What’s new on Pastlas

Pastlas can be found: a page for every change, a feed, a sitemap, and a page that says what is open

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

The atlas used to be invisible to a search engine and to an AI assistant: every address was an empty page filled in by script, under one name whatever was open. The ground for being found is laid: real pages a crawler can read, the machine's own files, and a document that says what it holds.

Every change has a page of its own, so a release note can be sent and found; What’s new is readable before any script runs, and has an Atom feed.
A new Data page lists every file the atlas serves, what each holds and under which licence, with the counts the atlas prints about itself, read from the files at build.
A shared link now says what it opens: the tab and the search result read the entry’s name and years, and each entry has one address of its own.
A sitemap, a robots file that welcomes every crawler and AI assistant, a page for an address that is not in the atlas, and llms.txt, where a machine starts.
The atlas's own name is Pastlas, and its tab says so.

Every territory on the map is a state, and every state has its rulers

2026-10-06T00:00:00Z

Hundreds of shapes on the map used to open only a bare card, because the atlas held no entry for them, and most states had no rulers at all. Every shape now opens a state of its own, and a state that Wikidata names no ruler of shows the rulers its English article and its rulers' articles name, with the years they give.

The Avar Khaganate, the Duchy of Benevento, the County of Toulouse, the Aetolian League, the Huns and some three hundred more are states of their own; where Wikidata gives them no dates, they are dated by the first and last years the map draws them, and the panel says so.
A shape filed under the wrong thing opens the right state: the Zaporozhian Cossacks open the Zaporozhian Sich, the title 'sultan' the Sultanate of Bone, the city of Girona the County of Barcelona.
A shape drawn in years its state does not cover opens the state of those years where the atlas holds one: Switzerland before 1798 is the Old Swiss Confederacy, Norway before 1397 the medieval kingdom.
The Kingdom of Pontus, the Bosporan Kingdom, the Latin Empire, the Khmer Empire and about a thousand other states now have their rulers, read from their articles' lists of leaders and their rulers' lines of succession, and labelled as read from the articles.

Prime ministers, party leaders, and rulers shared across one land

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

A state now shows who governed it as well as who reigned: Britain's prime ministers, the Soviet premiers and every other head of government recorded are a line of their own, drawn beside the rulers. In one-party states the rulers are the leaders of the ruling party, as each state's own list of leaders gives them, so Lenin and Stalin lead the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping leads China.

Each state's heads of government are shown under its rulers, from Walpole to the present for Britain, and a prime minister's own page shows the line with their place in it ringed in gold. They are never counted in the rulers' figures: a cabinet is not a reign.
In the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba the rulers are the party's leaders, read from each state's list of leaders; the formal heads of state, such as Kalinin and Voroshilov, are shown as a line of their own.
The British Empire now has its monarchs and its prime ministers.
Rulers are shared between the states that held one land in turn: West Germany has its presidents and chancellors, which the record files under today's Germany.
An entry for a state is now labelled State, and a border on the map that opens no entry yet is labelled Territory.

Ukraine in 1918 is Ukraine, not Germany

2026-10-04T00:00:00Z

The map of 1918 drew Ukraine as part of the German Empire, because the borders dataset draws the land the Central Powers occupied after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as Germany's own. The Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky was Germany's ally under occupation, never a part of it, and the map now draws it as a state of its own.

In 1918 Ukraine is drawn as the Ukrainian State, from Volhynia to Kharkiv and from Chernihiv to the Black Sea, and Germany ends where Ukraine begins; Crimea is drawn as the Crimean Regional Government that governed it that year.
The Ukrainian People's Republic now begins with the Third Universal of November 1917 rather than in December 1918, so the months of the Central Rada, the Fourth Universal and the Battle of Kruty have a state of their own; its panel says that the Ukrainian State governed in its place from April to December 1918.
Events of 1918 on Ukrainian ground belong to whichever state stood on their own day: the Ukrainian People's Republic before 29 April and after 14 December, the Ukrainian State between.
In 1919 the map's Ukraine opens the Ukrainian People's Republic.
State names on the map from 1960 on are sized and placed by their own territory again: since the last release some had been read against a neighbour's.

Nearly twice as many states, and the rulers who headed them

2026-10-04T00:00:00Z

The atlas now holds every state its own articles link to that Wikipedia writes up in five languages or more - from the Kingdom of Sardinia and Afsharid Iran to the Chola Empire, the Neo-Inca State and Tiwanaku - each dated, placed and given its flag as every other state is. Their rulers came with them: anyone who headed a state of the atlas and has an article in five languages is now an entry of their own.

About 1,470 states joined, among them the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia, Nanyue, the Ghurids, the Burgundian State and dozens of Indian princely states; they carry their flag or arms where the record holds one, and 240 of them have their ground measured from the borders dataset.
A new state the map draws from its own borders, but whose record gives it no place, is filed in the region where those borders lie rather than under Location unknown, and its panel says so.
The Kingdom of Poland is one entry, not two, and what happened inside its borders belongs to the kingdom of the year: the Piast kingdom to 1385, the Jagiellonian after. The Ahom dynasty and the Ahom kingdom are likewise one.
Events and people inside the new states are now theirs: the Battle of Badr belongs to the first Islamic state at Medina rather than to a Nubian kingdom, and the battles of Sekigahara and Nagashino to Japan rather than Korea. Where the atlas has only a guess, it still says it is a guess.
About 2,200 more rulers are entries of their own, hosted by the state they ruled, with how they died, their families and their portraits where the record holds them; 1,113 states now have a line of rulers, where 823 did.
England's overseas possessions now run to 1707, when they became the British Empire's; they had been drawn as a single year.
Every change in a country's form of rule now begins a new entry, as it already did for India and Italy: Ghana is the Dominion of Ghana until the republic of 1960, Cuba the Republic of Cuba until 1959, and Burma the Union of Burma, then the Socialist Republic, then Myanmar after the coup of 1988 - on the timeline and on the map. Occupations and rival governments are drawn beside the state they claimed.
The Slavic tribes' lands are now in the Tribes & ethnic groups layer with the other peoples rather than among the states' borders, and a tribe is never offered as the nearest state to an event.
Crimea is shown as part of Ukraine in every year. The borders dataset drew it inside Russia from 2014; the map, and everything the atlas places by borders, now follow Ukraine's internationally recognised borders, and an event in Crimea or in the regions occupied since 2022 belongs to Ukraine, whatever country the record gives it.
Clicking a territory on the map never opens a person or an event any more: where the borders dataset filed the land under a ruler, it opens the state that ruler held, or a card that names the ruler and opens the entry.
A territory the atlas holds no entry for in those years no longer shows a made-up history of when its borders were mapped: it says which entry the land is filed under and opens it - Poland's borders now open Mieszko's Civitas Schinesghe, the Piast kingdom or the Jagiellonian one, by the year.
People are in the atlas for ruling, or for working in a field history records - politics, war, religion, nobility, culture, science. Culture means what a person made: performers - singers, actors, dancers - however famous, athletes and businessmen are no longer on the map, while a composer who also sang, like Artemy Vedel, stays. Nobody is filed under politics for want of a profession.
Detail - Key, More, Everything - now thins the map as it thins the timeline: Key shows the best-known people and events of the year, Everything all of them.
Everyone who headed a state is filed as a ruler, whatever else they were: Mykhailo Hrushevsky, head of the Ukrainian People's Republic, no longer reads as a politician.
On the timeline a person's portrait sits on the start of their lifeline again, rather than hanging below it.

