We just launched TimeMap on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/timemap If you find what we’re building valuable, an UPVOTE there would mean a lot.
Stanford University recently hosted an event to introduce TimeMap to the world, which you can check out here:
* Recording on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZspMtwYI98
* Event page: https://events.stanford.edu/event/the-future-of-history-disc...
The talk dives into how TimeMap was built, including our use of Linked Data, OpenHistoricalMaps, LLM pre-processing, indexing algorithms, and more. It also highlights amazing partner projects like Pelagios, TimeMachine, and our amazing partner institutions such as the David Rumsey Map Collection, British Library, ETH Zurich and many others.
TimeMap has been a dream project of mine for years — I’m thrilled to see it coming to life and would love to hear your thoughts or feedback!
For context: I’m also the founder of OpenMapTiles.org, a MapLibre.org board member, author of GDAL2Tiles, and contributor to other open-source projects. Currently, I’m serving as the CEO of MapTiler.com.
Looking forward to the discussion, and thank you for taking the time to check this out!
(And this had geopolitical consequences, e.g., the invading Spanish could not cross some of the bodies of water present in the sixteen hundreds that are not there now.)
Which means that - Congratulations! This is only the beginning! There is so much to add, both in granularity, a year is not enough during some events. But also when it comes to geography. Or why not integrate it with google maps, to get an even more precise granularity in the 2000s when all of this accelerates.
But it is very impressive and a huge time sink to be mesmerized by!
One thing that I've also wanted was to be able to reason about the total timeline using the Holocene calendar[1] instead of the standard BC/BCE AD/CE timeline. It makes it easier to internalize how long ago (or how recent) certain civilizations were without having to do the wrap-around math in one's head. Would be nice to be able to maybe toggle that view.
They way history is taught misses a lot of the context that only makes sense when you put it into a map like this one.
If you could somehow "open source" at least the data side of this, I'd be glad to contribute. I have a bunch of history books from ancient latino civilizations.
This is a really project and really helpful to understand history. I noticed that several data points about the Portuguese Colonial Empire are wrong, is there any place where I can submit a ticket about it?
When the royal succession crisis took place in 1580, according to the blood line, the King of Spain was indeed the next in line but both Kingdoms remain independent, you can also find evidence of this in the name: King Philip III was called King Philip I in Portugal, the following one (Philip IV) was named the Philip II. In Timemap, when you check 1580, it shows the Portuguese territories with the Spanish royal flag, which is wrong because everyone understood back then that if Spain tried to dictated anything about the Portuguese overseas territories, this would be taken as a declaration of war. This is reason why the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed, Portugal and Spain divide the world and would not step on each other.
Also found things like Malacca, the flag is missing the dates of duration: 1511-1641 Same for Macau, the map states that the Portuguese rule ended in 1845 but in reality it only became independent in 1999. Many other important missing bits that, although technically they don't as territories, do represent groups, example: The city of Nagasaki was built/shaped by Portuguese merchants during 1511-1641 and was indeed under Portuguese administration during 1580-1586.
Among many other bits that would make this reply too long for HN.
Is there a process to provide feedback and correct errors on the map?
Most of the place names are clickable, with the notable exception of Israel (both Judah and Samariah) around 900 BC, and for Israel (the united monarchy) around 1000 BC. The mouse cursor changes shape, but nothing happens if you already have the Wikipedia panel open; if it's not already open, you get a blank panel. Broken link?
Israel/Samaria should probably point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(Samaria), Judah to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Judah, Israel/united to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_mona....
We also would have some inputs on some of the short-lived territories in the U.S. West that were important and had a role in later regional development. How much do we need to substantiate the addition of a specific territory to the project? Aside from the "lost state of Franklin", there were territories like Jefferson/Colona, Huron, Lincoln, Shoshone and a number of others that pop up from the late 1850's up to the 1890's.
There is a mistake, The "Northern" is missing from the Republic of Northern Macedonia.
If I look up the "Grand Duchy of Lithuania" on wikipedia, the years for the state do not match the data on the map. Is it because the data is disputed, or Wikipedia is wrong or there is a bug on the Timemap?
Why are the boundaries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden not shown for the Kalmar Union? They are for England at Scotland in 1620 when they were under the personal union of James, (VI of Scotland I of England). What's the reason for the difference?
Ux is great but I got in a state in maps where I couldn’t get back the control at the top that lets you pick people/battles without refreshing the page.
Question, why Ferdinand III does not appear under people during 1200s on the Hispanic area?
