Every empire · every border · every war · 123,000 BC → today
Age of Empires soundtrack
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.
Border geometry: CShapes 2.0 (ETH Zürich; independent states and dependencies 1886–2019, exact dates), CHGIS v6 (Harvard; Chinese prefectures 221 BC – 1911), and historical-basemaps by André Ourednik (GPL-3.0). Each is used where it is finest; Chronas decides the ruler of every polygon.
China before the Qin unification (Shang, Zhou, the Spring-and-Autumn and Warring States, 1600–221 BC): Cliopatria, the Seshat Global History Databank's map layer (CC BY 4.0). Xia (2070–1600 BC) is the historical-basemaps polygon dated by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project; its extent is a rough approximation and its dates are contested.
Battles and wars: Wikidata; the two sides of each battle from the English Wikipedia infobox; each side's arc starts at its capital of the year (Wikidata); summaries and images from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).