Every ruler in every line, and Compare cases in plain words

2026-10-04T00:00:00Z

Lines of rulers are now whole and shared between the forms of one state: Babylonia has its kings, the Old and Middle Kingdom of Egypt their pharaohs, the Roman Republic its consuls, and Ancient Rome its kings, consuls and emperors together. A ruler's own page shows the line they belonged to, with their place in it ringed in gold and how their reign began and ended. Compare cases now reads as plain questions answered in words, under the names of the cases, and Pastlas wears its own mark.

Lines are no longer cut short: all 516 pharaohs Wikidata records are in Ancient Egypt's line where 120 were, and every hetman of the Zaporizhian Host is in the line of the Sich he led - Sahaidachny, Kosynsky, Nalyvaiko - while the Cossack Hetmanate's line starts with its own hetmans in 1648.
A ruler appears under every form of the state they ruled: Romulus in the Roman Kingdom and in Ancient Rome, a pharaoh in Ancient Egypt and in its Old Kingdom, the kings of Babylon in Babylonia. A line read from another form of the state says so.
Ancient Carthage keeps its kings, and the Roman Republic's consuls, two a year, are shown together and never counted as rival claimants; the same goes for San Marino's Captains Regent, the Swiss Federal Council and Andorra's co-princes.
A ruler's page shows each line they held, their own place ringed in gold among the rulers before and after them, and how they came to power and how their reign ended, each as a coloured label with where the atlas read it.
Cases side by side asks plain questions - wars under way, risings in the years before, drought, eruptions, ground gained or lost - and answers each in words; the columns carry the cases' names, an i beside each question names its source and the theories that read it, and a search box adds any entry as a case, offering the closest like cases first.
Pastlas has its own mark: the header, the site's pages, the About panel and the browser tab now carry it, in the colours of whichever theme you read in.

Cities read as themselves, not the provinces named for them

2026-10-03T00:00:00Z

Each city on the map is matched to its record by name, and where a province, a state or a building shared the name and was better known, the city read that instead - its article, its founding, even its end. The match now always prefers the city, and the population table's own misplacements are corrected one by one, each with its reason.

Akita, Kursk, Oaxaca, Sokoto, Hamadan, Banda and some eighty more cities read their own article rather than their prefecture's, oblast's, state's, province's or district's, and Chihuahua, Indianapolis and Providence no longer begin in the year their state was made.
Berlin no longer ends in 1950: it had been read as the Berlin Palace, demolished that year. Singapore, Bucharest, Bangkok, Pyongyang, Ulaanbaatar and Ugarit read their own articles where they had read a hospital, a railway station, a hotel, a military university, a book fair and an alphabet.
Khersones - Chersonesus, the Byzantine city by Sevastopol that the Rus' chronicles call Korsun - is on the map from its founding to its last mention in 1396, with the population of 800 and 1000 that had been drawn at Kherson; Kherson stands from its founding in 1778.
Yekaterinburg carries Soviet Sverdlovsk's population of 1950 and 1975, which had been drawn at the small Ukrainian town of the same name.
Thirteen cities the population table had put at the middle of their province, or on another town, stand where they were: Old Goa, Old Banten, Mrauk U, Kilwa Kisiwani, Birnin Kebbi, Jilin City, Bihar Sharif, Dharwad, and Isanapura, Pundravardhana, Anbar, Bobastro and Vijaya at their ruins.
Portland, Maine, and Springfield, Massachusetts and Illinois, read their own articles; each had read a namesake's.

The actors of Ukrainian history, and many more rulers

2026-10-03T00:00:00Z

The atlas used to hold a person only if eighty or more Wikipedias wrote about them, which kept out almost everyone who mattered most to one country's history and was written up mainly in its own language. It now also holds every head of state its lines of rulers name, everyone the articles of its states and events keep naming, the living, and - by name - the actors of Ukrainian history: the hetmans from Sahaidachny to Rozumovsky, the princes of Kyiv and Halych, the leaders of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and its writers, composers, scholars and clergy. The Cossack Hetmanate and the Zaporizhian Sich are states on the timeline and the map, and the Hetmanate's hetmans belong to the state they ruled.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Petro Doroshenko, Ivan Mazepa and Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny open from search and from the timeline. Khmelnytsky, Doroshenko and Mazepa are placed with the Hetmanate they led rather than with the Commonwealth on their papers; Sahaidachny, who died before the Hetmanate was founded, still reads the Commonwealth.
Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ivan Kotliarevsky, Marko Vovchok, Mykola Lysenko, Dmytro Bortniansky, Artemy Vedel and hundreds more are in the atlas: people who were citizens of a Ukrainian state, were born or worked in Ukraine, or wrote in Ukrainian.
Living people are in the atlas, and read as living - their panel says there is no death on record, and their span runs to the present.
Far more states now have a line of rulers for Succession: the Ming, the Qing, the Han and the Tang have their emperors, Assyria and Babylon their kings, the Safavids their shahs, the Gupta Empire its emperors. The rulers are read from every place the record keeps them - the office, the term that names the dynasty, the state's own list of its heads, a title, a family.
Japan's line includes Hirohito again: a reign now counts where it overlaps a state's years, not only where it began inside them.
Ukrainian cities on the map are spelled as Ukrainians spell them - Kryvyi Rih, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Bakhchysarai, Nizhyn, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia - and carry the name of each year: Katerynoslav, Dnipropetrovsk and, since 2016, Dnipro; Yelysavethrad, Kirovohrad and Kropyvnytskyi; Khadzhybei before Odesa; Stanyslaviv before Ivano-Frankivsk.

