With that we know have an very small idea of where Amazon is going with their planned TV series based on the stories of JRR Tolkien. It has been awhile as not much to report on The Middle-Earth / The Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit front. That changed when Amazon finally teased some useful information along with a map that reveals the location of the island of Númenor and Lindon. Two important locations in the Second Age.
The First Age is basically the origin story of Middle-Earth. Think the Greek stories of the Titans creating heaven and earth, eventually birthing the Greek Gods, being killed by those Gods, and those Gods creating man. Only its a whole lot more drama and other details to that story. The Second Age is what happens with those races the Gods created and a tiny portion of the Second Age was covered in The Lord of the Rings.
Remember that opening scene in The Fellowship of the Ring? The forging of the rings occurred about midway through the Second Age (in year 1500 to 1600). The scenes ends a battle sequence (called The Battle of Dagorlad) of the final fight with the alliance of men, elves and dwarves against Sauron and his forces (aka The War of the Last Alliance). Sauron's defeat is the end of the Second Age of Middle-Earth (in year 3441).
That rather significant time spam of 3441 years gives Amazon a whole lot of story to play with as you can tell the story of the rise of and fall of Númenor which is basically Tolkien's version of Atlantis including it eventually being destroyed by the Gods after Sauron tricked the Numenorians to fight the Gods of Middle-Earth. In parallel to that you have the rise, fall, rise and fall again of Suaron, details on how the rings were eventually forged (took nearly 100 years so grabbing the knowledge also had to take time), how the alliance formed, and host of other things. As long as don't focus too much on the actual timeline (or somehow do effective and non-confusing time jumps), its feasible to tell a story that blows Game of Thrones away.
It also gives Amazon the ability to tie into The Lord of the Rings mythology while blazing their own path along the way and without concern of the shadow of Peter Jackson's films or those characters getting in the way. Technically the elvish characters and the wizards were alive at the time but its easy enough to leave them out of the story since most of Tolkien's writings about that time didn't include them either but did include some family members and ancestors.
There is a rabbit hole of information to go into if you are so inclined.
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