World map history
World map history
The Geacron Project
The Company
What is GeaCron?
GeaCron provides the most powerful geo-temporal database in the world for History Research, Education and Findings Dissemination.
GeaCron’s mission is to make historic information universally accessible for everyone, through intuitive and attractive geo-temporal maps, as well as configurable timelines.
Currently Internet offers a huge amount of historical information. In most cases they are free and documentary type.
However, for instance, suppose you would like to know how a specific Empire expanded and how the rest of the world evolved during that period. You will see the enormous difficulty it presents.
We propose a different approach. We created a system to represent the historical events and the geopolitical maps of any region in the world, for any given historical time period.
GeaCron is a geo data application based on a vector structured database. We developed a real temporal GIS system. We can generate raster images or vector files like KML or shapefiles.
This design allows GeaCron to be interactive, accurate, configurable, flexible, scalable and it facilitates increasing historical information, almost unlimited. The maps show the historical situation of the world at the beginning of every year.
We hope that Geacron is a tool that will help you to carry out Comparative History studies in a faster and simpler way.
Founder’s Story
Founder & Director 
Luis Múzquiz received his degree in Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, in 1983. He worked for 25 years in the computer field.
In 2011 Luis founded GeaCron in response to an idea that goes back to the 80s: a system to facilitate knowledge of historical events that have taken place every moment in our planet, in an interactive way and on a temporary geographical map.
GeaCron intends to be a facilitator for those websites that have historical content, such as online encyclopedias, eBooks, Digital journalism, geography and history websites or teaching sites. At the same time, the information offered on these websites may be useful to detail and enhance the contents of GeaCron.
Our Team
Ángel L. Samartino
MBA from the University of California at Berkeley – Haas School of Business, with certificates in Entrepreneurship and Management of Technology.
Double Degree in Industrial Engineering from ICAI Madrid and Ecole Centrale Paris Universities.
Founder and Managing Director at the Startup University Ventures Business Accelerator.
Business Developer GeaCron
Felipe Debasa
Professor Doctor of the University Rey Juan Carlos at Madrid
Visiting Professor University Language and Culture at Beijing in PR China
Faculty Advisor GeaCron
Javier Múzquiz
Civil Engineer from Universidad Politécnica at Madrid
World History/Maps
Welcome to the World History Project’s collection of online maps, which have been made especially for this project. Below you will find them conveniently organized into historical periods, trying to keep at least some semblance of order. If you wish to contribute, please go here.
Contents
Ancient History [ edit | edit source ]
Sumer and the Akkadian Empire.
East Hemisphere in 500 BC (height of the Persian Empire).
Persian Empire 490 BC.
Empire of Alexander the Great.
East Hemisphere in 323 BC (before Alexander’s death).
The Classical Age [ edit | edit source ]
The Roman Republic at 44BC
The Roman Empire in 60 AD
The Medieval World [ edit | edit source ]
The Byzantine Empire at its height
The Colonial Age [ edit | edit source ]
The Ottoman Empire at its height in 1683.
Colonial possessions in 1674
Colonial Empires [ edit | edit source ]
The Dutch Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The British Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The Italian Empire in 1940.
The Portuguese Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The French Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The Swedish Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The Belgian Empire in 1900.
The German Colonial Empire and additional colonial activity in the Americas.
The Danish Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The Spanish Empire and its possessions at different times in history.
The Japanese Empire in 1942.
World Colonization in 1920.
The Modern Era [ edit | edit source ]
Dutch expansion in the East Indies.
Alliances prior to WWI.
Central Powers gains in WWI.
Europe under German and Italian Occupation.
Histomap: Visualizing the 4,000 Year History of Global Power
Imagine creating a timeline of your country’s whole history stretching back to its inception.
It would be no small task, and simply weighing the relative importance of so many great people, technological achievements, and pivotal events would be a tiny miracle in itself.
While that seems like a challenge, imagine going a few steps further. Instead of a timeline for just one country, what about creating a graphical timeline showing the history of the entire world over a 4,000 year time period, all while having no access to computers or the internet?
An All-Encompassing Timeline?
Today’s infographic, created all the way back in 1931 by a man named John B. Sparks, maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline.
View a high resolution version of this graphic 
Although the distribution of power is not quantitatively defined on the x-axis, it does provide a rare example of looking at historic civilizations in relative terms. While the Roman Empire takes up a lot of real estate during its Golden Age, for example, we still get a decent look at what was happening in other parts of the world during that period.
The visualization is also effective at showing the ascent and decline of various competing states, nations, and empires. Did Sparks see world history as a zero-sum exercise; a collection of nations battling one another for control over scarce territory and resources?
Timeline Caveats
Crowning a world leader at certain points in history is relatively easy, but divvying up influence or power to everyone across 4,000 years requires some creativity, and likely some guesswork, as well. Some would argue that the lack of hard data makes it impossible to draw these types of conclusions (though there have been other more quantitative approaches.)
Another obvious criticism is that the measures of influence are skewed in favor of Western powers. China’s “seam”, for example, is suspiciously thin throughout the length of the timeline. Certainly, the creator’s biases and blind spots become more apparent in the information-abundant 21st century.
Lastly, Histomap refers to various cultural and racial groups using terms that may seem rather dated to today’s viewers.
The Legacy of Histomap
John Spark’s creation is an admirable attempt at making history more approachable and entertaining. Today, we have seemingly limitless access to information, but in the 1930s an all encompassing timeline of history would have been incredibly useful and groundbreaking. Indeed, the map’s publisher characterized the piece as a useful tool for examining the correlation between different empires during points in history.
Critiques aside, work like this paved the way for the production of modern data visualizations and charts that help people better understand the world around them today.
Without a map who would attempt to study geography? –John B. Sparks
This post was first published in 2017. We have since updated it, adding in new content for 2021.
World map history
Some of the greatest thinkers in all world history are living at this time. Their teachings will have a lasting impact on the history of humanity, right up to the present day.
If you want to know why our world is the way it is, you’re in the right place!
Both an atlas and an encyclopaedia, the Timemap of World History covers all the world’s history.
The Atlas gives you a panoramic overview of the grand sweep of history.
The Encyclopedia provides a wealth of information which lets you dig deeper into civilizations, empires and events.
The Education area offers teachers and students ideas for getting the most from the site.
“A super-cool and accessible way to learn about world history”
– Award-winning education blogger, Larry Ferlazzo.
Upgrade to Premium for more
The Timemaps Premium service offers more in-depth map resources than those available free. These are especially useful for teachers and their students, but will also be of interests to others. The units are of the same authoritative quality you already see on the site.
an ad-free experience of the whole Timemaps site
access to masses of material not available in the free area
extra learning support for teachers and students
“Historical integrity and technological accuracy are combined in one of the most reliable and easy-to-use teaching aids you can ever have the privilege of using. Use this product. It will enhance your teaching of the material and make it take on greater meaning for your students. Without question, this is one of the best teaching resources I have ever seen.”
Dwight Jenkins, History Teacher, USA.
World History Maps Bundle 4+
WORLD HISTORY MAPS INC.
Приложений в пакете: 3
World History Maps: Ancient
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: The World
Снимки экрана
Описание
All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
World History Maps Bundle 4+
WORLD HISTORY MAPS INC.
3 Apps in This Bundle
World History Maps: Ancient
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: The World
Screenshots
Description
All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
World History Maps Bundle 4+
WORLD HISTORY MAPS INC.
3 Apps in This Bundle
World History Maps: Ancient
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: The World
Screenshots
Description
All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
World History Maps Bundle 4+
WORLD HISTORY MAPS INC.
3 Apps in This Bundle
World History Maps: Ancient
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: The World
Screenshots
Description
All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
World map history
The largest online collection of animated historical maps
For students: a learning tool to increase comprehension and retention For teachers: a ready-made teaching tool to add visual impact in the classroom For history buffs: novel technology to provide new perspectives
Our timelines
Our series of animated maps have been approved by the French Ministry of National Education and authorized to us the «tools of pedagogical interest» label
They have recommended our site:
EuroclioEuropean Association of History Educators Queensland History Teachers’ Association
Partnerships
Armchair General, the interactive history magazine
Our 21 map series currently online:
The Bible and History
(12 animated maps)
Ancient Greece
(16 animated maps)
Jerusalem: The History of a Global City
(12 animated maps)
Rome and its Empire
(6 animated maps)
This new series will have a total of 16 animated maps. 6 are currently available online.
(4 animated maps)
This new series will be made up of 17 animated maps. 4 maps are currently online.
Origins of Islam and the Arabo-Muslim Empire
(7 animated maps)
Crusades
(12 animated maps)
(16 animated maps)
(12 animated maps)
(7 animated maps)
This new series will have a total of 11 animated maps. 7 are currently available
The United States: a territorial history
(20 animated maps)
Europe and nations, 1815-1914
(24 animated maps)
Europe and nations, 1918-1942
(19 animated maps)
Europe and nations since 1945
(16 animated maps)
Europe’s colonial expansion, 1820-1939
(19 animated maps)
Decolonization after 1945
(14 animated maps)
The first World War, 1914-1918
(20 animated maps)
The second World War, 1939-1945
(15 animated maps)
History of India since Independence in 1947
(5 animated maps)
This new series will have a total of 10 animated maps. 5 are currently available online.
