Map of battles fought since 2500 B.C | Hacker News Reader

Map of battles fought since 2500 B.C

battles.nodegoat.net

178 pointsivank77 comments

The data being from Wikidata, another way to read the density of battles on the map as the amount of historical information we have about every region of the world (at least, the information available on Wikipedia)

Unfortunately, large parts of the history of countries like Morocco was lost, and of what was written a very small portion is actually on Wikipedia. (in contrast with Europe, the US, etc. who have more contributors)

I had the same thoughts as well particularly Africa and South America. I also think it would have been interesting instead of using color for dates maybe use color for size of battle (based on casualties or something similar).

and even that data is highly unreliable, for instance if you zoom on post-war Europe (after 1952) one of dots is antic Battle of Bedriacum (which happened in year 56, but BC)

This is true. Especially for the data we got through dbpedia, even though we tried to clean this somewhat. See our blog post on this: http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of...

I noticed that there was a battle from the 20th century in the eastern Bay Area, and was confused about what it could be. It turns out that it was the Port Chicago disaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster).

It was during wartime, and a lot of people died, but it really wasn't a battle. It was an accident that involved a lot of munitions. The only opponent in that "battle" was unsafe working conditions.

They don't have the explosion of the munitions ship in Halifax in 1916 listed as a battle, which was a very similar situation, so I'd say there are some issues with the source data.

It's a very interesting map though. They have a lot of stuff on there.

Just a small correction - the Halifax Explosion happened in 1917, not 1916.

It also seems to list a polar expedition as a battle (right at the bottom of South America)

Thanks! There is indeed some noise and messy data as well as some questionable categorisations, all taken from wikipedia/dbpedia/wikidata. See this blogpost ( http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of... ) for a full description of how we got the data.

The creator's definition of a "battle" is very different than how most people would define them. A just one example: this site considers the 1980 siege at the Iranian Embassy in London as a battle, which I doubt most people would agree with.

And 2008 UEFA Cup Final Riots in Manchester. "Battles" in Europe post 1946 was definitely the first thing I noticed that looked odd.

There also seems to be a surprising lack of battles across the eastern steppes by the Mongols.

Definitely could use some more information of how they decided what a battle is - or the data source at least

Right. It's ridiculous that the most violent and dominating empire in the history of mankind is not included here.

I thought the UK was rather well represented actually.

There's very little data on the Mongols unfortunately, especially since they were nomadic and moved so much, one dot in the middle of Mongolia just says "Mongol Battles".

But the data for much of their conquests doesn't exist.

It's using the Wikipedia definition. Data seems to come from Wikidata.

Yep, it describes accidentally loading nuclear cruise missiles on a bomber as a battle:

http://dbpedia.org/page/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear...

The word battle is not used on the page you linked.

The map says that it's listing battles. It (the map) lists the incident that dtparr says was not a battle. As part of his/her claim that the incident was not a battle, dtparr supplies a link containing details of the incident. You note that the link does not use the word "battle". I think you are confirming dtparr's point.

It also breaks Gettysburg down into four battles—Gettysburg itself, Pickett's Charge, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. I guess that's one way to do it.

It's missing lots of rap battles though.

This.

Did you know Texas and Oklahoma fought a "battle"? http://dbpedia.org/page/Red_River_Bridge_War

> The Bridge War, also called the Red River Bridge War or the Toll Bridge War, was a 1931 bloodless boundary conflict between the U.S. states of Oklahoma and Texas over an existing toll bridge and a new free bridge crossing the Red River.

A battle between bridge trolls.

The most unexpected part of there was that Texas did not win.

As for the data that came from dbpedia, we took all events with a some kind of a date and location that have the rdf:type http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MilitaryConflict. This seems to include all events in which the military was involved. See our blog on how we gathered the data: http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of...

I got a bit of a headache when I saw that B.C.E dates are displayed on the slider like: 12-01--4. Four years before the Common Era, aka "-4"... hah! It seems ISO 8601 actually tries to solve this problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Years

I really like the Holocene Calendar. It adds ten thousand to any given anno domini, and thus moves the start of the calendar to 12016 years ago from today. For anything that happened before that, we're nearly guaranteed to not have very certain dates, so it's very uncommon to need to use BHE (before holocene era) with the holocene calendar. 4 B.C.E is 9997 HE, 753 B.C.E. is 9248 HE (Holocene era). For AD add 10.000, for BC subtract from 10.001, as it has a year zero. And even the dates for the construction of Gobeklitepe can be expressed in positive years.

I like the idea of the Holocene Calendar, but there were already archaeological sites known to be older than twelve thousand years when it was devised. As archaeologists find older developed structures and dating methods get more precise, negative HC dates get pretty likely.

Unless we didn't take the big bang as the first year, negative dates will exist. From an archaeological stance, 12.000 or maybe 15.000 years would be better, but 10.000 has an advantage: for anni domini we stay in the same millennium, i.e. 2016 becomes 12016, which is easier to parse at a glance than 14016.

