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); Natural Earth (present-day countries, coastlines).
• Battles, wars, capitals: Wikidata (CC0), queried through the QLever mirror: battles with coordinates and dates, wars, rebellions, conquests and invasions, participants, civil-war flags, capitals with their dates.
• Sides of each battle: the English Wikipedia infobox (combatant 1 / combatant 2). 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.
• Relief: three.js example planet textures. Fonts: Google Fonts. Music: the Age of Empires II main theme live at the Royal Albert Hall (Red Bull Wololo Londinium 2026), then the Age of the Conquerors soundtrack (© Microsoft), played through YouTube's player.
• All borders are approximate and many are contested.

Hand corrections

Changes made on top of the sources, where they disagree with each other or with the historical record.