I'd recommend giving Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen a go, perhaps. Initially it's very hard going, as it launches straight in and leaves you to pick up the pieces as you go, but it definitely reads more like a fictional history than it does a traditional high fantasy novel, so it might appeal to you. The world is highly detailed and shows a very clear evolutionary structure dating back some 300,000 years.
It's mostly set in a single time frame of about a century, but it draws very heavily on past events, and the way it darts about between continents means you don't get too bogged down in any single point, save for the last two books which conclude the whole thing. You get a very broad view of the world and its history, as some characters have been around for the whole thing and still play prominent roles...hell, an entire race of people commit themselves to immortality in the name of genocide against another people, and their conflict is still an important part of the current world situation. There are prologue chapters and points of view that give you a sense of what went on before, why it's relevant now, and make the current events feel a part of a much larger series of events.
The only thing I would say is that if you want to read events in chronological order, don't start with the first book. Erikson likes to go all over the place; the events of the first book don't get resolved until the eighth, the second and third books are set simultaneously on different continents, the fourth is set before and during those events, the fifth is set before all of them and catches up by the seventh, and the ninth and tenth round it all off.
Plus there are spinoffs - Ian Cameron Esslemont has been adding his own novels set in the same world at different points, and Erikson is writing a trilogy at the moment set a few hundred thousand years before the main series detailing events that are referenced to in them.
...as an aside, it's a very good set of books. Erikson isn't afraid to kill off characters in order to drive the plot forward - and those deaths are both monumentous and trivial at random; nobody is immune to it either...and death isn't always the end for them - and it's superbly written.