The Cold War and Confrontation between East and West 1947-1991
(9 animated maps)
The Middle East since the beginning of the 20th century
(18 animated maps)
The Geacron Project
The Company
What is GeaCron?
GeaCron provides the most powerful geo-temporal database in the world for History Research, Education and Findings Dissemination.
GeaCron’s mission is to make historic information universally accessible for everyone, through intuitive and attractive geo-temporal maps, as well as configurable timelines.
Currently Internet offers a huge amount of historical information. In most cases they are free and documentary type.
However, for instance, suppose you would like to know how a specific Empire expanded and how the rest of the world evolved during that period. You will see the enormous difficulty it presents.
We propose a different approach. We created a system to represent the historical events and the geopolitical maps of any region in the world, for any given historical time period.
GeaCron is a geo data application based on a vector structured database. We developed a real temporal GIS system. We can generate raster images or vector files like KML or shapefiles.
This design allows GeaCron to be interactive, accurate, configurable, flexible, scalable and it facilitates increasing historical information, almost unlimited. The maps show the historical situation of the world at the beginning of every year.
We hope that Geacron is a tool that will help you to carry out Comparative History studies in a faster and simpler way.
Founder’s Story
Founder & Director
Luis Múzquiz received his degree in Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, in 1983. He worked for 25 years in the computer field.
In 2011 Luis founded GeaCron in response to an idea that goes back to the 80s: a system to facilitate knowledge of historical events that have taken place every moment in our planet, in an interactive way and on a temporary geographical map.
GeaCron intends to be a facilitator for those websites that have historical content, such as online encyclopedias, eBooks, Digital journalism, geography and history websites or teaching sites. At the same time, the information offered on these websites may be useful to detail and enhance the contents of GeaCron.
Our Team
Ángel L. Samartino
MBA from the University of California at Berkeley – Haas School of Business, with certificates in Entrepreneurship and Management of Technology.
Double Degree in Industrial Engineering from ICAI Madrid and Ecole Centrale Paris Universities.
Founder and Managing Director at the Startup University Ventures Business Accelerator.
Business Developer GeaCron
Felipe Debasa
Professor Doctor of the University Rey Juan Carlos at Madrid
Visiting Professor University Language and Culture at Beijing in PR China
Faculty Advisor GeaCron
Javier Múzquiz
Civil Engineer from Universidad Politécnica at Madrid
World History Maps Bundle 4+
WORLD HISTORY MAPS INC.
3 Apps in This Bundle
World History Maps: Ancient
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: The World
Screenshots
Description
All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
World map history
Заполняйте пробелы карты с нами
Становитесь автором, найдите уникальные документы в огромной библиотеке исторических материалов и поделитесь ими.
Общая история
Советская наука была одной из сильнейших в мире. Мы предлагаем авторам «Карты Истории», интересующимся этой темой, создать хронику развития науки в нашей стране, чтобы с помощью событий на карте можно было проследить за научными открытиями, созданием изобретений, которые происходили в нашей стране в ХХ веке. Вы можете выбрать одно из событий ниже или добавить на карту свое собственное: • Создание первого в мире лазерного генератора, за которое его создатели получили Нобелевскую премию по физике
В 2021 году Россия будет праздновать 60-летний юбилей со дня полёта человека в космос. Это событие достойно того, чтобы погрузиться в прошлое и восстановить цепочку событий, которая позволили Юрию Гагарину совершить тот исторический полет. Интервью с учеными и инженерами, производство космических аппаратов, испытательные полеты. Предлагаем авторам добавить на «Карту Истории» события, которые связаны с темой космоса. Вы можете выбрать одно из событий ниже или добавить на карту свое собственное:
Россию сформировали сотни народов, которые живут на территории страны. Мы уверены, что пользователям платформы было бы интересно узнать больше об их истории, традициях и особенностях. Если вы увлечены историческими событиями из жизни народов России, становитесь автором «Карты Истории» и создавайте точки на карте с медиаматериалами. Вы можете выбрать одно из событий ниже или добавить на карту свое собственное: • Создание Советских республик • Известные личности народов России в истории ХХ века
К юбилею Победы
Если вы увлекаетесь историей вооружений, можете отличить модификации артиллерийских орудий, знаете, на каких заводах производили танки, которые помогли одержать победу в войне, то присоединяйтесь к сообществу авторов и наполняйте «Карту Истории» событиями, связанными с этой темой. Вы можете выбрать одно из событий ниже или добавить на карту свое собственное: • Создание самолетов Второй мировой войны • Испытание атомной бомбы в СССР • Реактивные системы залпового огня во время Великой Отечественной
Существуют сотни часов военной хроники и тысячи фотографий, относящиеся ко всем этапам Великой Отечественной войны. Нам кажется важным связать фрагменты кинохроники с конкретными датами и местами на карте, где происходили те или иные события. Возможно, именно вы распознаете место или историческую личность во время просмотра хроники, и это позволит сделать наши знания об этом периоде более полными и сохранить память о событиях прошлого. Вы можете написать статью об одном из событий ниже или добавить на карту свое собственное:
Многие герои Великой отечественной на слуху, многие несправедливо забыты. С помощью «Карты Истории» мы можем сохранить память о тех людях, которые позволили стране победить в войне. Вы можете добавить на карту биографии военных деятелей из списка ниже, либо любых других известных личностей, а также события, связанные с ними. • Иван Конев • Константин Рокоссовский • Летчик-ас Иван Кожедуб
World 3500 BCE
Stone Age hunter-gatherers and farmers live in much of the world. In one small area, however, cities are appearing, literacy is developing, and civilization is emerging.
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Civilizations
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In the Middle East, the first civilizations in world history are emerging.
These two developments are the opening phases of that stage in global history which we call the Ancient World.
The spread of farming
In 3500 BCE, much of the world is inhabited by small groups of hunter-gatherers. Since about 9000 BCE, however, farming has been spreading in and around the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, Europe and northern Africa. The spread of agriculture has enabled populations to expand, and villages of farmers now dot the landscapes of these regions. This is a trend which will last throughout global history, right up to the present day, as farmers push hunter-gatherers into ever smaller corners of the planet.
The horse
Another notable development at around this time is the domesticating of the horse, on the steppes north of the Black Sea. Modern scholars think that this occured amongst people who spoke a tongue ancestral to the modern Indo-European family of languages. Their domestication of the horse, initially for their milk, meat and hides, is a first step along the road to an expansion over a huge area of Eurasia.
The Western Hemisphere
Agriculture is also practiced in a few places in the Western Hemisphere, in parts of Mexico and Peru. The rest of the populations of North and South America are hunter-gatherers.
History
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Links
Here are MANY history-related websites. Finding them is easy – the hard part is sorting through the information and verifying its accuracy. Much of our knowledge has been lost over time, and many surviving sources conflict with each other.
In this modern age, the Internet gives us access to information from other countries. You may notice that sites based in other countries (like Britain, Germany, China, Russia, Muslim countries, etc.) may have different information than US sites have available. Sometimes their data is better than ours, and sometimes it’s not.
Our Links section is only a list of the best history websites was found during research. This list is by no means the most comprehensive; there are already websites that database all the history links they find. They have a lot of information if you have time to dig through all of it. Hopefully, this list will save you some time.
