ia_olovit — all of human history, everywhere, at once

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Detail panel

On the timeline
scroll — zoom time
ctrl + scroll — zoom lanes vertically
shift + scroll — scroll lanes
drag — pan · / search
In the tree, ctrl + scroll compresses the rows.

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Basemap

Window Palaeo-Earth

Hierarchy

ia_olovit

“All of it.” A synchronoptic atlas of human history — a tool for seeing what was happening everywhere on Earth at once, from the Big Bang to this year.

School teaches history as vertical threads: your country, top to bottom, with neighbours appearing only when someone invaded. This is the horizontal cut. Freeze the world at 447 BCE and the Parthenon is going up in Athens, Confucius has been dead thirty years in China, the Buddha is within living memory in India, Rome is a small republic that has just written down its first laws, and the Olmec are already gone.

How to read it

Rows are world regions. Every region has a lane at every moment, so a blank stripe stays visible as a blank stripe.

Bars are periods (dynasties, lifespans, constructions); marks are point events. Faded bar edges mean the dates are scholarly estimates, not records.

Colour is a family — six of them. Members within a family differ by lightness, and on the map by marker shape, so identity never rests on colour alone.

A grey comb at the bottom of a lane means events that would not fit at this zoom. Nothing is silently dropped — zoom in and they reappear.

Click anything to drop the cut line; the drawer lists everything under way at that instant, everywhere.

The three time scales

The corpus spans 13.8 billion years, so no linear axis can show both the Cambrian explosion and the French Revolution. Logarithmic gives each equal slice of screen one order of magnitude of years-ago. Density warps the axis by how much is actually recorded, so crowded centuries stretch and empty megayears shrink. Linear stays honest about duration once you are inside one era.

Where the data comes from

The corpus is hand-curated with a per-region quota. That is a deliberate choice: the largest machine-readable history datasets are heavily weighted toward Europe and the last five hundred years, and importing one in bulk would produce a tool that reproduces exactly the fragmentation this is meant to cure — while looking complete. The coverage audit in the sidebar shows this corpus's own gaps.

Source	What it provides	Status
Cliopatria Seshat Global History Databank	1,600+ polities as map polygons, 3400 BCE – 2024 CE, with rulers and events. Built for cross-cultural comparison, so it is not Europe-weighted.	Planned — the backbone for polity borders on the map.
World Historical Gazetteer	2M+ historical place records with names that change over time — Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, Karakorum.	Planned — historical placenames and coordinates.
Pleiades	Community-built gazetteer of the ancient world. Very high quality for antiquity.	Planned — ancient place resolution.
Wikidata	Structured, enormous, SPARQL-queryable.	Filler only, under a regional quota — heavily Euro/modern-biased on its own.

Source

What it provides

Status

Cliopatria
Seshat Global History Databank

1,600+ polities as map polygons, 3400 BCE – 2024 CE, with rulers and events. Built for cross-cultural comparison, so it is not Europe-weighted.

Planned — the backbone for polity borders on the map.

World Historical Gazetteer

2M+ historical place records with names that change over time — Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, Karakorum.

Planned — historical placenames and coordinates.

Pleiades

Community-built gazetteer of the ancient world. Very high quality for antiquity.

Planned — ancient place resolution.

Wikidata

Structured, enormous, SPARQL-queryable.

Filler only, under a regional quota — heavily Euro/modern-biased on its own.

Comparable tools

Worth knowing, and none of them do the horizontal cut with filters: Omniatlas, Timemaps, GeaCron, World History Encyclopedia maps, ChronoZoom (retired, open source). Map tiles are served by Esri and CARTO over OpenStreetMap data; rendering by MapLibre GL.

Accuracy

Dates before roughly 3000 BCE are estimates with real error bars, and the tool marks them approximate rather than pretending otherwise. Deep-time figures follow current scientific consensus and will move. Individual event summaries are written to be defensible but are not peer-reviewed — every event carries a lookup link so you can check it. Where historians genuinely disagree (the Bronze Age collapse, the Maya collapse, the Great Divergence), the summary says so instead of picking a side.

Adding to it

Events are plain JSON in data/events/. Add a record, reload — there is no build step. The schema is documented in README.md.