Every page of an investigation says how to read it

2026-10-03T00:00:00Z

Causes, Conditions, Succession and each tab of Compare cases now open on a guide of their own: what the page is for, what its words and marks mean, which number to look at first, and the one thing not to conclude from it. Theories has been set again from the top, as a printed atlas sets a spread - a headline, a tally of the five verdicts in large figures, and each theory that applies in three columns: its argument and the main objection, its conditions one by one, and how often its outcome follows them.

A guide opens the first time you reach a page and then stays as you leave it, on your device. In the narrow rail it is an index of numbered topics that open one at a time, so the answer you came for is still on the first screen; in Compare cases it is set in columns.
Theories says plainly what each of its five verdicts means - applies, close, absent, cannot be checked, does not ask - and counts the theories under each before any detail.
Each theory that applies shows whether every condition it names held here, the rows behind each, and its rate as two large figures, with the conditions and without, saying whether they are read for the region or across the atlas.
The near-fits are cards side by side that name the missing condition before they are opened; a state's own history reads as a table with each theory's share of its risings drawn as a bar; and the library below is set at reading sizes.
The headings of Compare cases are set in the display face at the design's sizes, and its notes and tables a step larger.

Events placed in the state whose land they happened on

2026-10-03T00:00:00Z

Where the atlas places an event, a person or a natural disaster in a state by the historical borders, it now reads only that state's own land, as the map has since the last release. Land the borders dataset files under one state because two states were bound by an alliance or an allegiance no longer makes the first of them the host, and a state's dependencies count as its land only in a year the dataset draws none of its own.

The Tumu Crisis of 1449 is the Ming's rather than Joseon's, the Battle of Ankara the Timurids' rather than Georgia's, the first Muslim conquest of Jerusalem the Byzantine Empire's rather than the Sasanians', the Battle of Morgarten the Holy Roman Empire's rather than Bohemia's, and the London Beer Flood of 1814 the United Kingdom's rather than the Hawaiian Kingdom's.
Where two states' lands overlap, the smaller is read first, so the North Sea flood of 1962 is West Germany's and the Berlin Crisis of 1961 East Germany's, where both had been read as an occupying power's.
People and events in Britain belong to the British state of their year - the Kingdom of Great Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, then the United Kingdom - rather than to the British Empire; Jane Austen is the first's and Winston Churchill the second's.
About 380 entries name a different host state, and the theories and the measures of unstable successions that read a state's conditions were worked out again. Earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis from the hazard catalogue are placed the same way, and none is placed in an alliance's land any more.

The Slavic tribes on the map

2026-10-03T00:00:00Z

The Antes, the Sclaveni and the East Slavic tribes of the chronicle now have ground on the map in their own years: the Polianians between the Irpin and the Ros, the Derevlianians in the forests of Polissia, the Krivichs on the upper Dnieper and the Dvina, the Vyatichi on the Oka, and the rest. Their borders are approximate - nobody ever drew one - so they are dotted, traced along the rivers their sources name and set against a map of the East Slavic tribes.

Before a state's border reaches them, a people is drawn as ground of its own, in a tint no neighbour shares; once a state's border holds them - Kyivan Rus' from the 880s - they are a dotted outline with their name inside it, a people of that state.
Hover a people's ground for its card, click it to open its entry; its Sources say how its ground was drawn and against which map.
In the sixth century the Antes and the Sclaveni stand where the later tribes will, and the tribes take their ground as they leave the record.

A new look: the atlas set like a printed one, in light or dark

2026-10-02T00:00:00Z

The whole atlas has been redesigned. It reads like a printed atlas now: a serif for names and headings, a quiet paper in light and the navy of the atlas's home page in dark, one gold for whatever you chose, and six inks for politics, conflict, nature, culture, science and trade. Every bar, row and mark shows what it is at a glance - a state's flag for the year, a person's face, an event's picture, or the kind of thing it is as an icon - and the map stands on a plain plate of land and sea with the states named and flagged as an atlas names them.

Two rows of controls instead of five. The header holds the view, search, sharing and help; the toolbar holds the range, the zoom, Show - every topic and kind of thing in one panel, with what is drawn against what is held - and how much detail to draw.
On the timeline, a state's bar wears its flag, a life its face, and every other bar the icon of its kind. The rail beside it reads "In 1550": what was standing, happening and alive in the year, best known first.
An entry opens on what it is - its name, its years, what was true of it in the year on screen - with the question it raises as a button: why did it end, why did it begin, why did it happen. The rest is in tabs: an overview, its rulers, its land and people, its connections, and the sources for every fact.
Investigate asks its question in words - "Why did the Peasants' Revolt happen?" - and answers first, in one sentence, before listing the causes by the part they played, each with how strong its evidence is. The theories whose conditions held are listed under the causes, one line each; Compare cases now takes the whole width, with the theories, a cause removed and the patterns in the record in tabs of their own.
The map no longer stands on a street map of today. It is a plain plate of land, lakes and rivers, with each state in a soft tint of its own, named in capitals with the flag it flew that year. Every layer, the ground and the relief are in one Layers menu that says which of them reach the year on screen, and the rail beside the map reads what began and ended around it.
On a phone the atlas no longer asks for a wider screen: the timeline reads century by century for one region, an entry opens as a sheet, and the map and search are a tab away.
A first visit offers a four-step tour rather than starting one, and the lane for things no place was found for is now called Location unknown.
Every chart answers a hover: a bar, a century, a reign or a point on a line says what it is and what it counts, beside the pointer.
A state the record held twice is one state now: Carthage and Ancient Carthage, and seven empires that stood beside their own dynasties - the Abbasids, Achaemenids, Sasanians, Seleucids, Ptolemies, Seljuks and Samanids. The Seleucid Empire now has its borders on the map, and an old link to the second record opens the state.
Different states that share a name are told apart by their years, as their articles are: the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Hungary (1526–1867), the Jin dynasty (266–420) and (1115–1234).
A person belongs to the state they were born or worked in, never to the nearest one: Xenophanes and Pythagoras were filed under Troy and are Ancient Greece's, and Gandhi is the British Raj's. Someone born where no border is recorded is left without a state rather than given a wrong one.
With a picture of the ground or the relief on, the states keep their colours; the flags no longer blink as the cursor moves; Show on the map always flies there; and the atlas's name is followed by its author's.

