About the project
The World Through Time is an interactive historical atlas: a world map from AD 1 to 2026 that you can drag through time, a sourced glossary behind every shape on it, and a knowledge blog for the stories that connect the two.
Three parts, one idea
The project is built as three pieces that feed into each other. The map shows you what happened and where. The glossary tells you who and how. The knowledge blog takes on the why.
The heart of the project. Two thousand years of borders on a single slider — every territory clickable, every year reachable, in an equal-area projection so that the sizes you see are the sizes that were.
The long read behind every shape: where a state came from, who ruled it, how big it really got and how it ended. Each entry is researched against named sources and linked back to the exact year it stood on the map.
A blog for the stories that don't fit into a glossary entry. Why a border ended up exactly where it did. How today's conflicts grew out of yesterday's maps. What you notice when you put two moments in history side by side.
How it is made
Nothing on the map is drawn freehand. The shapes come from published academic datasets, the text is written from sources named on each entry, and every page says where its information came from.
Every territory comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (CC BY 4.0). The German states between 1715 and 1814 come from Historical Basemaps (GPL-3.0), because Cliopatria draws the Holy Roman Empire as a single shape there. No AI draws or alters a border.
Most world maps inflate Russia and Canada into monsters. This one defaults to the Equal Earth projection, so when an empire looks enormous, it really was — and you can compare empires fairly across two thousand years.
Each glossary entry names the books, papers and archives it was written from, and every one of the 1,681 references is collected on the sources page with the entries that cite it.
Blank land means no state claimed it. Borders before 1648 are approximations of overlapping rights. Where the data is coarse or historians disagree, the page says so instead of pretending.
The entries are researched and drafted with an AI research assistant working from the sources named on each entry, and are not reviewed by professional historians. The method, and what it cannot do, is set out on the sources page.
No account, no install, no paywall. It runs in your browser on a laptop or a phone — and when you find something worth showing, send a friend the link. They will see exactly what you saw.
What it does not claim
An atlas of two thousand years is an approximation in places, and the project would rather say so than look tidier than the evidence allows. Empires overlap, frontiers were zones rather than lines, and for some centuries the record is thin.
The text is a well-sourced starting point, not an expert verdict: follow the references for anything that matters. If you find a mistake, write to hello@theworldthroughtime.com — corrections go back into the research and are republished.
Glossary text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can reuse it with a credit and a link. The code and design are all rights reserved, and the German states overlay's corresponding source can be downloaded.
— The World Through Time
Who it's for
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The one you were born. The one your town was founded. The one you had to learn at school and never quite pictured.