Timemap.org – Interactive Map of History | Hacker News Reader

Timemap.org – Interactive Map of History

oldmapsonline.org

1,306 pointsagilek180 comments

Hi HN! I’m Klokan, one of the creators of TimeMap. It’s exciting to see this project here — thank you for the interest and support!

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!

Nice! Small nitpick, as a Dutchie: we changed the shape of our country quite a bit over time by reclaiming sea. The map of the area now occupied by The Netherlands was very different two thousand years ago from what your site shows.

(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.)

The German coast also had notable man-made changes, though far less extreme than what the Dutch did

And if you extend it even further back in time, you'd have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland there in the middle.

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!

This has been a dream project of mine too, so happy to see that it exists.

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.

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

Or, perhaps a bit more intuitively, an option to show the timeline as "years ago".

Thank you Kiokan, I've been looking for something like this since High School.

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.

You may be interested in OpenHistoricalMap: https://www.openhistoricalmap.org, which anyone can contribute to (you can read much more about it here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenHistoricalMap). Edit: I didn't realize at first but from other comments it sounds like TimeMap actually pulls data directly from OHM.

The is such a great project. I am a little confused by the oldmapsonline.org/timemap.org thing. Are they different names for the same thing? Why is the title timemap.org, when the URL is different?

Hi Klokan,

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.

Hi! It's done beautifully but there are some... inconsistencies.

Is there a process to provide feedback and correct errors on the map?

Yes! Please just use the "Feedback" button on the side of the interface - after you zoom the map and select time - then you can annotate, and it gives us most relevant context to your feedback

I don't see the "Feedback" button. I'm using the Vivaldi browser (based on Chromium, I think).

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....

uBlock Origin hid the feedback button for me. It's possible a similar extension or built in blocking functionality in Vivaldi may be doing the same to you.

I can second this. This problem happens on Firefox as well.

Is it possible to show contested territories? Ex Oregon territory/British Columbia

This would be a very important feature to me! Very interesting to understand the dynamics of it, before and after changes, how long areas were contested for etc.

Great freaking work. Have been waiting for someone to do something like this for years.

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.

Where is the Feedback button ? It is not shown in my map.

There is a mistake, The "Northern" is missing from the Republic of Northern Macedonia.

The map doesn't go that close to the present.

"Northern" was added to the name in 2019, before it was just Republic of Macedonia.

> "The Prespa agreement of June 2018 saw the country change its name to the "Republic of North Macedonia" eight months later." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Macedonia

The UN recognised name before the Prespa agreement was "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

This user does seem to be correct despite the (at least current) reception of their report, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Member_states_of_...

I agree it probably makes sense for the map to use UN recognized names of the time for times the UN was around and had recognized names for. Whether or not it's the absolute best answer in a given situation... it at least provides a definitive source to defer to for the modern period where the most debates might come from. For more historic names other methods need to be used and blended to the modern names which is sure to be a treat of user debate :).

That was not a "name" but a description.

Will such feedback lead to improvements in your own hidden data or https://www.openhistoricalmap.org or both?

Cool!

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?

Yes I'd like to report the error of Taiwan being labeled "Republic of China"

That is in dispute and depends on which party is in power, by the year. Until general elections were opened up in the late 80s, it was definitely the Republic of China.

Which party in power ever changed the constitutional name? It's always been the Republic of China.

The Democratic Progressive Party led coalition would change the name on the passport the government issues when it is in power. It would revert back when the Koumingtang led coalition comes back into power. It falls in line with what the constituents want, and it isn't as if opinions of the citizens are uniform or a clear majority.

The situation is fairly complex.

Since this is intended as a historical map going beyond the Bronze Age, there weren't always a thing called a constitution or international law. So while this does apply to whether we call this polity, "Taiwan, ROC" or "ROC" or "Taiwan", whether something is constitutional or not will not always apply historically.

Take a look at what is written on a Taiwanese passport.

That changes depending on when it is issued, and which coalition is in power when that passport was issued.