A second world beside the Earth, and modern states dated from their own beginnings

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

The atlas now opens on a second world, the history of Tolkien's Middle-earth from the Years of the Trees to the end of the Third Age, built with the same timeline, map and reading as the Earth. And on the Earth, a modern state no longer stretches back across the kingdoms and empires that came before it: each begins where its own history does, and the events of earlier centuries belong to the states that stood when they happened.

The second world, beside the atlas's name: the annals of the First, Second and Third Ages, every realm drawn on a map grown from the text and from freely licensed sketch maps, each person where the record puts them in the year on screen. An unofficial, non-commercial fan project; its text comes from the fans' wiki under CC BY-SA, and the books are cited by chapter, never reproduced.
Twenty-nine present-day states are dated from their own beginnings: Russia from 1991, Japan from 1947, Germany from 1990, Italy from 1946, Poland, Hungary and Romania from 1989, Ukraine and Georgia from 1991, Portugal from 1910, Brazil from 1889, and more. The kingdoms, empires and republics before them were already drawn as states of their own; now the events of their centuries are theirs too, so the Battle of Kulikovo belongs to Muscovy and Lomonosov to the Tsardom of Russia.
France keeps its long span as the country, and every event filed under it now belongs to the French state of its day, from Francia to the Fifth Republic; the Battle of France in May 1940 is the Third Republic's.
Seventeen states keep their span, because what they seemed to swallow was a regime, a rival claim or an occupation inside one continuing state: the United States beside the Confederacy, Mexico beside its First Empire, Estonia and Latvia under Soviet occupation.
The counts of titled people and office-holders follow those Wikidata files under a modern country back to the kingdoms they lived in: the Kingdom of Hungary, the Polish Crown and Commonwealth, the shogunates of Japan.
The atlas's code is licensed under the GPL, version 3, and the atlas is a non-commercial project; the About panel says so beside the data's own licences.

Peoples on the move, the ancient world's places, and a record that agrees with itself

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

The map now draws the movements of peoples while they were under way and, when asked, the towns, forts and shrines of the ancient world in the periods each is attested in. Underneath, a week of repairs: the reader of article sentences stopped mistaking words for causes, a few rows filed as the wrong kind of thing were put right, and every number the atlas's own documents print is now checked against the data it comes from.

Migrations on the map: each movement drawn only in its own years, as a line with arrows from where it began to where it arrived, a ring at its start and the people's name, the dash saying how well it is attested. In 400 the Huns are crossing from the steppe towards the Hungarian plain and the Visigoths from the Danube towards Toulouse. Nothing slides along the line with the year: two endpoints do not say where a people was in between.
Ancient places: the settlements, forts and shrines the Pleiades gazetteer locates and dates, nearly sixteen thousand of them, each drawn in the periods it is attested in. Off by default, because it is dense; switch it on beside the cities.
The map's layer switches wrap between switches rather than inside their names, and one that is off can be read over the map.
Investigate reads an article's sentences more carefully: “fled to” and “failed to” are no longer read as “led to”, nor “Following their” as “following the”, and a sentence that names its subject by a word of its name now counts as that subject's. About sixty causes that were never in the text went, and the pandemic pages now name the virus that caused them.
A bacterium is not dated by the year it was identified: Yersinia pestis is no longer drawn as a discovery of 1894 that caused plagues centuries earlier; the plagues keep it as their cause, undated. Laki in 1783 is an eruption rather than a discovery.
An earthquake, a wave or an eruption the atlas already draws is no longer drawn a second time from the NOAA catalogue — Tambora's wave of 1815, the shock under Thera, Vesuvius in 1631.
Background data reads four records over all the years they hold, not the narrower years once typed for them, and Denmark and the medieval Kingdom of Norway now read the people Wikidata files under their other names.
Where the atlas prints a Ukrainian form of a name, the panel now says whether the other name beside it is Wikidata's label or the English article's title.

The ground under the map through time, the map in 3D, and charts where there were sentences

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

The map can now show what the ground was like, not only who held it: how people used the land at every step from 3000 BCE, what the climate of each millennium let grow, how much rain fell against today, and how warm it was against the twentieth century — each a model or a reconstruction that says which, and at which step. The relief can be shaded or tilted into 3D. And every chart in the atlas is now a bordered card of its own, with new ones where the panels used to say it in sentences.

A Ground & climate panel on the map. Land use (HYDE 3.2.1): settlements, villages, croplands and rangelands at every step from 3000 BCE, fading from one step to the next as the year moves — in 3000 BCE the farmed land is a thread along the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile and almost nowhere else. Vegetation and rainfall (Beyer, Krapp & Manica 2020), every thousand years: the Sahara and Arabia read wetter than today at the start of the atlas, the tail of the green Sahara.
Temperature against the twentieth century: the regional reconstructions of the PAGES 2k Consortium inside the regions they cover — Europe a cold blue through the Little Ice Age — and the Holocene latitude bands of Kaufman et al. everywhere else, one source per place, each named on hover. A chart of temperature through time with the climate episodes the literature names, from the 4.2 kiloyear event to the Maunder Minimum, each with its works.
Where farming began: the eleven independent centres of domestication, from the Fertile Crescent to eastern North America, each with what was domesticated there, when, and the studies that date it.
Relief: shaded, or the map tilted into 3D over today’s terrain, so the Zagros stand behind Mesopotamia and the Alps behind Venice.
Every chart is now a bordered card with what it shows, what it is drawn against, an “i”, its source, and its numbers as a table one click away.
New in a state’s panel: the ground it held and the city at its seat over its whole span, with its wars and risings marked; where it stands among all states five ways, each counted only over the states that carry the measure; and another state of your choosing aligned at the founding of each.
The reign ribbon: every reign as long as it lasted, coloured by how it ended, wearing the ruler’s face, each one opening the ruler.
Each theory’s rates as a chart — with its conditions, without, and the control — by century and by region.
The faces of a year, from the status bar: everyone alive at the cursor, grouped by state, with their age that year. And What is here: the window as a treemap of regions, families and kinds, each cell opening its region with that family alone.
The chronicle wears the flag a state flew, a person’s face or the kind’s sign on every row, with a heading per century, and can sit beside the timeline in place of the list at the cursor.
What’s new can be read by date, by topic and by words, and a filtered view of it can be sent as a link.

