8 ms·
Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC
- bookofjoe 10mo agorelated: https://ideas.zudiay.me/ https://ideas.zudiay.me/
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- krembo 10mo ago[flagged]
- mihaic 10mo agoPlease don't make this political, especially since it's about a cool project and not the minutia of the data. I'm sure you don't want the Iranians claiming ownership of the region due to whatever Cyrus and Darius would have conquered.
- nflekkhnnn 10mo agoWhy not? History matters.
- mihaic 10mo agoSure, history matters, but I'll return the burden on you to argue why Israel/Palestine matters specifically in this context. Otherwise, it's irrelevant noise to the topic at hand.
- dghf 10mo agoI 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 10mo agoIndeed, and having the "Scoti" replaced by the "Picts" isn't terribly accurate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata 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.
- dghf 10mo agoMore recently, the idea that the Picts conquered the Scots (which they'd done once before, in the eighth century) and adopted their language (something which they seem to have already started on) has gained ground.
- 7373737373 10mo agoI'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 10mo agoReminds me of this book for children I read when I was was young: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/974324.Crusade_in_Jeans https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/974324.Crusade_in_Jeans
- grosswait 10mo agoSounds like a really interesting story, but the reviews of the English edition by Dutch and German speakers leaves me wondering Is there a better English translation available? It’s hard to tell from the reviews if there’s only one.
- xenocratus 10mo agoNot 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/OttomanEmpireMain.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/OttomanE...
- prmph 10mo agoYes, there are several errors. For example, the Gold Coast did not include any part of German/French Togoland. The Gold Coast added some of that territory when it became Ghana in 1957
- juleiie 10mo agoCool but the white areas are so annoying. How little we know about all the undiscovered empires destined to be forgotten forever…
- Yizahi 10mo agoThere were no unknown empires at the white areas, no forgotten ancient civilizations.
- Nevermark 10mo agoThese 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!
- noduerme 10mo agomm..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 10mo agoIf 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)
- lordnacho 10mo agoHow 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?
- Yizahi 10mo agoI guess something like this - add timelines for every known point (city, landmark, ritual site etc.) connect the dots in the same year with one another, then apply some reasonable territory estimate to round out the resulting blob, correct for visible mistakes manually.
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoJust for fun, how would you envision this process working for empires that weren't based on territorial control of cities and landmarks like the Mongols, or based on territorial control of land at all like the Hansa?
- Yizahi 10mo agoI guess the same way, based on the known extent of the empire, put some points which they held the same way as cities, and then go from there. More manual work, but the same idea. This is just guessing btw.
- zamadatix 10mo agoThis is the same question as "How would the information even get put into something like Wikipedia in the first place" - knowledgeable people in the field do the work of aggregating academic information and turn it into a database of sorts. This seems to be accomplished in this case by running it as a business with a founder who has a degree in geography and history + a team of variously skilled people (history + tech + business).
- netsharc 10mo ago
- kbrannigan 10mo agoThe 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.
- nflekkhnnn 10mo agoNo it does not imply that.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pell 10mo agoSimilarly 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.
- nuggetzs 10mo agoThanks for the rec!
- usrnm 10mo agoThe 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?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kykat 10mo agoSeeing 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 10mo agoBoth 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_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_China
- kykat 10mo agoThen it should be striped, the same way Crimea is.
- maratc 10mo agoShould Mongolia be striped too? ROC does not officially recognise Mongolia's sovereignty. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_and_Claims.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_a... I'll add that most of the "Internet's supporters of Taiwan independence" not only do not live in Taiwan, they have never even visited there -- if they did, they would know that even most of Taiwan's population consider Taiwan and (mainland) China to be one entity. And mainland China mostly agrees with that -- where they disagree is what is the political entity that should govern this territory.
- kykat 10mo agoGreat straw man argument you got there, please tell me more about my life, I'm sure you know all about it
- kykat 10mo agoI'm sure that you can see in the map that there's "free are of the republic of china", which wasn't represented in the map, which was the point I raised originally. I never mentioned taiwan independence, you twist the facts and my word for your political agenda.
- cdman 10mo agoCool 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).
- jimmydddd 10mo agoWhat is it supposed to do? When I click on a country, I get a pop up with a flag and a link to Wikipedia?
- mg 10mo agoI 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 And then I can zoom in on particular areas of time and see smaller milestones.
