The World History Map
for Any Year
Pick a year and see the world as it was: the empires and borders of 3000 BC to today, the great voyages and trade routes, and Earth itself from Pangea to the ice ages.
Explore Key Historical Dimensions
Every entity in YearMaps links vector GIS polygons with academic history dossiers and Wikidata knowledge graphs.
The Great Silk Road
The ancient overland arteries connecting Chang’an to Rome and Constantinople, carrying silk, spices, and philosophical exchange.
The Roman Empire
Centuries of administrative dominance encircling the entire Mediterranean basin ("Mare Nostrum"), with over 80,000 km of paved roads.
The Nile River Basin
Nourishing the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt through annual inundation and fertile black silt (Kemet).
The Mongol Empire
The largest contiguous land empire in world history, unifying the Eurasian continent under the Pax Mongolica and Yam postal route.
The Persian Empire
The first global superpower spanning three continents from the Indus to the Aegean, linked by the 2,700 km Royal Road and satrapy governance.
Tigris & Euphrates Basin
The storied Fertile Crescent river system where humanity first invented agriculture, urban city-states, the wheel, and cuneiform legal codes.
Trans-Saharan Caravan Routes
Arduous desert caravan highways crossing the Sahara to connect West African goldfields in Mali and Ghana with North African Mediterranean ports.
The Great Pyramid of Giza
The oldest and only substantially surviving Wonder of Antiquity, engineered from 2.3 million limestone blocks aligned to celestial north.
The Magellan–Elcano Expedition
Five ships left Spain in 1519 to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west; three years later one came home, having gone around the world.
The Titanic’s Maiden Voyage
The largest ship afloat struck an iceberg four days out of Southampton and sank in under three hours; about 1,500 of the 2,224 on board died.
Shackleton’s Endurance
Crushed in the Weddell Sea pack ice, the Endurance sank, yet all 28 men survived after Shackleton sailed a lifeboat to South Georgia for rescue.
Columbus’s First Voyage
Sailing west from Spain to reach Asia, the Santa María, Pinta and Niña made landfall in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492.
Browse 16,498 Indexed Entities
Every section is generated from open geospatial data and cross-linked by geography, so a dam leads to its river, a harbour to the sea it lies on, and each country to its cities, mountains and lakes.