Every city joined to its record

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

The cities on the map now carry what Wikidata knows of each: 1,528 of the 1,588 are joined to their item, 744 with a founding on record, 32 with an end, and the card opens the city's article.

A city's card now gives its founding where Wikidata records one earlier than the first population estimate — Rome from 753 BCE, Ur from the fourth millennium — and its abandonment where one is recorded, with the article under it.
The join prefers the city to anything that shares its name — Mexico City is no longer its metro, Córdoba not its province — and the handful the name alone could not place (Ur, Toledo in Ohio, Ani, Mayapan) are joined by hand with the reason written down.
The table's Memphis carried Memphis, Tennessee's population of 1975 beside the pharaohs'; the Egyptian city now ends in 641.

Cities on the map in their own years, and the atlas reads the articles: how each ruler left office, how each rising ended, how each state fell

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

Wikidata knows how 29 of the 3,102 rulers who left office alive left it. Their own Wikipedia articles say, in prose, and the atlas now reads that prose by one rule: a sentence counts only when its grammar makes the page's subject its subject — “Peter III was deposed” counts, “Childeric II was killed” on his successor's page does not. The same reader gives every war, battle, rising and coup its outcome and every fallen state its ending, each with the sentence it was read from. More events have a host state, and Wikidata's own end-of-term cause is read where it exists.

Cities on the map, drawn only while they stood and under the name they bore in the year on screen: Constantinople in 500, Istanbul in 1950, no Rome in 1500 BCE. 1,597 cities with population estimates from 2250 BCE to 1975 CE (Chandler's and Modelski's tables as digitised by Reba, Reitsma & Seto, 2016), each dot sized by the estimate for the year, with a card giving when it stood, what it was called in each period, and how many lived there at each of its years. A new “Cities” chip; it travels in the link.
Every entry is named as its Wikipedia article is. Wikidata's label and the article's title disagreed for some 2,900 entries — “Long War” for the Long Turkish War, “Coalition Wars” for the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, “Ifat Sultanate” for the Sultanate of Ifat — and the article's name now stands on the timeline, the map, the search and the panel alike. The atlas's own Ukrainian names still come first, and a bare word the fuller name qualifies keeps it: the People's Republic of China is not “China”, because every “China” in every article would then be the state of 1949.
The map's name for a state is the atlas entry's, which is its Wikipedia article's, wherever the border polygon is that entry alive in those years — “Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia” where the borders dataset wrote “Halych-Volhynia occupation” — and the card still says what the dataset called it.
Every reign on a succession line now says how it ended as the ruler's own article tells it — deposed, abdicated, resigned, killed, executed, exiled, lost an election, served out the term — with the sentence printed under the reign and “read from the ruler's own article” as its source. It decides a reign only where a historian's coding, Wikidata's end cause and Wikidata's manner of death all say nothing, which is most rulers who left office alive.
Two more grounds for an irregular handover: the ruler's own article says they were deposed, exiled, killed or executed, and the successor's own article says they seized power. The Russian Empire's palace revolutions and a Mughal emperor's deposition now count where the record alone could not see them.
What a war, battle, rising or coup came to, as its own article says — put down by whom, a victory for whom, settled by which treaty, succeeded, not over — in the reading at the top of the investigation and on the hover card, for 481 events; and how a state fell — conquered by whom, partitioned, dissolved, replaced by what — for 235 states. Each with its sentence; nothing is said where the article's words could not be tied to the subject.
Wikidata's own end-of-term cause (resignation, abdication, deposition, a coup, a named event such as the Glorious Revolution) is read for the 214 terms that carry it, above the manner of death: a term that ended by abdication did not end by the death years later.
888 more events have a host state: the border test now reads the point of the city, region or battlefield an event names, not only an event's own coordinate. Fewer risings, regime changes and massacres stand without a state for the theories to read.
Download of the reign table carries the new columns: Wikidata's end cause, the article's word and its sentence, and the successor's seizure.

Rulers with faces, successions in the open, theories over a state's whole history, and an “i” on every block

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

A state's investigation now shows its succession at the top — every reign on the calendar, the rulers in order as portraits, and how many handovers were irregular — rather than behind a mode. Every ruler named anywhere wears their picture, opens their entry and answers the hover card. The theories are read over the events of a state's own history, every block explains itself on request, and tables of numbers are drawn as bars.

How power changed hands, in the reading itself: the reign strip coloured by how each reign ended, the rulers in order as faces, and the irregular handovers counted — a killing, an execution, a death in battle, a coded deposition, a violent death within a year of leaving, a rival already reigning, a rising beside it or a coup. “Died in office” includes a tsar strangled in his bedroom, and the violent share is printed beside it.
Every mention of a ruler — in the reading, the reign list, the rows of the rail — shows their portrait where Wikimedia Commons has one (5,276 of the 6,394 rulers on the lines), opens their entry on a click, and shows the card on hover, including rulers the atlas holds no entry of its own for.
The theories are read over a state's own history: for each theory, how many of the risings, regime changes, massacres and wars the atlas records under the state it applies to, and which — so the Byzantine Empire no longer reads as a state no theory has anything to say about.
A way back: a “Back to the investigation” button at the top of the Succession, Background data and Compare cases panels.
An “i” beside every block of the investigation, opening two or three sentences on what the block is and how to read it.
Tables of numbers — how the reigns ended, the line by century — are drawn as bars with the count, the share and the source on hover; the columns are one click away.

Investigate, rewritten to read: the subject in its own terms, theories judged by their own logic, and every reign with the reason it ended

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

The Investigate rail now opens on what the subject is — a state's span, origin, body and end; an event's kind and parts; a person's offices, wars and family — before it lists the links, and every link says what it is. Theories are judged condition by condition. A new Succession mode reads every reign with how it ended and where that is known from. Ninety states that flew no flag now show the seal, arms or clan mark their article does.