- Jolter 10mo agoFacebook was not ”human progress”. Future historians will point to its founding as a pivotal point of regression of democracy and humanity.
- mg 10mo agoI put Facebook up there to point towards the beginning of social media.
- Jolter 10mo agoSocial 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 10mo agoThere was social media before Facebook, though.
- Jolter 10mo agoI think if social media is WW1, then the launch of Facebook will be considered as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Not in itself sufficient, but a point that really got some important balls rolling.
- zulko 10mo agoTotal plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923": https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictDate=true https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD... https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
- pu_pe 10mo agoThis looks pretty cool actually, nice job!
- llbbdd 10mo agoThis is very very cool! I went right to the month and year of my birth; kind of the same vibe as finding a newspaper published on the day you were born but all over the world. Thanks for sharing!
- milst 10mo agovery cool. Made something with a similar idea, but using timelines instead of maps. I wonder if the two could be combined in some way https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/ https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
- zulko 10mo agoNice, how does your timeline work under the hood? Does it read from wikipedia? What could be interesting in your project is to be able to compare timelines. See for instance this website specifically for comparing composer works (with timelines pre-extracted from wikipedia): https://zulko.github.io/composer-timelines/?selectedComposers=Wolfgang+Amadeus+Mozart%2CLudwig+van+Beethoven%2CRobert+Schumann%2CFranz+Liszt https://zulko.github.io/composer-timelines/?selectedComposer...
- milst 10mo ago
- zamadatix 10mo agoSimilar alternative https://www.runningreality.org/ https://www.runningreality.org/
- imiric 10mo agoWonderful! This is the type of visualization that would captivate me for hours on end on Encarta in my early teens. Granted, those were a bit more polished and engaging, but the right mix of edutainment was fascinating to my developing mind. The world lost many of these learning experiences after Encarta went away. Wikipedia certainly has much more information and is an improvement in many ways, but it's sorely lacking this type of curated and interactive content. Information is much easier to digest when it's presented in formats beyond text and pictures. Encarta had all sorts of experiences like this, from quasi-3D environments to mini-games. The early web was certainly a limiting factor in what could be displayed on it, but today it can deliver far richer experiences. Authors like Neal Agarwal, Bartosz Ciechanowski, Grant Sanderson, and to an extent platforms like brilliant.org, prove that this is possible. I just wish that the world's largest free encyclopedia also had this.
- m2f2 10mo agoTibet? Never existed? Meh.
- kykat 10mo agoFor those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951)
- yehat 10mo agoUnfortunately, the bold title of that "project" doesn't hold well to subject that it pretends to cover. Maybe not complete, but that should be stated. For example - why since 3000 BC? Why "World History", the World started 3000 BC? I can continue about the mixing of "states" and populations" neither of which is complete on that map. I would get this as a nice try, but in reality it looks like a school assignment project.
- NicuCalcea 10mo agoThe world didn't start in 3,000 BC, but the world since 3,000 BC started exactly in 3,000 BC.
- cyberjill 10mo agocool
- begueradj 10mo agoI checked only North Africa: several mistakes (even inaccuracies in terminology such as showing Berbers and Tuaregs as if they are distinct population groups)
- OtherShrezzing 10mo agoI’d always wanted the World War 2 channel on YouTube to do something like this. They’ve produced incredibly actuate moving borders of every day of WWII for their videos. They’d be a useful historical tool if they were published as an interactive map.
- tgbugs 10mo agoI like to compare these to CENTENNIA [0,1], which was the first program like this that I ever encountered (back in 6th grade). My test, is to see whether the program records the Napoleonic wars. This one does not. 0. https://historicalatlas.com/download/ https://historicalatlas.com/download/ 1. https://youtu.be/WFYKrNptzXw?t=64 https://youtu.be/WFYKrNptzXw?t=64
- jason-richar15 10mo ago[flagged]
- djoldman 10mo agoClearly a British concoction... United States doesn't start here until 1784! :)
- krb5 10mo agoCrimea is shown Russian here. I'm questioning the data source.
- booi 10mo agoIt would be great if we could get private funding to make this dataset opensource.
- nrgapple 10mo agoHey I have something similar! https://historicborders.app https://historicborders.app
- geldedus 10mo agoWrongly shows the Romanian Principalities as "part of the Ottoman Empire". Fact: they were never part of the Ottoman Empire. Serbia and Bulgaria were, but not Wallachia Moldavia or Transylvania. Hard next for me.