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!

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...

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 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

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/

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!

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.

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

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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).

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'

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!

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.

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)

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?

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)

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.

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

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.

Love the concept Clean and clear design

Slider does not work though

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!