The Investigate rail opens on a reading of the subject: a state stood so many years, came after these states and was followed by those, holds this many wars, risings and people, drew this much ground, changed rulers this often, and ended among these events — every name a link, every bar and line a way to move the plot to the years it counts. Click a century to see what the atlas holds in it.
Every link says what it is. A predecessor state, a battle in a war or a ruler's father used to read as a “long-term cause · weak”; it now reads as the relation the record made, and says it is not a cause. Long lists are grouped by what the links are — “Took part in · 36”, “Family · 9” — with the largest group open.
Theories are judged by their own logic, condition by condition: which of the conditions a theory names held here, which were absent, and which could not be measured, with the rows behind each. Theories that come close — some conditions held, not enough — are shown with what was missing. Whether the authors wrote about the case is a footnote, never the verdict.
What says nothing is out of the way: measurements that could not run, the names in the article and the links set aside are behind a click, with their counts on the label.
A Succession mode in Investigate, for any state with a line of rulers: every reign with its dates, the ruler's age, how the reign ended — died in office, killed, executed, in battle, left alive, deposed as coded — and the source of that reason: Wikidata's manner of death, Kokkonen & Sundell's coding for 27 European monarchies, or the dates alone.
Who followed whom: for every handover, whether the successor was the predecessor's child, sibling, spouse or other recorded kin. Where nothing is recorded it says so, never "unrelated".
The numbers beside the list: median reign and its spread, a survival curve against the atlas as a whole, age at accession, interregna and rival claimants, the risings beside a handover by name, and the same by century.
Download the reign table as CSV, with every ending and its source.
Ninety states that flew no flag — the Mongols, the Ming, the Sasanians, the Achaemenids — now show the symbol their article does: a seal, a standard, a coat of arms, a clan mark or a coin, named as what it is. 1,098 of the atlas's 1,522 states now carry a symbol.

Nearly every event on the map, real dates, period flags, and a light theme

2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

Nine in ten events now have a place on the map, event dates follow one clear rule, states show the flag they flew in the year you are reading, and the atlas comes in a light theme and a deep navy dark one.

Events with no coordinate of their own are now marked at the place they happened, drawn fainter over a ring so you can tell. Nine in ten events appear on the map, up from about half.
Event dates are now chosen by one rule instead of by chance. The American Civil War reads 1861–1865 (it read 1865), the Great Northern War 1700–1721, and treaties sit at their signing. About two hundred events changed, and the Wars of the Roses, the Suez Crisis and others that had gone missing are back.
Where Wikidata's only date for an event is plainly wrong, the atlas follows the event's own article and says so beside the dates: the Phoney War ran from September 1939 to May 1940, not until 1958.
States on the timeline, in the list at the cursor and in the preview card show the flag or coat of arms they flew in the year on screen, credited to Wikimedia Commons.
A light theme, and a dark theme in deep navy. The switch is in the header; until you choose, the atlas follows your system setting.

Events that crossed borders belong to no single state

2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

A pandemic, a world war or an earthquake felt in several countries is no longer filed under one of them.

The Black Death was shown as Georgia’s, and Investigate read Georgia’s wars and rulers as its conditions. It now belongs to no single state, as do COVID-19, the Holocaust, the Second World War and about a hundred other events that crossed borders.
Where such an event has a place of its own, the border at that place decides: the Nepal earthquake of 2015 is now Nepal’s rather than India’s, and the Haiti cholera outbreak Haiti’s rather than Mexico’s.
Some theories of history no longer apply to cases they had been reading through the wrong state.

A guided tour, and Investigate easier to read

2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

First-time visitors get a short tour, Investigate is easier to read, and this page lists everything that has changed.

A short guided tour on your first visit. Skip it at any time, and replay it from the How to page.
Larger text in the Investigate panel, which you can now resize.
The theories section now shows first the theories whose conditions fit the case; the rest are behind “Show all”.
This page: what has changed, newest first.

A home of its own

2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

The atlas now lives at the root of its own address, https://app.pastlas.com.

New address: https://app.pastlas.com. Every view you share now starts there.
Visits are now counted anonymously, without cookies and without anything you type, and Do Not Track is respected. The About panel says so.

The atlas is public

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

The first public release, open to everyone, with no account and nothing to install.

About 16,000 states, events, people and works from Wikidata, from 3000 BCE to 2025, on one timeline and one map.
Borders that change with the year, 184 trade corridors, Roman roads, ancient peoples, and NOAA’s record of 10,726 eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Every entry opens its Wikipedia article inside the atlas, in English or Ukrainian.
Investigate any entry: what led to it and what came of it, with the evidence behind each link, and which of eleven theories of instability fit the case.
A How to guide in English and Ukrainian, and every view shareable as a link.
Designed for a desktop screen; on a phone it offers the map and search.

Kyiv, not Kiev, and the peoples of the steppe

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

Ukrainian places and the princes of Kyiv are now named the Ukrainian way, and the Scythians, the Sarmatians and the East Slavic tribes have entries of their own.

Ukrainian place names are now spelled the Ukrainian way: Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, the Dnipro. The princes of Kyiv are named as Ukrainian historiography names them: Volodymyr the Great, Ihor of Kyiv, Danylo of Halych. More than 200 names changed.
Quotations and article titles keep the spelling their authors used, and where a name differs the panel also shows Wikidata’s English label.
Search finds either spelling: typing “Kiev” finds Kyivan Rus’.
Kyivan Rus’ now flies the trident of Volodymyr the Great on the map, as struck on his coins, from his accession in 980.
Twenty-one peoples that Wikidata records without a date or a place are now entries, read from their Ukrainian Wikipedia articles: the Cimmerians, Scythians, Tauri, Sarmatians, Antes and Sclaveni, and fifteen East Slavic tribes from the Polianians to the Bolokhovians.
Fixed: dates recorded only to the century now sit in the right century. Some sixty CE entries had been drawn a century late, and most BCE ones a century early.
Fixed: fewer misread causes. A clause opened by “which” is now read against the phrase before it, so “the invasion of Poland … marked the beginning of World War II, which resulted in the Holocaust” no longer has Poland causing the Holocaust.

Previews on hover, and articles in Ukrainian

2026-09-28T00:00:00Z

Rest the pointer on anything the atlas draws to see what it is, and read the Ukrainian Wikipedia article wherever there is one.