"inconsistencies" that's a friendly way to put it. The data is severely lacking for the world before the bronze age collapse. Upside: it can only get better over time.

Indeed, any contribution to https://www.openhistoricalmap.org is welcome.

Interesting. It seems a bit slow but perhaps that's my laptop.

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?

Also the Ottoman Sanjaks are not distinguished. Perhaps only top-level boundaries are shown.

Really amazing site. I could spend hours on it. Only real suggestion: I’d like to see more stuff. Layers for notable events in different categories besides just battles. It would need some curation but user- submitted content. Or maybe use ai to find various time/place on Wikipedia and decide if it is “notable”.

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.

Thank you for this awesome project.

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

This is something I've wanted to see for years - thanks so much for building this - is there a way to suggest edits? Perhaps a way to link a wikipedia account in order to create an article?

It would also be cool to have filters of pre history, Hunter Gatherer, Early Farming, Bronze age and so on!

This is awesome! I've been thinking about making something like this, but felt like a huge undertaking. One of the major reasons I wanted it was to visualize how (ie under which treaty) were boundary lines moved or redrawn.

Be careful assuming that the dates are correct and that the borders are drawn exactly where they should be. This map is a great guide, but don't base decisions on it.

Also many historical treaties did not define borders to the level of detail they we are used to today.

I was so excited to see this project as I was dreaming of such a thing, followed by immediate disappointment that west coast indigenous territories aren't included. Curious how what appears on the map or not is decided, is it just repackaging existing data sources? Are those sources editable by anyone (like OSM)?

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.

This is a well implemented and remarkably responsive version of what I've always wanted--a map that travels throughout all of human history. I'm so happy to see this today, honestly.

There's a great big coffee table version of this [1]. As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times.

[1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...

> As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times

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?

One thing you could do is use different axes. A two-color pattern where the pattern would be religion, the hue of one color language, the other family structure, etc.

That’s kind of my point. That’s the interesting stuff (the fact that Macedonia at some point nominally controlled Kyrgyzstan is much less interesting imo) but it’s much too complex (and unrecorded) to convey in a satisfying way.

And it was rarely clear enough on the ground, let alone in the little available data. Just in the first quarter of the 20th century there were a ton of conflicts all over Europe to try to clarify borders based on different interpretations of identity based on culture/religion/language/history.

A notable observation from a lecture which touched on linguistics I attended:

>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.

(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)

This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...

I enjoyed Empires of the Word, will have a look at the other book you recommend.

> >Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.

Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.

That (and Basque) were the complications I noted as simplified out.

Or Basque...

Arguably the ultimate commentary on that aspect of history and politics is to take T.E. Lawrence's original map showing his suggestion for dividing up the Middle East based on linguistic groupings and factional differences and religious factions and interactions and to then overlay it with any more recent map.

Do you have a link?

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2gb4v6/te_lawrence...

I would love if historical maps at least qualified what they show and what they don’t show.

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).

Cool, I wish the project all the best! Making an interactive historical atlas is a great idea but the path is not an easy one.

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

It's fascinating to see how much more (and more accurate) data your project comprised, but how much better the interface is for this one. Perhaps they can leverage the data you collected for a best of both worlds approach.

Wow - have not seen this one yet. Looks great!

Wow, this is awesome!

It is surprisingly difficult to study history chronologically when one gets beyond the scope of a given text/item due to overlap.

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:

https://www.explorehere.app/

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42381612

Asimov was a machine. What did he not write about? Materials, space, science & exploration, physics, the Bible.

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?

Yeah, I'm finishing up a compleat collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's writings, and am probably going to collect (and read/re-read) all of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction.

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....

Could be wrong, but think it was Gauss, not Goethe.

