Hazards, economies and lines of rulers
- Timeline
- Rulers and reigns
- Data and accuracy
The atlas gains NOAA’s natural hazards, Maddison’s long-run economy and each state’s line of rulers, and a rebuild brings in entries that had been missed.
- Natural hazards from NOAA: significant eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, joined to the atlas’s own entries rather than drawn twice, with a Hazards collection to show them all. Where the two sources disagree on a date, both are kept: NOAA dates Thera to 1610 BCE, Wikidata to 1601.
- Maddison’s GDP per capita and population under each modern state, labelled as a measure of its territory, and drawn fainter where a figure is one scholar’s reconstruction rather than national accounts.
- How power changed hands: each state’s rulers drawn as a succession on the same calendar as the timeline, with interregna and overlaps, and a plain note where the record is too thin to measure.
- Fixed: some states listed rulers who never ruled them, such as Richard I and King Arthur under the Kingdom of Judah. Wrong ruler links fell from 8.1% to 0.8%.
- Wikidata types the Ming dynasty as a “Chinese dynasty” rather than a “dynasty”, so it had been missed. Narrower classes like these are now included, bringing in the Ming, Tang and Yuan dynasties and the Battle of Lepanto: about 16,100 entries in all.
- Kinds you can follow: eleven families on the control strip, each showing how many are drawn of how many are held, with “none” and “all” to follow one kind at a time.
- Six domains instead of three: politics, conflict, nature, culture, science and trade. An earthquake is no longer filed under politics.
- Fixed: in a long open region, rows could spill under the next region’s heading (Swedish monarchs drawn under the Middle East). The plot now has one scroller and each region is as tall as its content.