Hover over a bar on the timeline, or a marker or a state on the map, and a card previews it: what it is, its dates, one line of context and the opening of its article.
An English · Українська switch over the article reads Ukrainian Wikipedia wherever it has the article, and says so where it does not. Ukrainian Wikipedia is often far fuller on the steppe and on Rus’.
“Ruled by” now names who ruled in the year on screen: Ukraine in 2022 reads Volodymyr Zelenskyy, not Leonid Kravchuk.
A border drawn for a people rather than a state, such as Cliopatria’s Scythia, now reads “borders first mapped” and “borders last mapped” instead of a founding and an end it never had.

How kings lost their thrones, and a round of data fixes

2026-09-25T00:00:00Z

Hand-coded depositions for 27 European monarchies, counts of each state’s titled elite, and fixes from a review of the data.

How 27 European monarchies lost their kings, 1000–1799: 723 reigns coded by hand by Kokkonen, Krishnarajan, Møller and Sundell, with who was deposed or killed and by whom, civil wars, and parliaments per century. It is shown beside the atlas’s own line of rulers, with how often the two agree.
What the record holds of each state’s elite: per half-century, how many of its citizens Wikidata records, how many held a noble title, and how many held one of its offices. A half-century resting on fewer than 20 people is marked unmeasured rather than drawn as small.
Fixed: NOAA’s hazard catalogue had been read only in part, so the atlas held no NOAA earthquake between 1811 and 1999. It now holds all 10,726 eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Fixed: a state’s allies and vassals were counted as its own territory; the Papal States had read 7.4 million km² in 1609.
Lines of rulers now keep every term a ruler held, so Henry VI of England no longer loses his first reign, and a generic title such as “Prince-Elector” no longer turns other states’ rulers into a line.
Coups are now filed as regime changes, from the coup of 18 Brumaire to Myanmar in 2021; failed attempts and revolutions stay under unrest.
Present-day states now run to the present, so France hosts events after 2000, and a state with no recorded end says so. An event’s host state is found by the border in that year before any nearest-state guess, which is now capped at 1,500 km.
Fixed: a sentence dating something to “612 BC” was read as 612 CE.

Theories of instability, tested against the record

2026-09-24T00:00:00Z

Investigate now brings eleven theories from the comparative literature to every case, and a new Compare cases mode tests them across the whole atlas.

A library of eleven theories: Goldstone’s demographic-structural breakdown, Turchin’s fathers-and-sons cycle, Ibn Khaldun’s dynastic cycle, Huntington’s modernisation gap, Skocpol and Tilly on war and revolution, Tilly’s multiple sovereignty, Hilton and Cohn on plague and revolt, climate shock (Manning, Büntgen, Parker, Campbell), Fearon and Laitin on state weakness, the conflict trap (Collier, Hoeffler, Walter) and Toynbee’s disintegration. Each carries its sources, its strongest objection, and conditions the atlas can test for any state and year.
“What the theories point to” sits directly under “What led to it” and gives every theory one of four answers: its conditions were present, they were tested and absent, they cannot be tested here, or the theory does not ask about this kind of subject.
Where a theory’s conditions are met, the things it names become causes “by a theory”, cited to its authors and ranked below anything a source says about the event. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 now shows the Black Death in England (Hilton, Cohn). You can filter these links by theory.
Compare cases: each theory’s rate across the whole record, with and without its conditions, by region and by how well documented the period is, with the near-misses where the conditions held and nothing followed.
Compare up to six cases side by side. An empty cell says why it is empty: checked and nothing found, not known yet, not applicable, or outside the years a dataset covers.
“What if a cause is removed” counts what goes with a cause, and never claims to know whether the event would still have happened.
Instability on record, by region and half-century, drawn only where enough states and events are recorded to say anything; the rest is hatched and says why.
A test of chance: do changes of ruler fall near volcanic winters or severe droughts more often than chance would put them? On this record, no.
The area each state held, year by year, measured from Cliopatria’s borders: the Roman Empire at 5.26 million km² in 117.

Evidence you can check, and take with you

2026-09-24T00:00:00Z

Investigate became stricter about dates and sources, cites historians by name, and lets you keep and share your own judgements.

Fixed: a cause is never filed against its own dates. Something that began after the event is no longer listed as what led to it; the Xiongnu’s causes had included Mongolia in 1947.
42 claims argued by historians, each citing the scholarship for and against: Doyle and Schama on the debt behind 1789, Figes and Fitzpatrick on the war behind 1917, Heather against Halsall and Goffart on the Huns and the West, Keynes against MacMillan and Marks on Versailles, Kuhn and Platt on the Taiping and the Qing.
Each link names the documents behind it, so you can see which sources agree and which deny it.
Mark any link convincing, possible, doubtful or reject. Your judgements travel in the link you share, and a rejected link is set aside where you can find it again.
Background data: every dataset the atlas draws on or knows of, drawn as a bar across five thousand years, so you can see at once which reach the year and place you asked about, and what each says there.
A path to another entry: the shortest chain of recorded causes and successions between two entries, every step named.
Take it with you: the whole investigation as plain text, with its sources and a link back to the view, to copy or download.
Keyboard: 1–5 switch the kinds of evidence, d changes the depth, the arrow keys walk the list, ? opens the guide. A third level of depth reaches a war’s battles through its campaigns.
The map’s layers and playback speed now travel in the link too.
Fixed: people Wikidata links to a war only as participants, such as a novelist and a chemist under the First World War, are no longer listed among its causes.
Fixed: on a phone the atlas now offers the map and search, and a search result opens on the map.

What power rested on

2026-09-21T00:00:00Z

States since 1789 show what their rulers’ power rested on, and lines of rulers stop counting prime ministers as monarchs.

From V-Dem, for states from 1789: what the chief executive’s power rested on (heredity, the military, a ruling party, elections, the legislature), each on its own track, because the five do not add up to a whole. Coup attempts are listed by year.
Fixed: prime ministers were counted as rulers, so Russia showed a one-year median reign. The line of rulers now follows the head of state, and says which office it is a line of.
A median reign is shown only where at least 50 years of the line is dated; otherwise the panel says how much is dated.
Disasters now say what kind they were: earthquake, flood, eruption, storm, landslide, impact or tsunami.
The economy line follows your pointer, and the state’s own wars, plagues, famines, revolts and regime changes are marked on the same axis.
Fixed: the year box on the map overlapped the speed buttons beside it.