Going back in time to the Americas doesn't allow you to see much detail. If you're curious to find out, you can visit this website, which gives a detailed account of native lands: https://native-land.ca/

Some people may be surprised at the level of historical detail that has been discovered, particularly for the Maya who left written records. for example,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kings_of_Copán

This is amazing to see! I've wanted a good, digital, historical atlas for more than 10 years. The ones I've seen have all had some kind of limitation that's made them less-than-ideal imo. This one seems to check most of my boxes in terms of features & UX, plus it looks really nice! Big kudos to everyone involved. I will definitely be using this a lot!

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!

Regarding the "year 0" issue: it doesn't exist in that calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero

This is a very cool UI, and I love the inclusion of the Wikipedia links. The overaly of a modern map as you zoom in is interesting, and very helpful for orientation.

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.

For New Zealand in particular, the flags that are used through history are wildly inaccurate. It's missing the initial flag used before the Union Jack was officially adopted. And the signalling flag that is on there between 1907-1947 was never an official flag and was only kind of used between 1899-1902 before the current flag (Union Jack in the corner with the red Southern Cross stars on a blue background) was adopted in 1902.

Apparently nothing happened in Australia before 1788 too.

I'm mad that Victoria isn't considered independent of New South Wales for 50 years before federation.

Perhaps also of interest: A more curated example of a local initiative can be found here: https://kaart.gentgemapt.be/. This combines historical maps of a city in Belgium with information on local heritage.

https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/ is the OSM like version

The TimeMap is in fact loading the data from OpenHistoricalMap on the deep zoomlevels (streets) so if you edit OpenHistoricalMap roads and houses it will be displayed there.

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! :-)

I don't see mention of OHM anywhere within TimeMap, is there something I'm missing? Is there a page about where the historical data comes from for the map?

I love OHM! Some places are impressively well-mapped, for example NYC.

Oh my god, I've been wanting to create something like this for a while.

Gonna play around with this and report back! Looks amazing so far.

Excellent UI and very fun to explore, although North America is conspicuously blank before 1607. Hopefully more sources can be added to this to fill that out.

Thanks. Great to hear that you like the user interface...

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.

Wikipedia has plenty of good information. I left this link in another comment, but for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kings_of_Copán

Something very related I've been trying to find is a tool to create my own timelines. When I read about history, I always struggle to remember the order of events, or put them in historical context (eg who was the english monarch who sent troops to Ireland?). I'm often off by hundreds of years on when an event happened because I don't have a good mental model.

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?

Have you tried https://markwhen.com/

I have not personally used it yet, but I would consider it if I wanted to work with timelines

A good option is to use an LLM to produce Mermaid diagrams. For example Excalidraw has a pretty great integration for that.

The dates and sovereignties seem in order, but the map is modern no matter how far you go back. The boundaries shift, but the coastline remains in its 2024 state. This means historical seas are missing, and present-day polders are present in the middle ages, etc.

You can change maps to many older maps under the "Explore Maps" option on the home page of the site. it seems you can either explore maps or history, but not both at the same time.

You can vote for TimeMap on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/timemap

Thanks, I just spent two hours exploring the history of Europe while I should really be working.

Yeh. We have made it... in such case the project has successfully addictive UX :-)

What stage of "map completion" is this at? Seems overall to be very sparse on information. It makes claims like

> 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.

Here is a nice one of the Netherlands. https://www.topotijdreis.nl

Beautiful app and thank you to the developers

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...

Does it work in Firefox? Not here...

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.

Working fine for me on FF. Once or twice the timeline stops working, but clicking around a bit brings it back.

Works in larger resolution for me fine, issues on smaller viewports.

Works fine in FF on Fedora.

It does here. FF 133 on OSX

This is fine but Australian history seems to start in 1860! Completely misses about 60,000 years of history. https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia

I absolutely love this and have wanted something like this for so long.

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.

> 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?

I think this is especially important, because some areas may have changed several times within the same year.

How beautiful is this project exactly if it presents quite an inaccurate data?

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.

Could you give an example? Like a specific year when the map is not accurate?

Lots of things are missing. The kingdom of Frisia (6th to 8th century CE) is completely absent.

Urartu is missing as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urartu

Reminded me of https://www.runningreality.org/#01/01/1855&47.60530,-122.334...