He is arguably the most important historical figure during that time period:
- Unified Castille and Leon
- Lead the reconquest that resulted in what is Spain today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_III_of_Castile
EDIT:
He was the literally the directly responsible of the map changes during that era
It would also be cool to have filters of pre history, Hunter Gatherer, Early Farming, Bronze age and so on!
Also many historical treaties did not define borders to the level of detail they we are used to today.
Either way, good job! As a low key OSM contributor, this motivates me to contribute to the mapping, if data can be added by the public.
[1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...
That is pretty hard to do, because nationalism wasn't really a thing before the 19th century in Europe.
So how do you identify 18th century people living in Wallonia under the HRE or Netherlands, speaking French and being Catholic? What are they? How would they identify themselves? Or people born in Thessaloniki/Salonika/Solun in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, being Orthodox and Slav? Or people speaking Polish but considering themselves German in post-WWI disputed territories? Or Baltic Germans living in Russia for generations? Or the family in Macedonia where 3 brothers considered themselves Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian respectively.
Depending on the point in time, locality and even individuals, people would identify with their religion, main language, local area, monarch, nation state first. Or a combination of all of the above. How would you represent that sort of wild variety on a 2D map?
In a sense, all of the countries today have more in common with each other than with a given unique culture they subsumed (or in some cases annihilated). Putting all focus on separating the former and largely ignoring the latter is a narrow take on the meaning of “history”, and a more specific term (perhaps “political history”) seems more fitting.
For example, Russia did not naturally expand into a vacant spot eastward, despite resources such as Timemap.org perpetuating an image of peacefully walking into vast empty lands rather than annexing with a heavy dose of brutality, deadly smallpox, forced conversion to Christianity, and just plain old mass murder the territories where a range of cultures (Yakuts, Nenets, etc.) lived for centuries prior to that (or to Russia actually existing as such for that matter).
We did a similar project and closed it about 5 years ago https://maps.chron.ist/
Had multiple iterations, and put a lot of effort into finding and drawing the maps. Later we found some support from the community and they promised to provide us with verifiable and trusted map sources...
The source code is available here https://github.com/chronhq
When I was still reading to my children in the evening, after running through all the standard texts (Narnia, _The Hobbit_, _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_, H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_, &c.), I decided I wanted to read biographies to them, in chronological order, starting in as far back in history as was possible --- that was a surprisingly difficult list to put together (arguably because I missed texts such as: _Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present Chronologically Arranged_), so we did a dry run of just American Presidents --- this worked quite well, and I found it expedient to read an "adult" biography to pair with a children's one so as to anticipate and answer questions which came up during the reading. Unfortunately, my wife's job schedule changed and we stopped this at Truman, but it was very helpful in improving my understanding of the ebb-and-flow of American history.
EDIT:
Interestingly, this has been posted about here in the past on multiple occasions, but none of them yielded any prior discussion AFAICT:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=oldmapsonline.org
It would be really interesting to see this paired with a dataset such as:
They say Goethe was one of the last people in history who was still able to understand everything that was known up to then. It seems to me Asimov was as close to that as possible 200 years later.
Anyone here know a writer of our time who can match that?
There are at least five books with the (partial) title _The Last Man Who Knew Everything_ about:
- Leibniz https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15770928-the-last-man-wh...
- Athanasius Kircher https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119131.Athanasius_Kirche...
- Thomas Young https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/763029.The_Last_Man_Who_...
- Joseph Leidy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119125.Joseph_Leidy
- Enrico Fermi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746094-the-last-man-wh...
Maybe instead I'll start with those biographies...
surprised Sir Francis Bacon wasn't described thus....
That said, seeing it IS a definitely bittersweet since I started my own version of this about a year ago (after giving up on something nice like this ever showing up). Being a hobby project it's far from being able to match the progress that this has made. Now I don't know if it's still worth to pursue, which is both sad but also nice since I can do other things and take pleasure in using this without having to worry about actually making it myself...
Some features that I had (or was planning to have) that I think would be very nice, for inspiration; in case you're interested:
- Allowing anyone to add and edit data. One of mny gripes with many of the existing digital atlases was that they were very bare bones in terms of how much content they had. I hoped for a "Wikipedia for historical maps" kind of place. Maybe not at all what you envision and maybe your setup is too complex to allow for it, but I wanted to mention it at least. But at least your feedback system was very nicely integrated and easy to use, so hopefully that'll be good enough (and spare you the pain of having to care about trolls and layman mistakes).
