PastlasHistorical atlas

Terms and rights

Pastlas is a historical atlas by Oleh Voronko, built from Wikidata and the open research data named below. These terms say what in it is the atlas’s own, what you may do with it, what needs permission, and what belongs to its sources. They concern the published atlas and its data; the code is a separate matter and is GPL-3.0.

What is Pastlas’s own

The facts of history belong to nobody. What Pastlas adds to them is its own work, © Oleh Voronko 2026, and the collection as a whole is protected as a database under the United Kingdom’s and the European Union’s database right, which protects the substantial investment in obtaining, verifying and presenting its contents:

  • the selection of what is in the atlas and the arrangement of it: which states, events, people and works, under which floors and from which lists, in which lanes and families;
  • the lines of rulers: who held each state’s highest office, in which order, over which years, read from every place the record keeps them and from the articles where the record keeps none, and how each reign ended with its source;
  • the host joins: which state each event, person and work belongs to, and how that was decided;
  • the hand tables: the corrections of dates, spans, borders, names and places, the merges, the refusals, the links to outside sources, each with its reason;
  • the readings of the articles: the causes, the mentions, the exits and the facts the atlas’s reader binds to a subject by grammar, and the rules it binds by;
  • the territory series, the elite series, the instability density, the evaluation of the theories over every state and year, and the atlas’s own argued claims;
  • the static pages, the maps drawn for them, the infographics, and the words of this site.

What you may do

  • Read the atlas and its pages, and use what you learn, for any non-commercial purpose.
  • Cite a view by its address, which reproduces it exactly, or a state’s, ruler’s, year’s or century’s page by its address; link to any of them.
  • Quote a passage of a page, with attribution to Pastlas and a link to the page it came from.
  • Index the pages: every crawler, the search engines’ and the AI assistants’, is welcome to them, as robots.txt says.

What needs written permission

  • Extracting or re-using a substantial part of the atlas’s data, in one act or by repeated small ones: downloading its data files, scraping its pages at scale, or rebuilding its record from what the application fetches. The data folder is not offered for crawling or bulk download, and robots.txt says so.
  • Any commercial use of the published atlas, its pages or its data.
  • Redistributing the atlas’s data files, or a derivative of them, under any licence.
  • Presenting the atlas’s readings — a line of rulers, a host, a correction, a theory’s verdict — as your own.

Permission is asked for through pastlas.com. Research and teaching are what the atlas is for, and a request for them is answered in that spirit.

What is not Pastlas’s

The sources keep their own licences, and nothing here narrows them. What came from each is credited where it is shown, on the How to page inside the atlas and in the repository’s licence file. The main ones:

  • Wikidata: CC0 1.0 — the facts: items, dates, places, statements
  • Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 — every sentence the atlas quotes, wherever it appears, stays under this licence
  • Cliopatria (Seshat Global History Databank): CC BY 4.0 — the borders by year
  • Natural Earth: public domain — coasts, lakes and rivers
  • NOAA NCEI: public domain — eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis; the palaeoclimate series
  • Reba, Reitsma & Seto 2016 (Chandler, Modelski): CC BY 4.0 — city populations
  • HYDE 3.2.1 (Klein Goldewijk et al. 2017): CC BY 3.0 — land use
  • Beyer, Krapp & Manica 2020: CC BY 4.0 — vegetation and rainfall
  • Kokkonen, Krishnarajan, Møller & Sundell 2021: CC0 — the monarchs of 27 European lines
  • V-Dem v16: CC BY-SA 4.0 — the power base of the chief executive
  • Maddison Project Database 2023: CC BY 4.0 — GDP per capita and population
  • GREG (Weidmann, Rød & Cederman): research and teaching, with citation — the ethnic groups
  • aourednik/historical-basemaps: GPL-3.0 — the cultural regions
  • SeikoEn (Wikimedia Commons): CC BY-SA 3.0 — the map the Slavic tribes’ ground is set against
  • Wikimedia Commons: each file’s own licence, named where the file is shown — flags, arms and portraits

Where a page of the atlas quotes a sentence of Wikipedia, that sentence is CC BY-SA 4.0 and may be shared under it; the rest of the page is the atlas’s.

Accuracy

The atlas says where every claim comes from and how far it can be trusted, and it is wrong in places, because its sources are. It is offered as it is, for reading and research, and not as a source of record for any decision. A mistake can be reported through pastlas.com.

These terms were set on 7 October 2026, and this page is where they are kept.