Great alternative to timemap.org! Thanks for the discovery

These timelines fill me with certain amount of sadness. How empires and peoples last few centuries and fall! After few hundred years people don’t even know or care these people existed. It must be true that the countries we love may and owe our allegiance to may not exist in a few centuries. The people in that future wouldn’t care we existed. Over time everything gets eroded.

The interaction is really great and I love the premise. But it seems to be missing a huge amount of information from pre-1000BC that gives the impression nothing happened/there are no people there.

Excellent research and great output, this is something that I wanted for a long time, a movable timeline that shows the civilization at that time. Thanks for building this!

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.

All the nitpicking here is insane. Can we all just appreciate the work that went into this?

History is by definition nitpicking. History without nits picked is called "ideology" or "myth".

Call me crazy but I've never seen 'nitpicking' in the definition of history: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/history

GP meant that researching history necessitates doubting every claim, and never taking what any historical source says at face value.

Imagine you are holding a very, very nicely done history textbook. Excellent illustrations made with love, excellent typeface, high quality print, packaging, etc.

Except it's all totally wrong.

Could you appreciate the work that went into this?

Feel free to participate if you feel that strongly about it: https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/community

Is it really "all totally wrong"?

Not totally but I have noticed some glaring inconsistencies

Yes, I could appreciate it.

I'm also puzzled by many of the comments that are (for HN standards) exceptionally angry and dismissive.

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.

The historical criteria for Spain seems dubious. It posits the ahistorical existence of a "Kingdom of Spain" from 1479 on, when this political entity didn't come to be until several centuries later (despite some monarchs using the title "King of Spain". For that matter, the current Spanish King holds the title of "King of Jerusalem", but to my awareness no Kingdom of Jerusalem actually exists today).

The same thing for Morocco, it started being called Kingdom of Morocco only after the end of the french protectorate in the 50s.

I like the idea, but it seems like such a cliche how poorly represented native peoples are in this project. If you're a historian and cartographer is there a more obvious failure that everyone knows about? It's like storing your passwords in plaintext for services, so many people have made the error, and its so famous that making this error again seems like deliberate incompetence.

Curious about the differences between this map and the Europa Universalis IV extended timeline https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21741... ? I get the the latter is a videogame and is likely altered to be more fun to play, but I wonder how accurate their historical research is.

Great Project. I am very thankful for this useful tool.

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.

One area I recently learned about is the Kentucky Bend, which is encircled by the states of Tennessee and Missouri, so not connected to the rest of Kentucky. Before 1848, Tennessee tried to claim it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Bend

This map is really great for understanding world history, you can learn a lot just by scrolling back and forth and see how it all fits together.

I wish it would have other items though like wars and points of interest, inventions/discoveries, maybe ships on famous voyages, etc.

This is a really cool idea; however, unfortunately, for me anyway, the UX is hampered on mobile by the lack of pinch zoom, and on PC by the lack of ability to scroll the time bar. Still usable, but would be fantastic if either feature was fixed. Great app otherwise.

leaving the first people's areas blank (presumably due to lack of information) still perpetuates the story that those areas are't worth talking about until they were discovered/settled/conquered/etc by 'civilization'

Yeah, the first group to show up on the map is the Iroquois Confederacy.

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.

I could spend all day long on this site. History is so fascinating and there's infinite rabbit holes to go down, so being able to visualize everything on the same timeline is awesome. Also linking to an embedded Wikipedia is super smart!

I spent about 2 hours on this so far today. I have yet to dig in. This will be a major time investment.

It would be even more interesting to display OpenStreetMap state, as it was on selected year. Of course, this should start only when OSM was launched, I'm not asking for someone to map all the world from old aerial photography.

You might be surprised that https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/ exists, the 'sister' project OpenStreetMap...

One of the coolest projects I've seen in a long time. Spent a few hours clicking around (I love maps!). Curious why so little data for North/South America? Also a very happy user of MapTiler btw.

