# Pastlas

> Pastlas is a historical atlas by Oleh Voronko: a world history timeline and a map whose borders change year by year, 3000 BCE to the present, built from Wikidata and open research data. It holds 38,415 rows - 3,291 states, 11,299 events, 22,392 people and 1,433 works - with the rulers of 1,974 states in order, the borders of 1,466 by year, 1,588 cities under the name of each year, 10,726 NOAA hazards and 11 theories of instability tested against the record. Data built 2026-10-06, release v2.8.0.

The atlas at https://app.pastlas.com/ is an application whose state is its address: `/?sel=<Wikidata id>` opens an entry (`/?sel=Q12557` is the Mongol Empire), `/?v=map&y=<year>` the map in a year, `/?q=<id>` the causes of a thing. Static pages per state, year and ruler are being added; this file lists what exists.

## Pages

- [What's new](https://app.pastlas.com/changelog/): every release, newest first, each entry on its own page; Atom feed at https://app.pastlas.com/changelog/feed.xml
- [Data](https://app.pastlas.com/data/): every data file the atlas serves, what it holds and its licence
- [How to read the atlas](https://app.pastlas.com/?v=guide): the guide, in English and Ukrainian (`&lg=uk`)
- [About Pastlas](https://pastlas.com/): the landing page

## Data

Every file under https://app.pastlas.com/data/ is served with open CORS. The main ones:

- [entities.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/entities.json): every row - id, kind, name, dates, place, region, category, host state (Wikidata, CC0)
- [relations.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/relations.json): every recorded statement linking two things (Wikidata, CC0)
- [reigns.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/reigns.json): who held each state's highest office, in order, with dates (Wikidata CC0; infobox-read lines credited to Wikipedia)
- [series/territory.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/series/territory.json): km² each state held per year (from Cliopatria, CC BY 4.0)
- [facts.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/facts.json): how each war ended and each state fell, one attributed sentence each (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
- [claims.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/claims.json): the atlas's own causal claims with the historians for and against
- [mechanisms.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/mechanisms.json): eleven theories of instability evaluated over every state and year
- [numbers.json](https://app.pastlas.com/data/numbers.json): the counts above, as the build read them

## Citing

Cite a view by its address, which reproduces it exactly; cite the data as Wikidata (CC0) and the named source of each file. The published atlas and its data are for non-commercial use (https://app.pastlas.com/data/).