Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC
33 comments
·November 20, 2025kbrannigan
usrnm
The map certainly is not built in a eurocentric way. It does reflect the fact that the political history of Eurasia and the Mediterranean region are much better studied and better understood, but this is hardly the fault of the creator of the map. Do you have a better political map of the Americas two thousand years ago?
kbrannigan
The bias shows
In school we learned history as if it followed one straight line: cavemen → Stone Age → Bronze → Iron → Classical Rome → Medieval Europe → Modern world. That framing makes it feel like Europe was always ahead.
But that’s just Europe’s path, not a universal one. Much of Africa went straight to ironworking with no Bronze Age. West African iron (Nok, Termit) often predates Europe’s. And many American societies built complex cities without using iron at all.
Even the word “civilization” carries bias. It’s usually tied to stone monuments, empires, and written records—traits Europe and a few nearby regions emphasized. But that definition overlooks societies that built in earth or wood, used sustainable materials, or showed complexity through trade networks, governance, astronomy, or metallurgy rather than giant stone structures.
pell
Similarly overlooked is the philosophy of the Americas before European colonization. A great read I recommend to anyone who’s interested: “ Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion” by James Maffie
It obviously only focuses on the Aztecs so hardly a deep dive on all there is to learn.
mg
I always wanted something like a "History of human progress" which when zoomed out shows me something like this:
-2000000 Stone tools
-1000000 Using fire
-6000 Metal tools
-6000 Agriculture
-4000 Writing
1550 Printing
1888 Telephones
1888 Cars
1903 Planes
1941 Penicillin
1941 First computer
1982 Homecomputers
1983 Mobile phones
1990 The internet
2001 Wikipedia
2004 Facebook
2007 IPhone
2022 ChatGPT
Jolter
Facebook was not ”human progress”. Future historians will point to its founding as a pivotal point of regression of democracy and humanity.
pell
In a grand view removed 1000 years from now the introduction of digital communication and their network effects must have been pivotal though even if it was in a negative way (which very well may be). I just doubt that would then be a point about Facebook specifically as this is just a tiny slice of that era, I think.
mg
I put Facebook up there to point towards the beginning of social media.
Jolter
Social media was "progress" in the same sense that atomic weapons were.
They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their inventions were important. But "progress"?
krapp
There was social media before Facebook, though.
cdman
Cool project, but seems to be abandoned. At one point I was a subscriber to their premium version, but then started getting spam to the (unique) email address I used for the subscription. I emailed them to warn that their account database might be compromised but never heard back from them (this was back in '22).
Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).
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lordnacho
How do you make this? It doesn't seem to be like Wikipedia has coordinates or map boundaries for ancient empires, so there's no simple way to mine the data.
And if you don't mine it from somewhere, how do you know what to include? How many people will have heard enough about every part of the world to even be able to research ancient borders?
7373737373
I've been having fun with the following AI prompt recently:
> You roleplay as the various Ancient Roman (Year 0) people I encounter as an accidental time traveler. Respond in a manner and in a language they would actually use to respond to me. Describe only what I can hear and see and sense in English, never translate or indicate what others are trying to say. I am suddenly and surprisingly teleported back in time and space, wearing normal clothes, jeans, socks and a t-shirt into the rural outskirts of Ancient Rome.
In think this is a fun way to learn languages too.
Ampned
Reminds me of this book for children I read when I was was young: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/974324.Crusade_in_Jeans
dghf
I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).
arethuza
Indeed, and having the "Scoti" replaced by the "Picts" isn't terribly accurate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata
Edit: The "Scots" are supposed to have conquered the Picts in the mid 9th century leading to what would eventually become Scotland.
Nevermark
These lovely kinds of projects always leave me wanting more. In the same way every telescope leaves me wanting a larger one. Because what they reveal is so immediately interesting.
I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.
And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?
NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.
It is great as it is!
xenocratus
Not very "technically accurate", since it does not represent (at least some?) vassal states differently from their suzerain. For example, compare this [1] map of the Ottoman Empire with the one in this atlas.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/OttomanE...
noduerme
mm..I wish there was a really immersive version of this, something that looked like the map in Crusader Kings 3 but which let you zoom in on what was actually going on in every place at every time. I'm a map junkie and collector, and like to read historical atlases cover to cover. This is cool but it could be so much richer. I didn't take the time to seek out inaccuracies.
pastage
If everything is in Wikidata then you can probably do that. It is always going to be a bit hard to get the polish of the data there.
I am a firm believer in that good visualization gives you better data. You can probably get a lot of detail mapping of data in wikidata if you make a map that queries "things happening in BBX during these years)
kykat
Seeing that it fails to portray the current map accurately, by not to separating PRC and ROC (taiwan), makes me question everything about older data
maratc
Both PRC and ROC maintain their sovereignty over the whole of mainland + islands, so this depiction is not exactly inaccurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...
The issue is that the timeline is built in a Eurocentric way. Europe (and the Near East) are shown as the starting point of history, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas only appear when Europeans make contact with them.
This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.
It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.