Hazards, economies and lines of rulers

2026-09-20T00:00:00Z

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.

Investigate moves onto the timeline

2026-09-20T00:00:00Z

An investigation is now the same timeline with one question asked of it, and every link shows the words it was read from.

Investigate is now a mode of the timeline rather than a screen of its own: the question sits above the plot, only the rows that answer it stay, curves join them to the subject, and the reading fills the side rail.
The rows a question reaches are drawn whatever the importance floor says, and host states stay as a faint ground marked “where it happened, not a cause”.
Click a link to see its evidence: the sentence it was read from with the causal phrase underlined, the section it came from, and how close in time the two things are.
Causes are now read from an article’s Background, Causes and Origins sections, and from its Decline and Fall sections when you ask why a state ended.
What the article names: every other entry an article mentions, listed apart from its causes.
Argued claims: where Wikidata and Wikipedia are silent on a contested cause, the atlas states the argument with the evidence for and against it. The first asks whether the Thera eruption ended Minoan Crete.
Answers the atlas does not hold as entries of its own, such as French Madagascar, are now drawn on the timeline too.
Type a year into the timeline or the map: “480 BCE” and “-480” both work. The timeline now ends at 2025.

A larger atlas, and the first Investigate

2026-09-19T00:00:00Z

The atlas nearly doubles, every entry opens the right article, and you can ask any entry why it happened.

An event now needs an article in 8 Wikipedia language editions to be admitted, down from 20. The atlas grows from about 8,400 to about 15,000 entries, and Europe’s share falls from 54% to 49%, with East Asia and the Middle East gaining ground.
The importance floor, which thins the plot by how many Wikipedias cover a row, is now yours to set: type a number to pin it, press “auto” to hand it back, and both travel in the link.
Fixed: about one entry in five opened the wrong Wikipedia article. “Siege of Carthage” opened a disambiguation page, “Georgia” the US state and “Seneca” a people; each entry now opens the article its Wikidata item links to.
An entry with no English Wikipedia article now says so plainly.
Fixed: trade routes crossing the Pacific are no longer drawn across Eurasia.
Fixed: a battle is no longer nested under a campaign it cannot belong to, such as the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) under the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240.
The first version of Investigate: ask why an entry happened, or for a state why it began and why it ended, and see its causes ranked by the kind of evidence behind them, beside the situation beforehand (rulers who had just died, wars under way, earlier unrest), each saying what it searched when it finds nothing.

Connections that explain

2026-09-19T00:00:00Z

An entry’s connections are now read from recorded statements and sorted by cause and effect, and the map gains the peoples who lived between the states.

An entry’s connections are read from Wikidata’s statements and sorted into what led to it, what happened during it, and what came of it. Guesses from nearness in time and place are gone: an entry with no recorded connections says so.
Each connection says what kind of claim it is: recorded as a cause, linked by a statement such as “part of” or “replaced by”, read from the article, or a coincidence in time and place.
Causes read from Wikipedia’s own prose, each shown with the sentence it came from, so a wrong reading can be spotted at a glance.
Each state names its rulers, read from the office the state itself names, the best known first.
Names inside an article are links, and every dated connection opens, even to things the atlas does not hold as entries.
A campaign’s battles are nested under it, so the Mongol Empire’s sieges of Ryazan and Kyiv appear under the invasion that contains them.
On the map: 1,665 named ancient peoples and regions from the Barrington Atlas (750 BCE–640 CE), and 885 ethnic groups from a 1964 survey, each drawn only across the period its source describes.
Trade corridors grow from 45 to 184.
A selected marker stands out in amber, and the status bar says how many states, markers and corridors the map actually drew.

Borders, flags and trade routes

2026-09-18T00:00:00Z

The map gains historical borders for every year, the flags that actually flew, and the trade routes that crossed them.

Historical borders from Cliopatria redraw with the year, each state in its own colour with its English name. Borders are never interpolated: the map shows the recorded border and says which years it holds for.
Each state flies the flag it flew in those years: Hungary in 1400 flies Sigismund’s banner, not the Habsburg black and yellow.
Clicking a state opens a card beside the map, and its article where the atlas holds that state in that year: France in 1682 opens the Kingdom of France.
Markers show what they are, with an icon for each kind, and people appear with their portraits.
Forty-five trade corridors, from the Incense Route and the Silk Road to the Manila galleon, each an entry of its own: what it carried, how much where a source counted it, and how it changed. Beside them, 3,165 Greek and Roman road segments from the Barrington Atlas.
A chronicle beside the map lists what began and ended around the year you are on.
Press play: the map moves through the years at 1, 10, 40 or 200 years a second.
Fixed: Baghdad carried American flags and Doha a British one; each state now has a single label at its largest part.
Fixed: the map could get stuck on an error screen after a minor tile error; it no longer does, and it has a “Try again” button.

The first build

2026-09-18T00:00:00Z

A timeline and a map of five thousand years, built from Wikidata, with every article read inside the atlas.

A synchronoptic timeline of Wikidata’s states, events, people and works from 3000 BCE, in six world regions and an “Unplaced” lane.
Click any bar to read its Wikipedia article inside the atlas, search by name, switch to the map, and copy the URL to share the exact view.
Entries Wikidata gives no coordinates inherit a place from where they happened or who made them: unplaced entries fell from 38% to 2.4%, and each entry says how it was placed.
Every entry is filed by kind (battle, siege, treaty, plague, ruler, scientist and more) with its own colour and icon.
Open one region to read its states with the people, events and works they hosted beneath them, and pin another to compare; the other regions stay visible on the same axis.
Each person, event and work is placed under the state that hosted it, checked against the dates: Leonardo under the Republic of Florence, not Italy, which did not yet exist.
Click to fix the year; picking something off screen takes the timeline and the map to it.
Early states such as Ancient Egypt, Sumer and Uruk are kept with their true founding dates.
Piracy and Instability collections, picked from the control strip.
Fixed: BCE dates from Wikidata were a year out. Julius Caesar is now born in 100 BCE.
Fixed: people were drawn on the map after their deaths.
Fixed: anyone who had ever served in an army was filed as a commander; Tacitus, Cicero and Gagarin now read as a politician, a philosopher and an explorer.