Great Historical Map Sites
Animated Atlases:
Static (non-animated) History Maps:
General History Sites:
Link Databases:
History Maps:
Other links
A- Best History Sites
Regnal Chronologies by Bruce Gordon Friesian – Philosophy of History Friesian Philosophy of History page Friesian – History of Philosophy Friesian History of Philosophy page All Empires – Homepage All Empires – History Forum The Xenophile Historian – general world history pages Xenophile Historian – Site Map Livius – Ancient History Articles Columbia-edu – (Early) Maps of South Asia History DSAL – Schwartzberg’s Historical Atlas of South Asia Schwartzberg Atlas, Digital South Asia Library The Digital South Asia Library The Digital South Asia Library provides dictionaries, gazetteers, photographs, prints, drawings, maps, statistics, bibliographies, indexes, books, and journals for reference and research concerning South Asia. Huhai maps – History & Commercial Atlas of China by Albert Herrmann, PhD Historical & Commercial Atlas of China, available on http://map.huhai.net Bellemare’s Historical Atlas of Late Antiquity – (Translated) FSmitha Macrohistory & World Report Nikolaev’s Atlas of World History – Всемирная история (Russian) Wikimedia Atlas of world history Wikimedia’s Atlas of world history Bartleby Encyclopedia of World History Internet History Sourcebooks Project by Paul Halsall – Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks Project by Paul Halsall-Fordham University Internet Ancient History Sourcebook The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook Internet Medieval History Sourcebook Internet Medieval History Sourcebook History Wiki History Wiki is a database that anyone can edit. History Cooperative History Cooperative World History Network World History Association World History Resource Center (Wadsworth) EAWC Internet Index TurkicWorld – Maps Glorious India – History of India Historical Text Archives The Historical Text Archive publishes high quality articles, books, essays, documents, historical photos, and links, screened for content, for a broad range of historical subjects. The HTA is a collection of primary and secondary materials and links to other resources relating to history and culture. History Sites by Time Period (TNtech) Internet Resources in History (TNtech) AD Timeline (Anglefire) Best History Sites (AcesWebWorld) Best History Sites. Top History Sites. Award Winning History Sites. Great History Sites. The History Guide — Main The History Guide has been created for the high school and undergraduate student who is either taking classes in history, or who intends to major in history in college. The purpose of The History Guide is to better prepare yourself for your history classes and to make your time in class more enjoyable and proficient. Okeanos WHKMLA : World History at KMLA World History, Encyclopedic Description of History History Guide NG
World History
Ancient
AllRefer.com – Mongolia – Xiongnu and Yuezhi Mongolian Information Resource Internet Ancient History Sourcebook The Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map Ancient Atlas AncientWorlds Ancient History Ancient Civilizations – Tracing the Past Devoted to the study of Ancient Civilizations, the places, the people and events that have shaped the world as we know it today. Ancient World History Presents ancient world history sources and research on Mediterranean civilizations, historians, Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Egyptian museums and history associations Ancient World History of Civilizations Ancient world history sources and links, Mediterranean civilizations, historians, libraries, university associations Ancient World The origins of religions, civilization, empire, philosophy and the develop of religion to the fifth century. Forty-five maps. WWW-VL History: Ancient History In General | Selected Sites Hall of Maat – The Emergence of Civilizations to 500 BCE Discussing Alternative Archaeology, Science and History Ancient History Resources Ancient history research links for high school and college students Late Antiquity: A Guide to the … – Google Book Search Classical Atlas Project Livius. Articles on Ancient History Hellenistic Monarchs down to the Roman Empire Introduction Macedonian Great Kings Kings of Epirus The Bosporan Kingdom Antigonid Kings Kings of Thrace Kings of Macedonia Aetolian & Achaean Leagues Tyrants and Kings of Syracuse Consuls of the Roman Republic The Seleucids, Macedonian Kings of Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc. The Seven Wonders of the World Kings of Armenia Kings of Pontus Chiefs & Kings of Galatia Kings of Bithynia The Attalids of Pergamum Kings of Cappadocia Macedonian Kings of Bactria The Parthian Arsacids Leaders & Kings of Judaea Kings of Commagene Kings of Caria The Ptolemies, Macedonian Kings of Egypt Arabia Felix, Yemen at-Tababi’a Saba/Sheba Dhu-Raydan & Himyar Hellenistic Civilization The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography. Open Directory – Ancient History Open Directory – Science: Social Sciences: Archaeology: Periods and Cultures: Prehistory Oriental Institute | The Joint Prehistoric Project WWW-VL: History: Ancient Near East | Selected Near East Research Centers, Libraries, Ancient History Resources Ancient Civilizations The history of civilization is a long one. This sites take you way back into history to see human civilization as it first looked.
Medieval
About-Medieval-com
NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources NetSERF’s goal is to provide those interested in any aspect of the Middle Ages a single index of all the best medieval resources available on the Internet. The Medieval Academy A Medieval Atlas Medieval Atlas – Maps of Asia – Medieval Asia in Maps Medieval Atlas – World Maps – Medieval Maps of the World Medieval Atlas – Maps by Geographic Region Medieval Sourcebook Introduction Online Resources for Medieval Historians : Historical Studies : University of Leicester School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. A School acclaimed for its research and teaching, delivering high quality courses to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and contributing to major historical research in a wide range of areas. Open Directory – Medieval History Peoples of the Dark Ages Huns And Their Western Migration ByzNet Byzantine Studies on the Net Maps 650 Site dedicated to resources and links relating to the Byzantine Empire. Grover Furr’s Medieval History and Literature Page Lost Medieval Village by Wharram Percy Labyrinth Home Page Medieval studies scholarly resources compiled and organized from around the world. The Labyrinth
Americas
Africa
Egypt
http–www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk-chronology-index.html Ancient Egyptian Culture (mnsu) An exhibit in the MSU EMuseum which has information on the culture of ancient Egypt. This site includes information on architecture, art, hieroglyphics, the daily life of ancient Egyptians, military and maps. The History of Ancient Egypt (mnsu) An exhibit in the MSU EMuseum, which has information on the history of ancient Egypt, including Dynasties, significant people, time-frames, dates and maps. It gives a brief explanation of the political history for each time period. Egypt Links (mnsu) The Ancient Egypt Site – The History, Language and Culture of Pharaonic Egypt The history, language and culture of Ancient Egypt by Egyptologist Jacques Kinnaer WWW-VL: History: Ancient Egypt History | Egyptology, Hieroglyphs, Pyramids, Sphinx, King Tut, Egypian, Brugsch
East Asia
China
OLD WESTERN MAPS OF JAPAN Wolfgang Michel: OLD MAPS OF JAPAN Japanese History History of Japan. Digital Librarian: Japan Guide to Japanese Historical Periods – The Art of Asia – History and Maps An online project for museum visitors, teachers, students, and everyone interested in Asian art, culture, and history featuring objects from The Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ permanent collection.
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World History Maps Bundle 4+
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All three of the World History Map Apps in one bundle at a discount!
World History Maps: The World:
World History Maps: The World, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at history. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing the world (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades or even centuries of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire world for every single year in recorded history. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for the whole world that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest countries to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These are also the first historical maps to be made using GIS technology. Maps show countries of the world at the beginning of each year, with Major Tribes and Peoples. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the apps.
World History Maps: Ancient World
This interactive atlas of the ancient western world gives you a close up view of the area from the Mediterranean to India from 3000 BCE to 500 BCE. The map allows zooming and panning. Pop-up information is available for each country shown. Each map shows all countries of the world as they were at the beginning of each year. View cities, battles, campaigns, ancient roads, and more. Links to Wikipedia articles provide more detail. Zoom in without losing any detail.
World History Maps: N America
World History Maps: N America, by World History Maps Inc, is a new and unique way of looking at the history of North America. Instead of an historical atlas which has maps showing North America (or a region) at a few significant years, or maps that try to compress decades of change on to one map, we offer a different approach. Our interactive historical maps show the entire continent for every single year since 1492. This is an unprecedented amount of detail in time for North America that cannot be found anywhere else. The scalable maps allow even the smallest places to be shown. Looking at History in this detail gives one a unique perspective. These historical maps are made using GIS technology. These maps are just like our World app maps but with more details. In addition to countries, major Tribes, and Peoples at the beginning of each year, we also also show states and provinces, towns and cities, battles, parks, reservations and reservoirs, and many events including weather events. Maps are Scaleable and zoomable with popup information. Scrolling forward and backward is available with adjustable speeds. Maps can be pinned so you can toggle back and forth to compare different years. Following below are more details about how to use the app.
1. The Babylonian World Map
Babylonian map of the world. (Credit: VCG Wilson/Corbis/Getty Images)
History’s earliest known world map was scratched on clay tablets in the ancient city of Babylon sometime around 600 B.C. The star-shaped map measures just five-by-three inches and shows the world as a flat disc surrounded by an ocean, or “bitter river.” Babylon and the Euphrates River are depicted in the center as a pair of rectangles, while the neighboring cities of Assyria and Susa are shown as small, circular blobs. Outside of the disc sit a collection of triangular wedges, which depict far-off islands with mysterious labels such as “beyond the flight of birds” and “a place where the sun cannot be seen.” The accompanying cuneiform text describes these unknown lands as being populated by mythological beasts, which suggests that the map shows both real geographical features and elements of Babylonian cosmology.
2. Ptolemy’s Geography
Medieval reconstruction of one of Ptolemy’s maps. (Credit: Public Domain)
Many elements of the science of cartography can trace their origins to the work of the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known as Ptolemy. Around 150 A.D., he produced “Geography,” an eight-volume textbook that included some of the first maps to use mathematical principles. Ptolemy’s book has a few notable errors—the Indian Ocean, for example, is depicted as a sea—yet it’s still remarkable for its breadth and detail. It boasts more than 8,000 different place names as well as references to such far-flung locales as Iceland and Korea, all of which are plotted according to geometric points of latitude and longitude. Sadly, no maps drawn by Ptolemy have survived to today. His atlas seems to have disappeared for over a thousand years, and it wasn’t until the 13th century that Byzantine scholars began making projections using his coordinates.
