Every empire · every border · every war · 123,000 BC → today
Chronosphere
Charting the world…
About ·
Chronosphere
An interactive globe of political territory across all of human history. Drag the timeline through every year from 2000 BC to today (and snapshots back to the first hominins). Battles light up the globe in the colours of the two states that fought them, and the wars they belong to run as ribbons beneath the timeline.
Controls
Drag the globe to rotate, scroll to zoom.
Drag the timeline or press ←→ to move one year (shift for ten); space plays.
Hover a territory or battle for details, click to open its story.
Search any empire, battle or war to fly there at the right moment in time.
Sources
Who rules where, year by year (2000 BC – 2000 AD): Chronas, a crowd-sourced historical atlas (2,479 provinces, yearly rulers).
Borders: CShapes 2.0 (ETH Zürich; states and dependencies 1886–2019); CHGIS v6 (Harvard; Chinese prefectures 221 BC – 1911); historical-basemaps by André Ourednik (55 world snapshots, 123,000 BC – 2010); Cliopatria, the Seshat Global History Databank's map layer (CC BY 4.0; China 1600–221 BC, the extents and dates of states checked against it, and some 270 states Chronas lacks, such as the Gallic Empire, the Hyksos and the Tulunids, where Chronas leaves the land empty); Natural Earth (present-day countries, coastlines; which side of the Mediterranean a battle or war lies on).
Battles, wars, capitals: Wikidata (CC0; also the other names of each state, by which a battle side finds its state on the map), queried through the QLever mirror: battles with dates, placed by their own coordinates or by the town, fort or site they are recorded at (Europe, the United States and Canada: battles with articles in 12+ Wikipedias; elsewhere 5+, and 3+ in regions with under a tenth of Europe's battles, since article counts favour European-language history), wars, rebellions, conquests and invasions, participants, civil-war flags, capitals with their dates; and some 80 dated historical states (P625, P571, P576) placed in their seat province where no other source puts a state, e.g. Buganda, Kitara, Nri, Great Ardra, Sheba, Carchemish.
Sides of each battle: the English Wikipedia infobox (combatant 1 / combatant 2), with side names resolved through Wikipedia redirects. State founding and end dates where Cliopatria has none: Wikidata inception (P571) and dissolution (P576). Summaries and images: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).
Chronology of early China: the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project (2070, 1600, 1046 BC), whose dates are contested.