About Chronica Maps
Chronica Maps is a free interactive atlas of world history. Drag a timeline from 500 BC to today and watch the borders of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania change, with the cities, battles, landmarks, journeys and trade routes of each period placed on the map of its time.
What the atlas contains
- 39 border maps from 500 BC to 2010
- 231 historic cities with timelines and the states that ruled them
- 134 battles and historic sites and 243 dated events
- 92 landmarks shown then and now
- 16 journeys and 11 trade routes
- 600 town histories, and a search over 7,342 towns
- Five free tools: a daily puzzle, a two-year comparison, town history, true size of empires and border animations
The interface is available in English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese (simplified and traditional).
Sources and method
State borders come from the open historical-basemaps dataset (GPL-3.0), with some names corrected where a snapshot used a state that did not yet exist or no longer existed. Coastlines, lakes and rivers come from Natural Earth, and town positions from Natural Earth populated places. Landmark photographs come from Wikimedia Commons; each image is credited with its author and licence on its page.
The texts on cities, battles, landmarks and routes are written for this atlas and summarise standard reference works.
How accurate are the borders?
Every map is a snapshot of one year, and the gaps between snapshots can be long. Pre-modern borders were rarely fixed lines: many areas were contested, held through tributaries, or not governed by any state at all. Treat the borders as schematic approximations. Where a place lies near a frontier, the atlas may assign it to a neighbouring state. If you spot an error, the dataset is open and corrections are welcome.
Using and citing the maps
You may link to any page and embed the interactive map on blogs, course sites and school pages with the embed code shown under each map; please keep the credit line. Animations made with the animation tool are free to share with the chronicamaps.com credit visible.
Suggested citation: Chronica Maps: Interactive Historical Atlas, https://chronicamaps.com, accessed [date].
Credits
Maps are drawn with D3.