Well, it's not really a "map of history", it's more of a historical map. It's useful, sure, but there's more to history than borders, battles, rulers and famous people.

This looks great. Another similar project is https://www.chronas.org, surprised it hasn't been mentioned in this conversation yet!

This is awesome. Love this idea. What a great way to make history more alive. I've only spent ~30s with it so far but I hope to find ways to contribute to it (content and code/different visualizations)

Digging in a bit more: Love this explainer of how it's done - https://www.maptiler.com/story/oldmapsonline/

Looks great, but this bug keeps from enjoying it: On firefox/macos/desktop, clicking on a POI on the map opens the sidebar but then redirects the whole page to the wikipedia entry.

Amazing initiative ! I see that recent 'changes' to some territories are not taken into account. I bet this is because you take the history path with global consensus. Great work !

Very very cool.

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 have been looking for a map like this for a while and even considered creating one. Really nice job! I cannot verify the actual historical accuracy but it looks great.

Amazing, thank you. I've been meaning to build something like this for a while but never got around to it. Glad it exists now!

Love it. One suggestion is to have cities only appear when they were founded. Looking at Ireland it felt off seeing limerick Dublin and cork in 4000 bc.

This is amazing, but crashes with a 500 every 30 seconds.

I have always wondered whether anyone had ever put together a chronological list of maps of the world, and wow, it's even better than I imagined!

Honestly there is so much more to North America than just Maya for decennia's. You can review the indigenous people territories back centuries ago. There are some really good organizations that are tracking this.

https://native-land.ca/

I don’t know much about USA/Australia and New Zealand but I can imagine they have similar recourses.

This is what the Internet was for. Reminds me of when I used to have encyclopedias and atlases on CD-ROM for my old Mac Performa.

How cool would it be if the timeline could switch to a log scale and show prehistory too, with morphing continent shapes?

And, like, a LARPing mode I could use while sitting in my mom's basement that would automagically post every brain fart I had to HN. That would be totally cool!

Prehistory is less certain. And doesn’t fall in category of history of people which I think this map is meant to show.

I've wanted this to exist my entire life.

Very nice. I wish cities' names changed with the period (and disappear when they were not even a thing)

They may appear as a "ghost", or perhaps a "premonition". I may be useful to compare the locations.

No, I'm not going to give you access to WebGL just to show me a map.

I spent forever trying to drag the year slider, until I realized it wasn't a slider but a text box.

You can drag the red dot on the timeline.

Awesome framework. Would love to see it include indigenous history as well.

As a huge fan of Civilazation and Total War Series, the GUI definitely impressed me!

I spent half an hour on the site exploring different civilizations and time periods. Very fun!

This is incredibly educational.

Finally some well made gamified app with openstreetmap

There seems to be an obvious mistake which is that Catalonia is shown as part of Spain.

/joke

great job! :D

And Canary Islands as not part of Spain.

I've dreamed about making this for years, so glad someone did.

I love the visualization of early human presence over time. Good job!

Typo discovered - Swedish King's name is Karl IX not Kerl IX

Very cool and works well (Edge 64-bit 131.0.2903.86 / win10)

Much of the story of the Russian empire, Germany's unification, WW1, WW2 and even today's war in Ukraine can be told by dragging this timeline from 1000 to modern day and focusing on Poland.

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.

Ukrainian state of 1917-1921 is unfortunately missing on the map

It seems like much is missing from Ukrainian history. I did notice the brief appearance of the Hetmanate(1648-1667).

Love the concept Clean and clear design

Slider does not work though

Works for me

Love it!!!! Really cool way of reading history.

this is really cool! I have a ruler from metermorphosen.de and some posters and cardboards from museums. I will share it :)

Similar to geacron.com--love it! Bookmarked.

love this! Works well in FF 133.0 (aarch64).

oh my good this is sooo cool!!!! i have been wanting something like this since forever

<3 <3 <3 for doing this!

I love it! Very well done!

amazing! This was in my todo list since, like, forever aha!

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