I really wonder which +12.000 yrs old sites you're referring to (no rhetoric intended, I'm really curious).

Clovis culture sites, for one.

I'd pondered just making it CE + twenty thousand years.

That's equally viable, just like any multiple of ten, but I think that ten thousand is easier to parse, and that we won't find enough BHE events to use twenty thousand. Though my guesses and thoughts are uninformed here, and I'm mostly interested in middle-eastern and european antichity, not archaeology and geology.

That's fair.

Fascinating map!

I just got done reading "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric Cline. Fascinating look at civilization in ancient times. While I'd heard of many of the empires/kingdoms mentioned, it was always hard to think of them as "real" before I read this book. The book explores how the different cultures of the times interacted, and how their downfall may have been brought about because of their inter-reliance.

On amazon, not an affiliate link: http://amzn.com/0691168385

It's a nice visualisation and use of a slider but does expose the limitations of DBpedia as a source

The idea that a "battle" has been fought on British soil in the last 10 years raised my eyebrows, but I'm reassured to learn it was actually an apolitical riot involving a couple of hundred unarmed civilian football fans and no casualties. That gets more emphasis than many military offensives to seize cities during WWII or the English Civil War.

Man, this map is hard to use. It's extremely difficult to position the move cursor so that it turns into the pointer to actually see something.

Perusing this map led me to read about the Dai Hong Incident[1] and at the end of the wikipedia incident there is this nice little paragraph:

> The North Korean press (KCNA) released an uncommon statement, stressing the successful American-North Korean collaboration during the incident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident

There is hope in the world.

Some of the dates are incorrectly interpreted.

For example "Armada of 1779" is interpreted as a battle in October 2011.

Especially when you look at battles between 2000 and 2015 you'll see some which actually happened a few hundred years ago.

I could've told you from countless games of Risk that Europe was the place where it all goes to shit and I didn't need oodles of data.

All the data plus the categorisations came from dbpedia & wikidata. See this blogpost ( http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of... ) for a full description of how we got the data. You also find there the CSV files that we generated and used for this visualisation.

The numbers reflect what has been entered into wikipedia and has been harvested by dbpedia plus data that has been entered into wikidata. So, we assume there will be a western/eurocentric overrepresentation in this dataset.

This one is listed as 1963 but should be 1863:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Morgan's_Raid

Is there a way to limit this to battles that had at least 50+ people in them and maybe 20 casualties? Most of the ones I looked at didn't even seem liked an armed conflict.

It's too bad the data is "off" because the map is quite stunning.

To call friendly fire incidents, riots and explosions and such "battles" seems a little suspect. A "battle" should involve one or more belligerents of significant force (i.e., > 100) in an organized campaign. Smaller battles are routinely called "skirmishes" and shouldn't really even be recorded in this sense. Unorganized violence is simply unrest or rioting. And accidents are exactly that.

Also, I highly doubt China is a relative haven for peace given their history and population. There's clearly a lack of data there (or rather, they don't bother recording all of the other things that the creator has decided to add as "battles").

I question the overall motives of this. It's almost as if the creator wants the west to seem more violent than the rest of the planet. I don't think that's the reality. We're all just as bad.

The map has a dot in the center of Alaska (64N 153W), which refers to a battle on Kiska Island. The event linked to has the correct coordinates(51N 177E), but the map has differing ones, and no apparent way to edit it. Similarly, the battle at the top of the state appears to be misplaced.

Wonder if there's any pattern when you cross-reference it with this map of the world's religions? http://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/

Well, because the data source for the battles is clearly western-centric, it'll just show up with correlations with Christianity.

Compared to some other studies of religion-inspired battles, especially those related to the islamic conquest of the middle east, northern Africa and parts of Europe the map seems to be rather sparse. An example of such a study is the one done by one Bill Warner which tells of '548 battles that Islam fought... [which] doesn’t include battles [in] Africa, India, Afghanistan and other locations' [1].

Given that the map includes football brawls as 'battles' and that this is only one example of a specific group of battles, the only possible conclusion can be that it needs to be fed with more data.

[1] http://cspipublishing.com/statistical/charts/Islam-BattlesDa...

As many others have noted: 1.) The dataset implies that Europe is the most contentious area when it is more likely we just have the best historical records in Wikipedia 2.) The data set is dirty 3.) Because of (1) these are only going to be battles that Europe has found significant. The former Aztec Empire for example is evidently either the most peaceful in History or we just don't know a lot about all the tribes it has massacred in the format that Wikipedia likes.

At the very least he "every" in the title should be dropped. I'd suggest "Historically Significant Battles from a Western Perspective on Wikipedia"

Do you have any information written up on how you render so many points via the google maps API? I have built a similar tool[1] and struggled with performance and had to limit the amount of data points displayed at any one time.

Also, have you looked at Freebase[2]? This is what I used as the data source for mountains.io. They appear to have a decent amount of data for battles[3].

