A Marker, Not a Tradition's Category

Global is the atlas's own designation and not a category any tradition uses, which is worth saying at the top of its own entry.

Every other continent row here corresponds to something a source recognises: a quarter of the inhabited world, a triplicity, a region with sign assignments attached to it. Global corresponds to nothing of the kind. It exists because the atlas has to file material that is not tied to one landmass, and because leaving such material under a continent it merely passed through would put a false claim into the record.

Three kinds of thing end up here. The first is material whose spread is the point, a practice or a body of technique that moved across several continents and belongs to the transmission rather than to any one stop on it. The second is material that arose in several places without a demonstrated line between them, where asserting an origin would be asserting more than the evidence carries. The third is modern and contemporary material that was worldwide from the start.

Naming the marker as a marker is a small piece of honesty with a practical effect. A reader who sees Global on an entry should understand it as the atlas declining to make a geographic claim, rather than as the atlas making a very large one.