- Showing hierarchical Regions instead of just 1. For instance, being able to show the Holy Roman Empire above its various duchies/principalities etc, and those above their various counties etc. It feels overly simplistic to ONLY show topmost Region. And quite often there's not even any single Region that's undebatably the "topmost" either.
- Generic "Events" for things that aren't battles.
- Events or something similar to explain what's going on whenever a Region's border changes, a Region appears/disappears, a Region changes name etc. Basically connect the change you see on the map with a link to learn more about what caused that change. I think this is super valuable when it comes to going from "cool, that country grew a lot there" to "so what actually happened?".
- The search field seems to be connected to modern-day places rather than historical Regions. For instance, I expected being able to search for "Kalmar Union" to get to the place and time of the Kalmar Union. Or to search for "Alexander the Great" and go to his time and place. But kudos for supporting native spellings of place names, like "København" for Copenhagen.
- I see that some battles have a corresponding war underneath their names, which is really nice. I would love to be able to filter/find/highlight all battles from a given war. That way it would be a LOT easier to get a better grasp of the extent of a given war. I'd also like to see the war's duration and its belligerents.
Then some UX feedback and bugs I noticed:
- Showing the modern-day names of cities before they exist feels pretty weird. It can help for users to navigate and understand where they are, but I think it would be very nice to at least have an option to turn them off. Ideally also to have them show up only after they've actually been founded. A bonus would be to also show them with their historically accurate name.
- I notice that you see the name of the Region currently in the center of the screen, but I think it'd be more useful to show what's at the cursor's position. Especially when you have a bunch of small Regions. If you tied it to the cursor you could also highlight the currently selected Region.
- The red box for the current year looks reeeeally draggable to me. I would combine it with the slider.
- Having keyboard commands for going forward/backward with the time slider would be really nice, to complement when you're panning around with the mouse.
- I totally understand where you're going with showing BC years as "-X", but it looks pretty weird. Especially when it's outside the time slider, like underneath the names of people.
- Also, there's no "year 0"; it goes directly from 1 BC to AD 1.
- When there are multiple overlapping things (e.g. all the battles in Italy during the 80s BC) it feels a bit random which gets shown. It's also not clear that there are stuff that gets hidden until you zoom close enough.
- If I open a wiki page for a battle and then click a link in the article, I'm then unable to return to the original wiki page. Clicking on the battle again does nothing. I have to either close the wiki sidebar or click on another battle first.
- There's no way to close the Maps sidebar except by opening the wiki sidebar?
- Closing the top panel (the one with Regions, Rulers, People, Battles) causes the Maps sidebar to pop out. Feels weird; I was expecting the top panel to get minimzed similar to how the wiki and Maps sidebars are in their inactive states.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I just had a decade of thoughts to get off my chest; not to mention a year of spare time work on doing almost exactly what you have here. Whether you take any of my feedback or not, thank you so much for making this!
Makes me wonder how hard it would be to show things like historical coastlines in England and the Netherlands, or historical watercourses, but I guess that could be both hard to visualize, and you'd have to compile that data from a lot of different sources.
I have two nitpicks with this type of view of historical world maps (not this project specifically, it just employs a visual vernacular that I have opinions about):
1.Drawing a border around an area and shading it in doesn't mean the same thing in all times and places. It might be a state with a central government as we think of them now, or it might be a collection of states or proto-states that are conventionally grouped by common features of their cultures, or it might just be an area where the pottery is consistently similar.
2. More importantly I think the areas _outside_ the shading can be misleading, too: it makes the world look empty, even though most of the world (but not all! especially in the places settled by the Polynesians much later) definitely had people in it by the time this timeline starts.
See Lille for example - and play with timeline here:
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=13...
You will see directly how the town center has developed, fortifications, railways or highway... damn cool! :-)
Gonna play around with this and report back! Looks amazing so far.
It is indeed super hard to collect or create better data. We were considering cooperation with indigenous lands non-profit https://native-land.ca/ that would be amazing! Do you know of a better source?
If you have tips for how to improve or data - please - post it via "Feebdack" button on the edge of the website for area and selected time...
To make this project well is super hard.
I'd love a tool that lets me create my own timeline. Ideally, what I'd want is:
- An arrow of time, graduated by year - Ability to create events (eg invention of TV) and periods (eg rule of Elisabeth I) - Ability to put events and periods in themed swimlanes (eg ireland-related stuff, foreign affairs, religion...) - A lot of freedom: add arbitrary boxes, notes, nested/collapsable stuff...
Basically diagrams.net with a built-in timeline and first-class concepts of event, period and swimlanes would be great.