3. The Peutinger Map
The Peutinger Map. (Credit: Public Domain)
During the days when all roads led to Rome, the so-called Peutinger Map would have served as a handy guide to the Empire’s transportation network. The oddly shaped map is 22 feet long and just one foot wide, and depicts the course of more 60,000 miles of Roman roads stretching from Western Europe to the Middle East. An additional section also shows India, Sri Lanka and other parts of Asia. Much like a modern travel guide, the map includes the locations of more than 500 cities along with some 3,500 other points of interest such as way stations, temples, forests, rivers and even spas. The original Peutinger map was probably completed sometime around the 4th century A.D., but the version that exists today is a 13th century copy. It is named for the German scholar Konrad Peutinger, who took ownership of it in the early 1500s.
4. The Tabula Rogeriana
The Tabula Rogeriana. (Credit: Public Domain)
In the 12th century A.D., the renowned Muslim scholar al-Idrisi was invited to the court of the Norman King Roger II and asked to produce a book on geography. The result was the “Tabula Rogeriania,” also known by its longer title, “A Guide to Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands.” The book featured several regional maps as well as a projection of the known world, which depicted the entirety of Eurasia and a large section of Africa. By drawing from interviews with travelers and his own wanderings through Europe, al-Idrisi also compiled extensive data on the climate, politics and culture of different regions. The Tabula Rogeriana remained among the world’s most accurate maps for several centuries, but it may appear strange at first glance—in the tradition of Islamic cartographers, al-Idrisi drew it with south positioned at the top.
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5. The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu
The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu. (Credit: Public Domain)
One of the earliest surviving world maps from the Far East, China’s Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or “Amalgamated Map of the Ming Empire,” was drawn on silk as early as 1389. The map spans the entire Eurasian continent from Japan to the Atlantic Ocean, and includes detailed markings of mountain ranges, rivers and administrative centers. It is particularly notable for the way in which it distorts the size of various landmasses. Mainland China sits like a monolith in the middle of the map, while Japan and Korea are both far larger than India. The African continent, meanwhile, is depicted as a relatively small peninsula with what appears to be a giant lake in its center. Despite these peculiarities, the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu is often cited as the first map to show Africa with a southern tip that could be circumnavigated.
6. The Cantino Planisphere
The Cantino Planisphere. (Credit: The Cantino Planisphere/Getty Images)
The Cantino Planisphere was once at the center of an act of cartographic theft. In 1502, an Italian duke commissioned an agent named Alberto Cantino to acquire a map of the geographic discoveries of the Kingdom of Portugal, which was notorious for closely guarding the location of the new lands found by its explorers. Cantino succeeded in his mission, and the map that he smuggled out of Portugal has since become famous. Not only does it depict Africa, India and Europe in unprecedented detail, it stands as one of the earliest known maps to show the coastlines of Portugal’s “New World” territories in South America. To the north of Brazil, the map also includes a small grouping of landmasses that appear to be Cuba, Hispaniola and part of the American East Coast.
7. The Waldseemüller World Map
The Waldseemüller World Map, 1507. (Credit: Heritage Images / Getty Images)
8. The Mercator Projection
Mercator’s 1569 map—the first to employ his projection style. (Credit: Public Domain)
Once a staple of school classrooms the world over, the famed Mercator projection has also been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator first designed the map style in 1569 as a way of displaying the spherical Earth on a flat, rectangular surface. With this in mind, he drew a world map with parallels of latitude that are spaced increasingly far apart as they move away from the equator. This feature made the Mercator projection invaluable to mariners, who could use it to sail in straight lines with a constant compass bearing, but it also meant that the relative size of different landmasses was hugely distorted. Greenland and other polar regions appear far larger than they actually are, while equatorial landmasses such as Africa and South America are heavily compressed. The Mercator projection nevertheless remained a fixture of atlases until the 20th century, when critics began to denounce it as inaccurate. While it’s still used as a navigational aid, it has since been largely supplanted by more modern, oval-shaped maps such as the Robinson and Winkel Tripel projections.
World map 800 AD
Primary Sources for East-Hem_800ad.jpg:
World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com.
I – African information
* African Tribal locations are derived from:
a – Map of “The World in 750 CE”. Pgs 54-55.
b – Map of “The Development of Complex Societies in Africa ”. Pg 160.
* Ghana , Anbiya, & Gao are derived from:
* North African borders are derived from:
* Sao Civilization (collapsing) is derived from:
II – Asian Information
* Asian information is derived primarily from these sources:
* Arab Empire (Abbasid Caliphate) borders are derived from:
* Central Asia & Steppe Tribes are derived from:
* Chinese Empire (Tang Dynasty) borders are from:
* Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan):
* Japanese Islands information is from:
* Khazar Khanate borders:
* Korean & Manchurian information:
* Roman (Byzantine) Empire borders:
* Southeast Asia (including Champa, Chenla, Dvaravati, Nanzhao, Pyu, modern Indonesia, etc.):
* Tibetan Empire borders are derived from a combination of:
Note: User:Porikolpok_Oxom created this map of “Kamarupa_7th-8th_Century_AD.jpg”, which depicts different borders
for Kamarupa, Gauda, Tripura, and Manipur.
Note: The DK Atlas depicts Tibet ’s borders (c. 800 AD) including northern India for the entire length of
Note: Herrmann’s map depicts Tibetan control over Kamarupa, Bengal, and Pala in 750 AD
Note: Nelson’s map depicts Tibetan control only over the Tibetan plateau region.
Note: States that Nepal ’s Licchavi Dynasty became vassals of Tibet in the early 600s AD. Also notes the Pala Empire
under King Dharmapala accepted Tibetan overlordship.
Note: Describes Tibetan activities in India during the reign of King Songtsän Gampo of Tibet and King Harsha Vardhana
of Kannauj. Also describes Tibetan sovereignty over Kamarupa and Kannauj after the death of King Harsha.
Note: The articles state that Tibet & Nepal led a joint attack on Harsha’s successor in 648 AD, and subjugated
northern India in retaliation for an Indian attack on a Chinese envoy named Xuanzang.
(ISBN 0-8047-0806-1 cloth; ISBN 0-8047-0901-7 pbk., pp. 58-59)
* Uyghur Khaganate information is derived from:
III – European Information
* European information is derived primarily from:
Note: User:Bogomolov.PL has discovered possible errors in some of my European borders
compared to this source, due to the different geographical layout of the maps.
Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies.
800 AD Charlemagne- Emperor Of The West- Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Leo III on December 25th — Christmas Day — in St. Peters Church. Pope Leo allowed Charlemagne to clear himself of a series of charges. The coronation of Charlemagne represented an irrevocable breach between Constantinople and Rome.
World map 50 BC
Primary Sources for East-Hem_050bc.jpg:
World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com.
I – African information
* North Africa borders and tribal locations are from:
* Sub-Saharan Africa tribal locations are from:
(Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.)
II – Asian Information
Note: Asian information is derived primarily from a combination of these sources:
* Asia Minor (Anatolia) information (inc. Galatia, Cappadocia, Roman, & Armenian borders):
* Central Asia peoples and borders are derived from:
* Chinese Empire (Han Dynasty):
* Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan):
* Indo-Greek Kingdoms are derived from:
* Korean & Manchurian information is from:
* Pahlava (Indo-Parthian) Empire borders derive from:
possibly the Surena family, along the empire’s eastern border).
* Parthian Empire borders derive from:
* Southeast Asian borders: (Funan, Sa Huynh Culture, Malay Kingdoms, Pyu Cities, etc.)
III – European Information
* European information is derived from:
* Dacian borders are derived from:
Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies.
Roman Republic
Consuls: Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Claudius Marcellus.
The Senate refuses Julius Caesar permission to stand for consul in absentia, and demands that he lay down his command.
The Roman artillery piece called Scorpio is invented.
Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus, detail of a wall painting in the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, is made (approximate date).
The Roman Republic takes control of Judea (approximate date).
World map 100 BC
Primary Sources for East-Hem_100bc.jpg:
World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com.
Harvard University Press, 1935. Available at http://huhai.net.
Part of the Digital South Asia Library.
I – African information
* North Africa borders and tribal locations are from:
(Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.)
* Ptolemaic Kingdom borders are from:
* Sub-Saharan Africa tribal locations are from:
(Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.)
II – Asian Information
* Chinese Empire (Han Dynasty):
* Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan):
Indo-Greek Kingdoms
Mahameghavahana Dynasty
Satavahana Dynasty
Sunga Dynasty
* Judea borders are derived from:
* Kangju is derived from:
* Korea (Jin) borders are from:
* Min-Yue borders are derived from:
* Palmyra borders are derived from a combination of:
* Parthian Empire borders are derived from:
* Sakastan borders come from:
* Steppe Tribes (Chien-kun, Chu-she, Chu-shih, Dingling, Donghu, Hu-chieh, etc.) are from:
* Syrian borders (Seleucids, Palmyra, Osroene, Adiabene, etc.) are derived from:
* Note: Seleucid rule over the “spur” of land west of Judea is derived from
* Xiongnu/Hsiung-nu Khanate:
III – European Information
* Celtic Tribes and locations are derived from:
* Germanic Peoples location is derived from:
* Roman Empire is well documented. Here are some of the better sources I used:
Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies.
Roman Republic
Consuls: Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Gaius Marius (Marius’s sixth consulship).
Manius Aquillius celebrates an ovation for victories in the Second Servile War.
Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, a tribune, passes a law to redistribute land to military veterans. The law requires that all senators swear to abide by it. Quintus Caecilus Metellus Numidicus refuses and is exiled. He goes to Rhodes to study philosophy.
Late summer–autumn: Saturninus stands for tribune again for the following year, and is elected. His associate, the praetor Gaius Servilius Glaucia, attempts to stand for the consulship (illegally, as praetors cannot immediately become consul). A rival candidate, Gaius Memmius, is found murdered by agents of Saturninus and Glaucia, who are declared public enemies by the Senate. The Senate issues the senatus consultum ultimum, and Marius, as consul, defeats his former ally in battle in the Forum. Saturninus and his followers surrender on condition that their lives are spared, but they are stoned to death with roof tiles in the Curia Hostilia by renegade senators.
The building of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, Palestrina, Italy, is begun. The model of it is now kept at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Italy (approximate date).
Asia Minor
Tigranes II of Armenia is placed on the Armenian throne by the Parthians in exchange for the cession of “seventy valleys”. (approximate date)
Animation: How the European Map Has Changed Over 2,400 Years
October 28, 2021
How the European Map Has Changed Over 2,400 Years
The history of Europe is breathtakingly complex. While there are rare exceptions like Andorra and Portugal, which have had remarkably static borders for hundreds of years, jurisdiction over portions of the continent’s landmass have changed hands innumerable times.
Today’s video comes to us from YouTube channel Cottereau, and it shows the evolution of European map borders starting from 400 BC. Empires rise and fall, invasions sweep across the continent, and modern countries slowly begin to take shape (with the added bonus of an extremely dramatic instrumental).
Below are nine highlights and catalysts that shifted the dividing lines of the European map:
146 BC – A Year of Conquest
146 BC was a year of conquest and expansion for the Roman Republic. The fall of Carthage left the Romans in control of territory in North Africa, and the ransack and destruction of the Greek city-state of Corinth also kickstarted an era of Roman influence in that region. These decisive victories paved the way for the Roman Empire’s eventual domination of the Mediterranean.
117 AD – Peak Roman Empire
The peak of the Roman Empire is one of the more dramatic moments shown on this animated European map. At its height, under Trajan, the Roman Empire was a colossal 1.7 million square miles (quite a feat in an era without motorized vehicles and modern communication tools). This enormous empire remained mostly intact until 395, when it was irreparably split into Eastern and Western regions.
370 AD – The Arrival of the Huns
Spurred on by severe drought conditions in Central Asia, the Huns reached Europe and found a Roman Empire weakened by currency debasement, economic instability, overspending, and increasing incursions from rivals along its borders.
The Huns waged their first attack on the Eastern Roman Empire in 395, but it was not until half a century later—under the leadership of Attila the Hun—that hordes pushed deeper into Europe, sacking and razing cities along the way. The Romans would later get their revenge when they attacked the quarreling Goths and Huns, bouncing the latter out of Central Europe.
1241 – The Mongol Invasion of Europe
In the mid-13th century, the “Golden Horde” led by grandsons of Genghis Khan, roared into Russia and Eastern Europe sacking cities along the way. Facing invasion from formidable Mongol forces, central European princes temporarily placed their regional conflicts aside to defend their territory. Though the Mongols were slowly pushed eastward, they loomed large on the fringes of Europe until almost the 16th century.
1362 – Lithuania
Today, Lithuania is one of Europe’s smallest countries, but at its peak in the middle ages, it was one of the largest states on the continent. A pivotal moment for Lithuania came after a decisive win at the Battle of Blue Waters. This victory stifled the expansion of the Golden Horde, and brought present-day Ukraine into its sphere of influence.
1648 – Kleinstaaterei
The end of the Holy Roman Empire highlights the extreme territorial fragmentation in Germany and neighboring regions, in an era referred to as Kleinstaaterei.
Even as coherent nation states formed around it, the Holy Roman Empire and its remnants wouldn’t coalesce until Germany rose from the wreckage of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Unification helped position Germany as a major power, and by 1900 the country had the largest economy in Europe.
1919 – The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire—a fixture in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years—was in its waning years by the beginning of the 20th century. The empire had ceded territory in two costly wars with Italy and Balkan states, and by the time the dust cleared on WWI, the borders of the newly minted nation of Turkey began at the furthest edge of continental Europe.
1942 – Expanding and Contracting Germany
At the furthest extent of Axis territory in World War II, Germany and Italy controlled a vast portion of continental Europe. The map below shows occupied land and areas of influence at the height of Germany’s territorial expansion.
After the war, Germany again became fragmented into occupation zones—this time, overseen by the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Germany would not be made whole again until 1990, when a weakening Soviet Union loosened its grip on East Germany.
1991 – Soviet Dissolution
In the decades following WWII, the political boundaries of the European map remained relatively stable—that is, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost overnight, the country’s entire western border splintered into independent nations. When the dust settled, there were 15 breakaway republics, six of which were in Europe.
Bonus: If you liked the video above, be sure to watch this year-by-year account of who ruled territories across Europe.
World History
This article consists of a timeline of world history, followed by an article outlining the history of the world. It covers world history from 3500 BCE to 2005 CE.
Contents :
1. The Origins of Civilization
Up until about 12,000 years ago, all humans were hunter-gatherers: that is, they lived by hunting wild game, fishing, and gathering fruits and berries. They lived in small bands, following a mobile lifestyle as they followed animal herds and moved to where more plants could be found. They owned only what they could easily carry on their backs, which meant erecting shelters from branches and stones at a new site. In a few favored places, particularly on sea coasts where large stocks of marine foods were to be had, such as on the coasts of China, larger and more stable communities were able to develop.
Early farming
From about 8,000 BCE, some groups started growing their own food. This development was almost certainly linked to climate changes after the end of the last Ice Age. It first took place in the Middle East, where a range of edible grasses – wheat, emmer, barley – grow wild. These were the easiest plants to domesticate.
Sometime later, people in the Middle East began to domesticate animals, at first sheep, goats and pigs, and later cattle (dogs had already been domesticated thousands of years before). These provided a range of useful resources: meat, milk, skins and wool. They also provided their dung as fertilizer for the fields. Cattle, especially oxen, were soon used to draw early plows, which made preparing fields quicker, easier and more effective.
Farming and related technologies also emerged separately in the Yangtze Valley in China, sometime between 6000 and 5000 BCE. This was based on rice, which grows wild here. Chickens and water buffalo were also domesticated. In the Yellow River Valley to the north, millet farming developed. Crop cultivation also arose in New Guinea at an early date, but it remained confined to the interior of the island.
The spread of farming
Agriculture was able to support a denser population than hunter-gathering could do, so the farming populations began to expand and spread out across Eurasia. From the Middle East, wheat farming spread west into and across Europe and North Africa, eastward into India, and southward down the Nile Valley. There it met a barrier: where the topical zone starts, temperate crops cannot grow.
Rice, which can grow in the tropics, spread into South East Asia, and later to India; and it also became acclimatized to cooler climates in Korea and Japan. Millet farming seems not to have spread beyond northern China.
Tropical farming in Africa required the domestication of a whole new set of plants, involving different techniques in cultivation. On the savannas, sorghum and (tropical) millet were grown (probably from the early second millennium BCE), while in the topical rainforest belt straddling central Africa, fruit and root plants such as plantains and yams were cultivated (probably from about the beginning of the first millennium BCE).
Peoples in much of South East Asia did not change over to agriculture until migrants came in from the north, from southern China; some of these same migrants became the ancestors of the Pacific islanders, exploring and settling the Pacific islands, They not only brought with them the first farming, but were in fact the first humans to arrive in those isolated spots.
Agriculture developed entirely independently in the Americas; this, and the development of Pre-Columbian civilization, will be treated in a separate section, below. (Note: not yet completed)
Pastoral peoples
In many areas, especially in the Middle East and the steppes of central Asia, the climate is too dry for anything more than limited farming. Here, people specialized in animal rearing. This pastoralism gave rise to a nomadic way of life, which came more into its own with the domestication of the horse on the central Asian steppes. This occurred in the mid-fourth millennium BCE. It was only much later, about 1000 BCE, that horses large enough for riding on were bred; this gave these peoples more mobility. At about the same time the camel was domesticated, in Arabia. This opened the way for the emergence of Bedouin tribes.
The arid grasslands on which nomadic peoples grazed their flocks and herds supported a much smaller concentration of people than true farming was able to, yet these groups were to play a major part, out of all proportion to their numbers, in shaping world history. Their lifestyle made for a tough, mobile, way of life, an excellent training for formidable warriors. They took to regularly raiding each other and the farming peoples bordering the steppes, and from time to time conquered large territories of much larger settled populations. They also often took to trading, thus fostering links between different farming regions of Eurasia.