[1] https://www.mountains.io/

[2] https://www.freebase.com

[3] http://tinyurl.com/gr62x4u

One way of solving this issue is serving pre-rendered image tiles rather than overlaying each data point separately: http://blog.cartodb.com/the-versatility-of-retreiving-and-re...

Thanks for the suggestion! We'll certainly look into Freebase. We don't use the google maps API to plot the points, only the map itself. So we don't need limit ourselves to these restrictions. In this case we render the points with SVG, but can also do this with webGL for better performance.

The battle of Lipany is listed twice. So is the battle of Kolín. So is battle on the Marchfield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lipany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolín https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Marchfeld

What surprised me was the number of battles fought in Europe. It appeared to be the most violent place on the map. Is this because of a bias in the collection of the data, or is this representative of Human history?

To me it seems like Human history. European countries (and their various incantations from the past) spent hundreds upon hundreds of years competing and fighting with each other other everything imaginable. They even spent large chunks of that fighting themselves in the numerous civil wars each country had. But if you look into Middle East or Asia history, they went through approximatively similar periods.

Perhaps more of European history was recorded/found?

Both.

There's a massive bias in our historical records towards Europe. But Europe has also seen a lot of wars.

There is listed just one "battle" in the Americas for all of time through 1500, the Tikal-Calamakul wars. This is a poor representation even of the wars we know occurred, let alone all the stuff we don't know happened due to the lack of writing systems.

This data set appears to not be a particularly well-curated dataset, and it looks to my (non-expert) eyes to have an intrinsically high bias towards high detail of some key Western European conflicts even beyond the general bias imparted by the fact that histories of Europe tend to be the most well-curated and accessible if you're an English speaker.

I agree. Here's a list of battles which took place in New Mexico (where I used to live) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_fought_in_New_... . The 1540 Battle of Hawikku, which is in the time period you mentioned, is missing, as are the other NM battles until the mid-1800s.

This is a really awesome tool. I took both sliders left until there was one dot. I then slowly slid the right slider which made an animation of battles fought. It really wakes you up to just how much fighting our world has seen. The amount of issues from 1900 till 2016 is so much more than I ever realized.

Edit - after reading another comment I realized some of these might not be much of a battle.

These are just the battles within recorded history, too.

In school, I remember being confused why the neanderthals died out. The teachers kept saying it was because they were bad at using tools. Oh?

It wasn't till later that I realized they were probably brutally murdered.

Axe is a tool ...

Might be a small data problem. This battle is showing up in downtown Toronto

http://dbpedia.org/page/Battle_of_Hiep_Hoa

I was surprised to see one there in the after 1946 category. Nice job overall though. It's always incredible to see visualizations like this.

Same with the below, which is showing up in Western Australia for some reason:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Shell_House_massacre

The data looks as if it's being directly sourced from Wikipedia without filter. It might be that Wikipedia needs a bit of editing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cottage is shown in the middle of Alasaka, when it should be out in the Aleutians. It doesn't look like a problem with the underlying data either, as Wikidata has the correct latitude and longitude for it, and it hasn't been edited recently. Wonder how that happens.

I wonder when was the last date in history, if ever, when there wasn't a single war being fought anywhere on the Globe?

Wikipedia lists 16 battles of Adrianople (Edirne, Turkey) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adrianople_(disambig... but this map shows only three.

I've heard a lot about the Middle East being a place of unrest for so long in the history, yet looking on this map it seems pretty quiet (compared to others)! This means that either too many quarrels in there went undocumented, or things got exaggerated!

You can pretty much throw out any certainty of events before the British Empire invaded an area of the world. After that the recorded history will both have the same bias and consistency. Before that history will have been recorded (or not) and possibly lost by civilizations that did not win the game of Civilization (infinite): Real Life.

What is recorded as happening in Europe, that dense painting of many 'small' battles that consumed whole cities/towns/etc, can be assumed to have happened generally /everywhere/ anyone would actually want to live.

I don't think its too accurate. I put in a date range for the last couple of decades, and it says there was a battle in northern England for the 2008 euros. Hardly what anyone would call a battle...

Neat visualisation (look at France for the range 1914-18 and see the range of the trenches) but I found it really difficult to focus on the dots with a mouse pointer. Could they be made to scale with zoom level?

excellent, but please please please just invert the colors on the slider (so that the chosen range is a contrast to the background). it's an easy fix but would have saved me 30 seconds of confusion.

Thanks for the feedback!

Never mind the fact that data before 500 BC is highly unreliable because we just don't have enough information about what happened in every corner of the world back then.

It wants to force me to use cookies, it shows a black screen with a message telling me to allow its cookies. Why?

It's not very accurate. Spots in Australia are misplaced.

Violent conflict seems to follow our species where ever we go.

Africa, and Asia are missing quite a few data points...

You can see now - how peaceful is Russia.

Cool idea

Reply on news.ycombinator.com