The World Atlas

What it shows

Any year, sourced borders. State borders come from Cliopatria, a peer-reviewed dataset of more than 1,600 polities with year-by-year territories from 3400 BCE, and from Natural Earth after 1992. Where the data leaves states out or contradicts scholarship, the atlas adds reviewed corrections and reconstructions, each with its sources.

Who ruled what. Colonies and member states share their empire's colour. Click a realm to see its territory through time, its greatest extent, its rulers and its story.

Stories. 54 empire stories follow an empire reign by reign; 25 wars are told event by event with their front lines; 147 moments mark the turning points of history; 49 chapters describe the whole world, region by region, at moments from 3000 BCE to today.

Before writing. From 10,000 BCE the map shows the ice-age coastline, 110 archaeological cultures and 229 ancient sites, marked as known from archaeology.

All historical borders are scholarly approximations. Areas with no recorded state are grey; peoples and polities missing from the border data appear as an approximate hatched layer.

Credits

Inspiration

1. Bharat Rajya (bharatrajya.com), the interactive map of the kingdoms of Indian history that gave the idea for this atlas.

Borders and map data

1. State borders: Cliopatria, Seshat Global History Databank (CC BY 4.0); paper in Scientific Data (2025), doi:10.1038/s41597-025-04516-9. Simplified for the web.
2. Borders from 1992 to today, and island and micro states before 1992: Natural Earth 1:10m countries (public domain), with the changes since 1992 dated (Czechoslovakia, Eritrea, Hong Kong, South Sudan, Crimea and others). Disputed places follow Natural Earth's default view.
3. Peoples and other polities (hatched layer): historical-basemaps by André Ourednik (GPL-3.0).
4. Map corrections: 385 realms carry reviewed fixes or notes where the border data contradicts scholarship, each with its sources.
5. Reconstruction layers (for example Sangam-age Tamilakam, Africa's missing states, the princely states of India), archaeological cultures and ancient sites: compiled for this atlas from the publications cited on each page.
6. Rivers, lakes and sea names: Natural Earth 1:50m (public domain).
7. Disputed areas: Natural Earth 1:10m admin-0 disputed areas (public domain).
8. Terrain shading and the ice-age coastline: NOAA ETOPO5 world elevation grid (public domain).
9. Ice-age sea level: Lambeck, Rouby, Purcell, Sun & Sambridge 2014, “Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene”, PNAS 111:15296 (doi:10.1073/pnas.1411762111).
10. Ice sheets: NADI-1, Dalton et al. 2023, Quaternary Science Reviews 321:108345 (data, CC BY 4.0); DATED-1, Hughes et al. 2016, Boreas 45:1–45 (data, CC BY 3.0); Stroeven et al. 2016 for Scandinavia's last ice; present-day Greenland ice from Natural Earth.
11. War storyboards: front lines, occupied areas and battles traced for this atlas from campaign maps (West Point atlases and Wikimedia Commons maps) and cited statements; each war lists its sources.

Pictures

1. Wikimedia Commons: 1,065 reference maps, 140 empire pictures and 125 site photos, each credited with its author and licence where it appears (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0 or public domain).
2. Period photos and newspapers (35 moments): Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress (Chronicling America), the US National Archives, UN Archives and the Internet Archive, each credited where shown.
3. Ruler portraits (626): lead images of Wikipedia articles, matched through Wikidata, freely licensed on Wikimedia Commons and credited per portrait.

Facts and writing

1. Chapters, empire profiles, moments, wars and empire stories are written for this atlas and fact-checked against Wikipedia (cited statements only), Wikidata, Seshat, Britannica-level references, museum and university pages, Taagepera and Turchin for empire areas, and regional authorities such as Schwartzberg, Majumdar, the Imperial Gazetteer and the Cambridge Ancient History. Every page lists its own sources.
2. The twelve world regions follow the rows of the SenseForMaps decade-by-decade timeline poster.

Software and fonts

1. D3.js by Mike Bostock (ISC) and earcut by Mapbox (ISC).
2. Archivo (Omnibus-Type) and Inter (Rasmus Andersson), both SIL Open Font License, via Google Fonts.
3. Data prepared with Python and FFmpeg; hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Built with the help of Claude (Anthropic).

Licence

The atlas's code and its own writing are released under the MIT licence. The datasets and images keep their own licences, credited here and wherever they appear.

Contact and corrections

Write to Dinesh Varadharajan at gvdinesh@gmail.com, or open an issue on GitHub. Errors in the Cliopatria borders are best reported to Cliopatria as well, so that every user of the dataset benefits.