Does anything like that exist?
I have not personally used it yet, but I would consider it if I wanted to work with timelines
> Explore over 500k maps down to streets
If I look at the UK - arguably the cartography champions of all time, there is nothing though the years other than the shadow of current day. There is basically nothing on Ireland at any point, even though it's a very well documented history rich area.
Contemporary-ism is one of the most severe cognitive blind-spots. We have a tendency to see the past from today's perspective -- today's borders, norms, regimes, languages, ethnicities.
Nearly all of the countries today didn't exist 200 years ago, not to mention 600 years ago. Even the ones that share the same names had different ethnicities, regimes, languages, cultures, religions. They were hardly the same people. What was "Germany" or "Poland" 200 years ago?
Look at Lithuania in 1400 . One of the greatest kingdoms of Europe for centuries. Today most people look at Lithuania as a tiny , former soviet country (Sorry Lithanians, I don't , but it's true).
What will people think of the UK in 100 years?
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/rulers#position=3.7...
Suggestion 1: you could show the name of bigger entities also in the corners of the screen - now you must scroll up to Italy to see that the green region is the Roman empire.
Suggestion 2: I expected to be able to drag the timeline left and right. Dragging the cursor over the screen edge for the next time period makes you unwillingly jump a few hundred years.
A feature request: in addition to dragging the timeline smoothly across years, could there also be a step button that jumps to the next (or previous) change in the visible area?
Because if I'm looking at the US in 1623, my main question is, OK, so what happened next? I want to click a button and find out. And maybe even put a bold outline or something around the new border(s).
Having to scrub the timeline, overshoot, go back, now I can't remember what it looked like before, did I go too far? Is not the optimal UX for education. Like it's really cool to get the grand sweep of centuries, but not if I want to read the map over time like a story.
Not to take away from the phenomenal achievement that this already is! Just to make it even better.
I think this is especially important, because some areas may have changed several times within the same year.
I'm not talking about minute details.
For instance, lookup wikipedia for "Grand Duchy of Lithuania" and note the active years of that state in all its different phases. Then compare with what this map shows.
One improvement that I suggest is for the timeline. Currently if I have to go to the past/future, I have to move the timeline knob to the extreme left/right, and the timeline will jump. Instead of that if I can drag the timeline to the desired era and click on the timeline to place the knob (or something like that) it will be easy to use.
Except it's all totally wrong.
Could you appreciate the work that went into this?
Yeah, apparently the data is incomplete and there are some errors/disputes. But that will always be the case when processing huge amounts of data in a way that's never done before. I'd hope we could provide more helpful feedback (what _exactly_ is incorrect and what is the source of the correct information).
Edit: upon closer inspection I found many of the comments originating from the same users, so maybe it's just a very passionate topic for a small but vocal group.
Small "bug"/Different behaviour than expected I found: I you move the slider with Arrow-Keys, you are not able to move it beyond the currently visible time frame. If the value on the far right ist 750 BC and you press the Key repeatedly it will, at some point jump back around 30 years.
I wish it would have other items though like wars and points of interest, inventions/discoveries, maybe ships on famous voyages, etc.
I think, fundamentally, the problem with this kind of project is that it centers empire as the fundamental force in history. Then the nation state shows up when it becomes necessary to differentiate between the imperial core and far-flung sea-based empires. What that means is, until you start conquering, you don't matter.
Still, I won't lie to you. It's fun to watch the Mongol Empire grow. Wouldn't have been as fun to experience if you were on the wrong side of it.
Would be nice to add pre-colonial data from North America, i.e., the regions of the native American tribes, not shown AFAIK. There must be a good resource to pull from with that data.
I don’t know much about USA/Australia and New Zealand but I can imagine they have similar recourses.
/joke
great job! :D
The east/west lines of Poland from 1029-1569 roughly correspond to today's east/west lines. But between now and then Poland shifts east then back west. Only after a ton of wars and death:
1. Poland basically expands massively to become Poland-Lithuania
2. Poland-Lithuania gets eaten by Germany (Prussia) to the west and Russia to the east.
3. Poland reappears, but entirely shifted east in the 1800s
4. Poland gets eaten by Russia again
5. Poland reappears after WW1
6. Poland gets eaten by Germany and Russia again in WW2
7. Poland shifts back west by Stalin and his mass population transfer program. Back almost to the original east-west borders of medieval Poland.
This is obviously a simplification of a 1000 years of history.
Slider does not work though
<3 <3 <3 for doing this!