In the fourth, third and second millennia BCE, the steppes saw the expansion of a group of peoples who spoke a language ancestral to a large number of modern tongues labelled “Indo-European” (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Iranian, Hindi and many more). From their original homeland, probably in the modern Ukraine, they moved westward into Europe, probably as a warrior elite; there they would be central to the development of the German, Celtic, Greek and Italian peoples; southward into the Middle East, where they became the ruling class in the Hittite kingdom and many other states; southeastward into the Indian subcontinent, where they became the upper strata in the Aryan society of northern India; and eastwards towards China. Here they would impart their nomadic techniques to unrelated peoples – the Turks and tribes closely related to the Chinese – and these would later oust the Indo-Europeans, first from the eastern steppes and later from the western steppes as well.
Irrigation farming and the origins of civilization
From around 5000 BCE, a new kind of farming developed, based on irrigation. This arose in areas of very dry climate, but with streams and rivers coming down from higher ground and flowing through them. The construction of dykes, damns, water channels, ponds and, in due course, of full-blown canals allowed farmers to settle these river plains.
The rich soil brought down by the rivers and spread over the land in the spring floods, made the land very fertile, and allowed the population to expand far beyond anything seen to this date. Crop yields were abundant enough to allow surpluses over and above the needs of the farmers, so that groups of non-farming specialists were able to develop – full-time rulers and warriors, and professional priests, scribes and craftsmen. It was on these river plains that the earliest urban settlements (that is, towns and cities) arose, and with them large, monumental temples, royal palaces, stout city-walls, and their inhabitants developed a huge range of new skills. Writing, mathematics, astronomy, administration, law-making, engineering, architecture, and refined crafts such as metallurgy and fine textiles appeared. The potter’s wheel was invented about now; the wheel would later be adapted for use with carts, starting the long history of wheeled vehicles (though there real usefulness would have to await the coming of well-made roads).
2. Early Civilizations
The first true civilization in the Middle East emerged in Mesopotamia in the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Here, a people called the Sumerians lived in numerous small cities, the centers of the earliest true states.
By the end of the fourth millennium, a second civilization had appeared in the Middle East. This was Ancient Egypt, located along the banks of the River Nile. By the mid-third millennium BCE, the Egyptians were building some of the most iconic structures in world history, the Great Pyramids of Giza.
A third great civilization had appeared, in the Indus Valley of northwest India. Meanwhile, from Mesopotamia and Egypt, trade routes spread urban, literate civilization to neighboring regions of the Middle East – Asia Minor, Syria, Canaan and southern Iran.
The Bronze Age and the spread of civilization
Sometime between the beginning and middle of the third millennium BCE, metallurgists in one of the Sumerian cities succeeded in alloying copper with tin to make bronze. This was a tougher metal, and it was soon became apparent that it was ideal for making weapons and armor. This set off a demand for tin and copper, which are only found in widely scattered locations. Trade routes from Mesopotamia, and later Egypt, began reaching out to ever more distant places: eastward into Iran and India, and westward towards the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean and on into south-eastern Europe, southwards down the Nile Valley into Nubia.
Sometime around the end of the third millennium BCE much of the seaborne trade of the Mediterranean came under the control of a people known to modern scholars as the Minoans, on the island of Crete. On the strength of this they were able to build a magnificent palace-based civilization. Within a few centuries some small states such as Mycenae, on mainland Greece, had also developed a literate culture.
The use of bronze rippled out across Eurasia, and reached the Yellow River Valley in northern China, at about the same time as writing developed and the first cities were appearing in the region. The first of the long series of Chinese dynasties, the Shang dynasty, emerged into history about 1700 BCE.
Even in regions far from the areas of core river valley civilization, some non-literate and non-urban Bronze Age societies were able to construct imposing monuments. Probably the most famous example of these is Stonehenge, in southern England.
These advances were offset in the early second millennium BCE by the abandonment – for reasons not as yet understood – of the large cities of the Indus Valley.
The end of the Bronze Age
The middle second millennium BCE saw the height of the Bronze Age world: New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite empire, the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylon, and further afield the Shang kingdom of northern China, were all powerful, well-organized states. They all had armies built around that dashing pieces of military equipment, the chariot, were administered by bureaucracies of scribes and overseers, and carried on sophisticated diplomacy amongst themselves (except China, which was too far away from the other civilizations to have any diplomatic relations with them).
Towards the end of the millennium, disaster struck, at least in the west. A large-scale movement of peoples from Europe into the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East caused civilizations like the Mycenaean and Hittites to collapse, the ancient city-states of Syria and Canaan to vanish, Babylonia to fall into chaos and Assyria and Egypt to draw in on themselves.
The Iron Age
During these troubled centuries, however, several advances of great importance to world history occurred. The use of iron began spreading outwards from Asia Minor, and over the first half of the first millennium BCE would reach across Europe to Britain in the west, and across Asia to China in the east. It also spread south into sub-Saharan Africa, where it enabled a small group of Bantu farmers to rapidly expand almost throughout the whole of that region.
The abundance of iron made it a far cheaper material than bronze, and increasingly allowed ordinary farmers to use tough metal tools in cultivating their land. This made farming much more efficient, and laid the foundations for new developments in civilization.
Iron could be used in warfare, making metal armor and weaponry much more widely available.
The Alphabet
A third development in these centuries was the spread of alphabetic writing, which made literacy accessible to a wider section of society. This had originated in the Middle East in the late Bronze Age, and was now carried by the Phoenicians to hitherto non-literate peoples in the Mediterranean region – the Greeks, Lydians, and Italian peoples such as the Etruscans.
In the same centuries alphabet writing spread eastwards as well. Under the succession of Middle Eastern empires, the Aramaic alphabet (and language) spread through Mesopotamia, and then to Iran and northern India.
3. Civilizations of the Classical Era I
The Middle East recovers
The time of troubles ended about 900 BCE in the Middle East, and the ancient civilizations of the region were soon on the rise again. The following centuries saw the rise of the Assyrian empire. This was followed by the short-lived Babylonian empire (c. 612 to 539 BCE), and then by the Persian empire (539 to 331 BCE).
These empires pioneered imperial techniques which would be followed throughout history: large armies composed of mass formations of infantry and cavalry; provincial administration based on governors appointed from the center; and an empire-spanning system of roads, along which government couriers could move easily;
Greek civilization
It was not the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, however, which felt the greatest impact of the spreading use of iron in farming, industry and war, and of the new alphabetic writing. It was in regions bordering the Middle East which were revolutionized by these new developments: the Mediterranean basin and northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. Previously on the margins of the great Bronze Age world of the Middle East, these now developed brilliant civilizations of their own.
In the Mediterranean, the Greeks developed a vibrant urban civilization based on a multitude of tiny city-states. Confined as they were valleys their hunger for land drove many of them to send out colonies all over the Mediterranean and Black Seas. This enabled their merchants and sailors to come to dominate the maritime trade routes of the region.
Internally, these Greek city-states underwent a political revolution, getting rid of their kings and becoming the first republics in world history. Some, most notably Athens, went on to become full-blown democracies.
Indian civilization
In the Indian subcontinent, meanwhile, cities reappeared after a thousand years’ absence. These were not now in the Indus Valley, but in the Ganges Plain to the east. This became the new heartland Indian civilization. These cities were the centers of organized states, and were tied together in a growing trade system, this one based on the river transport enabled by the Ganges and its tributaries. Most of these were kingdoms, but there were also states which were not, and modern scholars often refer to them as republics. These latter seem to have been governed by councils of clan chiefs.
Chinese civilization under the Zhou dynasty
Thousands of miles away in East Asia, the Chinese of the Yellow River valley remained untouched by the revolutions disturbing the west. Iron-using reached the region in about the 9th century BCE. As elsewhere it led to increased productivity and population growth. However, there was not at first the same revolutionary impact. The state remained much the same as before, a monarchy, and the Chinese pictographic script was never replaced by an alphabetical one.
Change, however, did come. The unity of the Chinese state was shattered in the early 8th century, and it fragmented into a number of smaller states. These soon engaged in a fierce struggle for dominance, and to survive they had to field large armies and, to support these, strong centralized bureaucracies.
A time of intellectual advance
In the mid-first millennium BCE, all the major civilizations of Eurasia moved into a “Classical” phase, characterized by revolutions in intellectual and religious thought. The flourishing of Greek speculation; the rise of monotheism in the Middle East, of which Judaism would be the most influential; the emergence of new world religious movements in India, most notably Buddhism; and the period of “100 Schools” in China which produced above all the hugely influential Confucian philosophy: all these left a mark which has helped shaped human history up to the present day.
Empires of the Classical Era
Apart from in the Middle East, the first half of the first millennium BCE saw the rise of numerous states, constantly at war amongst themselves: indeed, this fierce competition amongst them almost certainly contributed to the dramatic developments in thought noted above. These struggles ultimately led to the rise of “universal empires” which covered the whole of their respective culture areas.
Alexander the Great
In the Mediterranean, the constant fighting between the tiny Greek city-states of Greece opened the way for the rise of the northern kingdom of Macedon, which came to the dominate them. Then, the brilliant Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, led a Greek-Macedonian army in the conquest of the vast Persian empire.
