif.”
In the above maps, I converted the data to an 8-bit grayscale and then applied this color ramp to the layer in QGIS.
Why potential vegetation
Instead of showing current vegetation cover, which reflects modern, human-induced changes to the environment (such as deforestation and irrigated agriculture), these maps show what the vegetation coverage might be without humans. While the landscape in biblical times was hardly untouched by humans, such changes were much smaller-scale than they are today. This type of view helps recreate a version of the natural world that’s closer to what biblical writers experienced.
Natural Earth 2 provides a good basemap for historical mapping because it aspires to present a less-developed earth: for “historical maps before the modern era and the explosive growth of human population, [potential natural vegetation maps] more accurately reflect what the landscape actually looked like. The Mediterranean region at the time of the Phoenicians was more verdant than today.”
More-detailed vegetation alters the character of the Natural Earth maps somewhat by elevating vegetation over other biome indicators. It doesn’t preserve as strongly the distinction between the different kinds of forests (tropical, temperate, and northern) that Natural Earth 2 makes. For historical maps, these changes mean that the adjusted maps feel more in line with satellite imagery.
Depending on your map’s purpose, you may find that presenting vegetation this way tells a clearer story to the viewer.