Historical Atlas
01
Realms
The great civilizations and polities of the past — how frontiers swell, shrink and give way.
- Civilizations
- Tribes
- Kingdoms
- Empires
- Republics
- Confederations
The timeline advances · 221 BC
Historical AtlasHistory on the map
From 3000 BC to 1900 AD. On a turning earth, watch realms swell and fade — from the Nile and Rome to Magna Carta, the Armada year of 1588, Trafalgar, and the republic declared in 1776.
Scroll to explore
Atlas
Three ways into the map
Time and geography as warp and weft: put realms, campaigns and lives back where they happened.
02
Events
Wars, disasters, reforms and movements that bent the course of human history.
- Wars
- Disasters
- Reforms
- Movements
03
Figures
Plot the lives of statesmen, captains and rebels as routes on the same earth.
- Politicians
- Generals
- Revolutionaries
- Thinkers
Rise & Fall
Rise and fall · expansion on the globe
Drag the timeline, or let the years run.
Drag to turn the globe. HD maps in the app
Realms
Realms
From 3000 BC to 1900 AD. Civilizations, peoples and polities set back into time and space.
Civilizations, tribes, kingdoms, empires, republics, confederations — taking the stage on one map.
Events
Events
The campaigns, disasters and crossings that changed how civilizations grew.
Battle-lines, sea-tracks, walls and voyages — the story laid back on the ground that held it.
Figures
People who moved the map
Statesmen at the council table, captains in the field, rebels who rewrote the polity.
Politician
Alfred the Great
849–899
King of the Anglo-Saxons who held Wessex against the Danes and stitched a realm that later called itself England.
Politician
Queen Victoria
1819–1901
Empress of an industrial Britain whose writ ran from the Channel to India; her long reign closes the century this atlas allows.
General
Horatio Nelson
1758–1805
He broke the combined fleet at Trafalgar and locked British command of the sea for a century.
Politician
William Pitt the Younger
1759–1806
Wartime prime minister who funded the coalitions against France and recast the sinking fund of the British state.
Reformer
Robert Peel
1788–1850
He founded the Metropolitan Police and repealed the Corn Laws, splitting his party to cheapen bread.
Politician
Qin Shi Huang
259–210 BC
He crushed the Warring States, unified script and axle, and laid the skeleton of imperial rule in China.
Politician
Emperor Wu of Han
156–87 BC
He pushed Han armies to the steppe, opened the Silk Road, and made Confucian learning the language of the court.
Politician
Emperor Taizong of Tang
598–649
The Zhenguan years became the mirror later dynasties held up to good government, with the Silk Road at full stretch.
Politician
Augustus
63 BC – AD 14
He ended Rome’s civil wars, founded the Principate, and opened a long peace with an emperor at its centre.
Politician
Kangxi Emperor
1654–1722
A long reign that settled frontiers and held a vast, many-peopled Qing empire together at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Politician
Elizabeth I
1533–1603
In an age of schism and sea-war she gave England its Elizabethan century — theatre, privateers, and a realm that learned the ocean.
General
Sun Tzu
Spring and Autumn
The Art of War taught that the supreme victory is the one won without battle — a text still read wherever staffs gather.
General
Alexander the Great
356–323 BC
In a decade he carried a Hellenic world to Central Asia and the Indus, and redrew the political map of antiquity.
General
Hannibal
247–183 BC
He crossed the Alps with an army and shattered Rome at Cannae — still the textbook of audacity in ancient war.
General
Genghis Khan
1162–1227
He bound the Mongol clans into a war-machine that spanned Eurasia, the high-water mark of pre-modern conquest.
General
Yue Fei
1103–1142
Song general against the Jurchen Jin; later ages made him the type of loyal arms and bitter recall.
General
Napoleon
1769–1821
Artillery and speed remade European war; the Civil Code outlived the eagles and remade the state.
Revolutionary
Spartacus
c. 111–71 BC
He led gladiators in revolt, shook the late Republic, and became a name for the refusal of bondage.
Revolutionary
Joan of Arc
1412–1431
She lifted France in the Hundred Years’ War and entered the nation’s memory as a single, stubborn flame.
Revolutionary / Politician
Oliver Cromwell
1599–1658
In civil war he unseated a king and tried a commonwealth — England’s first modern experiment in revolution.
Revolutionary / Politician
George Washington
1732–1799
He won a war of independence and refused a crown, setting the republican habit of handing power on.
Revolutionary
Simón Bolívar
1783–1830
Liberator of the Andes and the Caribbean rim, midwife to several republics between mountain and sea.
Revolutionary
Giuseppe Garibaldi
1807–1882
Redshirts and the making of Italy — the nineteenth century’s favourite legend of the revolutionary volunteer.
Narratives
Stories on the map
Routes
- Hadrian’s Wall — Rome’s northern limit in Britain, a stone line between empire and the unconquered north
- Hastings (1066) — Norman cavalry and the making of a new English crown
- The Spanish Armada (1588) — Elizabethan seapower turns the Channel into a theatre of Protestant survival
- Trafalgar (1805) — Nelson breaks the combined fleet and locks British command of the sea
- First Punic War (264–241 BC) — Rome and Carthage contest Sicily; Carthage is not yet destroyed
- Second Punic War (218–201 BC) — Hannibal crosses the Alps and campaigns in Italy
- Zheng He’s voyages — Ming treasure fleets; the capture of the pirate Chen Zuyi; traffic with Melaka
- Vasco da Gama’s route — Europe reaches India by rounding Africa
- Magellan–Elcano circumnavigation — the first circuit of the globe; Magellan dies in the Philippines
- Alexander’s eastern campaign — from the east Mediterranean into Central Asia and the Indus
- The Antonine Wall — Rome’s other frontier work in Britain
- Great Northern War (1700–1721) — Russia, Denmark–Norway and Saxony–Poland challenge Swedish mastery of the Baltic
Rise and fall of realms
- Kingdom of England (927–1707) — from Æthelstan’s realm to the Act of Union
- Elizabethan seapower and the Armada year — a kingdom learning to live by the ocean
- The United States, 1776–1789 — independence and the early federal union
- Normandy — a duchy of Northmen inside the Frankish world
- The Mongol Empire’s partition — the great khanates going their own ways
- Inca Empire — Andean power, broken in the sixteenth century
- Qing — the last imperial dynasty of China in this atlas’s span
- Republic of Texas (1836–1846) — the Lone Star between Mexico and the Union
- Vandal Kingdom — a Germanic realm in North Africa; sack of Rome in 455, later ruined by the East Romans
- Srivijaya — a maritime polity centred on Sumatra
- Sultanate of Rum — Seljuk succession in Anatolia
- Russian eastward push into Siberia — Cossacks riding to meet the sun, a continent claimed by river and ostrog