This episode is notable as being one of the few cases in world history where forces from one culture area (in this instance, the Mediterranean) succeeded in annexing almost the whole territory of another culture area (the Middle East); and indeed Alexander went on to conquer large parts of a third (the Indian subcontinent).
Alexander’s empire only lasted a few short years before his early death, and then fragmented into several kingdoms. His “universal empire” thus proved abortive. Nevertheless, his conquests had a huge impact. The successor kingdoms retained a Greek-speaking ruling class, and Greek culture mingled with native Middle Eastern elements to produce a rich hybrid civilization which modern scholars label “Hellenistic”.
The Mauryan empire
By the fifth century BCE, northern India was covered by a network of states, and out of their struggles arose the Mauryan empire. At its height, this was ruled by one of the most attractive rulers in world history, Asoka. He renounced warfare and instead devoted himself to the welfare of his subjects.
Unfortunately, the Mauryan empire soon fragmented into different states, until at length a new imperial power, the Gupta empire, emerged to rule northern India. This presided over a “Golden Age” of Indian civilization.
Imperial dynasties in China
In China, a “universal empire” was achieved when a winner emerged from the struggles between the states. This was the state of Qin; but its empire, like Alexander’s, did not outlast its first emperor. However, after a few years of chaos, a new dynasty emerged, the Han, which ruled a united China for 400 years.
The Roman empire
We noted above that Alexander the Great’s conquests did not result in a long-lasting empire. A much more durable “universal empire” was achieved with the rise of Rome. Over the course of several centuries the Romans grew their power from that of a single city-state to an empire covering the entire Mediterranean basis plus western and parts of central Europe.
Starting out as a republic, like most other city-states of the region, this form of government soon proved inadequate to the challenge of holding together a huge empire, and so the Romans adopted a monarchical power structure under the rule of emperors. Under them, the Roman empire endured for more than 400 years.
Iranian empires – Parthian and Sasanian
In the Middle East, where “universal empires” had preceded those in other regions by many centuries, was left divided between two imperial powers. In the west, the Roman empire took control of Asia minor, Syria, Judaea and Egypt, while in the east, Iranian powers (first the Parthians, then the Sasanians) ruled Mesopotamia and Iran.
The Sasanian empire outlasted all the other empires of Classical Antiquity. It was conquered by Muslim armies in the 7th century CE and incorporated into the new Islamic Caliphate.
The impact of empires
All these great empires developed the same kind of imperial techniques first seen in the Assyrian empire: large, well-organized armies, provincial administration answering to the center, roads criss-crossing their huge territories, public postal systems manned by a system of couriers, and so on.
They all had a huge impact, not only within their own cultural sphere, but well beyond. In all cases, they greatly expanded the reach of their respective culture areas. The Roman empire spread Mediterranean civilization far into Europe; the Mauryan empire carried Aryan culture deep down towards south India and initiated strong links with Sri Lanka, and probably with South East Asia as well; and the Qin and Han empires in China absorbed southern China and began the process of drawing the East Asian countries of Korea, Japan and Vietnam into Chinese civilization’s cultural orbit.
The existence of these powerful states and the peace and prosperity which they brought their inhabitants acted as a powerful boost to the trading links between them. The “Silk Road”, that great trade route across Asia linking China in the east and the Mediterranean in the west developed in these centuries, in response to the demand for goods by Han China on the one hand and first the Hellenistic kingdoms, and then the Parthian, Sasanian and Roman empires, on the other. Later, a second, even more influential route opened up across the Indian Ocean.
These routes strengthened cultural interactions between regions. Buddhism spread from India to China, and both Hindu and Buddhist traders carried their faiths (and the cultural package that went with them) to the lands of South East Asia. Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity, spread around the Roman empire, and also around the Parthian empire, largely as a result of the existence of scattered trading communities. Eventually, Christianity, in what seems against all the odds, became the dominant religion within the Roman empire.
Greek culture was brought to northern India where it mingled with indigenous influences to produce the Gandhara culture, whose influences can be seen in later Indian, Chinese and Persian civilization.
Fall of empires
All the imperial regimes felt a responsibility to put a defense cordon round their territories to defend their subjects from the turbulent “barbarians” beyond their frontiers. And not without reason: with the exception of the Mauryan empire, these external invaders played a major part on their downfall. But internal weaknesses may have been more important, at least in some cases: above all, internal rebellion undermined their strength to resist invasion.
What happened after the fall of these empires was different in each case. The Sasanian empire, as we have noted, simply became a constituent part of the Islamic caliphate, passing its institutions and culture on almost intact. The Mauryan empire passed its institutions and culture on to its successor kingdoms, without any significant modification. The same thing occurred with the later Gupta empire.
There was also near-complete continuity between the Han empire and its successor states. However, a century or so later, barbarian invaders set up kingdoms in the north, and these did bring about some major modifications; however, the central features of Chinese civilization survived and were passed on, with some changes, to future eras.
There was no such continuity in the west. The fall of the western Roman empire to barbarian invaders led to a dramatic decline of classical Mediterranean civilization here, and the eastern Roman empire, which survived this catastrophe, soon faced other serious threats. As a result it underwent fundamental transformations to reemerge as a very different entity, known to modern scholars as the Byzantine empire.
The word “medieval” means “middle”, or “in-between”; and it is tempting to see the centuries between 500 CE and 1450 CE as an “in-between” time when the glories of classical civilization lay behind and the achievements of the modern world lay ahead. The more recent term “post-classical” is even more dismissive, suggesting that the histories of these centuries as a mere after-word on the truly significant times that came before.
This period was truly transformative, however. It saw linkages strengthen between the different big regions of the world and key technologies spread around the world. At the same time it saw the great culture traditions consolidate their hold on their regions, sharpening the differences between the civilizations. In all these ways, the Medieval centuries built on and modified the achievements of the Classical world, and in so doing paved the way for the rise of the modern world.
The world of Islam
One of the defining episodes in the early medieval era was the rise of the Muslim caliphate in the 7th century, and its spread over the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, parts of central Asia and into the Indian subcontinent. This was the achievement of Arab tribes, who were fighting in the name of their new religion, Islam.
This vast state fragmented into numerous successor states from the 9th century onwards, but the Islamic faith continued to strengthen its hold on the peoples of the region, and spread out to new areas of Eurasia.
Western Europe in the early Middle Ages
The successor states to the Roman empire in western Europe were ruled by German tribes who presided over a sharp decline in the urban, literate civilization which the Romans had introduced. Before the region could recover, new invasions from the north (the Vikings) and east (the Magyars) de-stabilized western European in the 8th and 9th centuries, and it was not until the 10th century that sustained recovery began to set in.
This recovery is linked to the emergence of “feudal” Europe, which saw a society ruled by weak kings, strong barons, a powerful Church presided over the pope in Rome, and small towns. The landscape reflected this society in strong stone castles, soaring cathedrals, townscapes dominated by numerous spires, and villages, each with its small church and stout manor house, of rustic cottages.
From the 11th century order gradually returned to western Europe. Populations began to recover; trade expanded, and towns reemerged.
Byzantium and eastern Europe
The eastern half of the Roman empire, meanwhile, endured throughout the medieval centuries, ruled from its capital, Constantinople. In the early middle ages its state, society and culture was radically modified, so that modern scholars do not refer to it as the Roman empire but give it the label “Byzantine empire”.
As in the west, Byzantine society was also devoutly Christian, but they owed their spiritual obedience to the patriarch of Constantinople rather than the pope in Rome. A rift gradually developed between the two branches of Christianity.
The Byzantine (or Orthodox) church experienced dramatic expansion with the conversion of the Balkan populations, and later of the Russians. The Byzantine empire itself, however, experienced a long term shrinkage of its territory, so that by the mid-5th century, apart from its capital, Constantinople, it covered only a small part of Greece.
The Indian subcontinent in the early Middle Ages
India remained covered in numerous kingdoms. From the 8th century onwards Muslim forces began to make their presence felt, and from the 11th century they began their conquest of almost the whole of the subcontinent. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Delhi Sultanate came to rule almost the whole of the region.
During this period, Buddhism finally ceased to have a widespread following in the region of its birth. It became confined to the island of Sri Lanka in the south and to some Himalayan kingdoms (notably Nepal) in the north. Hinduism became the near-universal religion of the mass of the people.
China and East Asia in the early Middle Ages
Northern China, like western Europe, experienced barbarian invasion after the fall of the Han empire. However, as things settled down, the ordered, bureaucratic style of government characteristic of the Han dynasty returned to this area (it had never left southern China).
In the religious sphere, Buddhism came in from India, and became a powerful force in the country.
China was reunified under the Sui dynasty, in 589, and the glorious period of the Tang dynasty, from 618 CE, saw China reach one of its highest points, both in terms of political power and of culture. At this time, the neighboring countries of Korea and Japan were drawn more closely into China’s “sphere of influence”. They acknowledged the political superiority of the Tang empire, sending regular tribute missions to its capital, Chang’an; and they imported wholesale elements of Chinese civilization – bureaucratic government, Confucianism, Buddhism, styles of art and architecture and so on – into their own societies.
Under the following dynasty, the Song, Confucianism was reformed and reinvigorated, so that modern scholars refer to it as Neo-Confucianism. This was accompanied by the eclipse of Buddhism, at least amongst the educated elite. The Song also saw dramatic economic growth, leading to the rise of numerous large cities: under them, Chinese society became much more urban and more commercially orientated. It was during the Song period that several important technological advances were made in China, including the compass, printing and gunpowder.
South East Asia
In this region, centuries of links with the Indian world to the west saw large, well-organized kingdoms emerge. Little is known about the Srivijaya empire in detail, but it seems to have been a trading power, dominating the newly-flourishing trade routes between India and China. It flourished from the 8th to the 11th centuries, and its influence stretched far and wide across the region.
The next state to dominate the region was the Khmer empire, in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Khmer civilization was based in present-day Cambodia, and is remarkable for the series of massive “temple-mountains” it built, especially at Angkor Was, the capital.
By the end of the medieval centuries, the Majapahit empire, based on the island of Java, covered much of insular South East Asia.
Medieval Africa
The medieval period saw the rise and fall of a succession of kingdoms in West Africa. The heartlands of the earlier kingdoms were in the western savannah, where first Ghana, then Mali, then Songhai rose to prominence. Further to the east, in the Lake Chad region, was the kingdom of Kanem-Bornu. Between the western and eastern states, a central bloc of territory saw the rise of the trading city-states of the Hausa people.
These kingdoms owed their power to their control of the trans-Saharan trade routes, and during these centuries merchants from North Africa brought their faith, Islam, with them and converted members of the elite. The general population on the whole remained loyal to paganism, and this set up a religious-political tension in these kingdoms which could be destabilizing at times.
South of the Savannah, the medieval centuries began to see the rise of states in the forest regions. Amongst the earliest were the kingdom of Benin and the Yoruba city-states of present-day south-western Nigeria.
In East Africa, other states emerged at this time. Along the East African coast Muslim traders were instrumental in establishing a string of trading city-states, which soon developed their own distinctive Swahili language and culture. Inland from these, in southern-eastern Africa, their grew kingdoms in the gold-bearing area of present-day Zimbabwe; the most famous of these was centered on the large settlement of the Great Zimbabwe.
In north-east Africa, the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia stood out from amongst its neighbors by adhering to a Christian culture, deriving ultimately from contacts with the eastern Mediterranean of the Byzantine world.
Medieval trends
In the contrasting histories of the different regions, some common trends can be discerned.
Growing populations
The most obvious is population growth. This was a Eurasian-wide development and all the culture areas, with the exception perhaps of the Middle East, experienced it.
The process led to hitherto marginal areas of culture zones becoming more important. In China, population more than doubled between 500 CE and 1450 CE, and southern China overtook the north (the ancient heartland of Chinese civilization) in terms of population and economic importance.
The Indian subcontinent saw the full integration of south India into the Aryan (and by now fully Hindu) civilization of the north.
Western civilization, which in classical times had been predominantly a Mediterranean affair, shifted its center of gravity to western and northern Europe. Its demographic expansion began in the 10th century, after a long period of population (plus economic and cultural) decline in the wake of the fall of the western Roman empire. An important factor was the development of the large horse-drawn plough, which was able to turn the heavy clay soils of northern European areas and bring them under much more effective cultivation.
Growth was not limited to the areas of classical civilization: South East Asia saw the rise of powerful states and striking civilizations – most notably, in medieval times, the Khmer empire. In sub-Saharan Africa, kingdoms began sprouting up in different parts, most famously in West Africa as a result of the camel-powered trans-Saharan trade.
Inter-regional contacts
Linked to this demographic and economic growth, the medieval period saw the development of greater inter-regional contacts, of a military, economic and cultural nature.
The “clash of cultures” of the 11th to 13th centuries known as the Crusades, between Christendom (Europe) and the Islamic world, involved all three elements. Despite the intermittent hostilities, they actually increased trade and cultural transmissions between the two worlds, to the great benefit of Europe in particular.
From the 8th and 12th centuries, the Islamic caliphate fostered a rich fusion cultural elements from ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Persia and India. To these were added major original contributions from Arabic scholars.
The resulting mélange was then disseminated to Europe, bringing, amongst other things, Arabic numerals, the decimal system and a large chunk of Greek philosophy (lost in the West). These all helped to lay key foundations for later Western advances.
From the 8th century, economic growth in China turned that country into a powerful magnate for international trade. The Silk Road across central Asia flourished in medieval times, as did the maritime trade routes of the Indian Ocean.
Muslim traders became active in pioneering and expanding trade routes. They soon dominated the trans-Saharan routes between North and West Africa, which led to the conversion of many West African kings to the faith. They were also major participants in both the Indian Ocean trade and the Silk Road. They established a string of trading city-states along the coast of East Africa and Muslim sultanates began to spread through South East Asia towards the end of medieval period.
The Impact of the People of the Steppes
Another factor in the strengthening of links between regions was the activities of the nomadic peoples of central Asia. Turkish nomadic tribes, having converted to Islam, came to rule most of the states of the Middle East; and it was Turkish warrior leaders who created the Delhi sultanate and conquered most of the Indian subcontinent in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The Mongols
Meanwhile, nomads of the eastern steppes came to rule northern China. The rise of the steppe peoples culminated in the Mongol conquests of the 13th century under Genghis Khan and his successors. These embraced a large part of Eurasia, including the whole of centra Asia, China and Russia, and much of the Middle East. They thus created the largest contiguous empire the world had seen to that date.
Although the Mongol conquests were entirely military affairs, they greatly boosted existing commercial and cultural exchanges between regions. The Silk Road entered a golden age, and the Indian Ocean routes also flourished as never before. It was a period symbolized by the journeys of two famous travelers, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.
Ideas and technologies travelled along these medieval trade routes. In religion, Islam was carried far and wide by its traders, as we have seen. In technology, innovations such as paper and gunpowder, certainly, and possibly printing and the compass as well, rippled out around Eurasia from China.
The Black Death
Sadly, pathogens also spread along the trade routes. The most deadly pandemic in world history, the Black Death, occurred during these centuries. It swept through much of Eurasia, killing between a third and half of the population in the effected areas.
Unsurprisingly, the Mongol empire broke apart along these regional divisions, with different Mongol dynasties ruling in Russia (the Golden Horde), the Middle East (the Il-Khans), and East Asia (the Yuan, founded by Kublai Khan). In the last two instances, the Mongol rulers adopted the religion and culture of their subjects.
After the Mongols
In the 14th and 15th centuries, all the Mongol dynasties, except in central Asia, were ousted by native rebellions; Eurasian politics reverted once again into its constituent culture-areas. The Ming dynasty took control of China; various Turkish groups contested for dominance in the Middle East; – one of these, the Ottomans, succeeded in gaining control of Asia Minor and then invading the Balkan lands of southeast Europe – where they captured the great Christian city of Constantinople and thus put an end to the Byzantine empire; and the Golden Horde were ousted from their control of the Russian principalities by the Grand Prince of Muscovy.
By the end of the medieval period, the populations of Eurasia were recovering strongly from the effects of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of the plague. Renewed population growth stimulated economic activity, and trade links between them were becoming stronger, especially in the Indian Ocean. Cities were expanding, and the way was being paved for the revolutionary transformations which would characterize the modern world.
Europe in particular was experiencing change. The Black Death had changed the economic balance within Europe by creating a shortage of the peasant labor, on which the landowning aristocracy depended. This led to rising wages, increased their purchasing power, and created a rising demand for goods. These trends stimulated trade, craft industries and urban growth.
The civilizations which arose in the Americas followed a quite different path to those of Eurasia and Africa. They could almost have been on a different planet. The patterns identifiable in Asia and Africa – great river valleys, Bronze Age, Iron Age and so on – are absent here.
Constraints
Farming
Agriculture came much later to the Americas, mainly because there were not the abundance of edible grasses that there were in the “Old World”. Perhaps for the same reason, however, when agriculture did emerge, it was based on a much greater variety of plants than in Eurasia, including potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, cassavas, beans, tobacco, avocado and cacao.
It was almost as if the Americans took delight in the challenge of domesticating the most unlikely plants; indeed the one grass which did become a staple crop, corn, took a very long time to turn from its wild form into a suitable crop.
Animals
Another difference between the environments of the “Old World” and “New World” was that in the latter there were fewer animals suitable for domestication. This was true of beasts of burden – in the Americas, the llama is the largest of these, and it has nowhere near the size and strength of oxen or horses – but also of smaller animals. There were no equivalents of sheep or goat in the Americas. Compared with Eurasia, this placed a severe constraint economic productivity. Not only was overland transport limited, but meat was harder to come by, crops could not benefit from animal manure, diets could not be supplemented by dairy produce, animal hides were not available for clothing, and plowing was limited to human energy.
Metals
A final point to make is that the Americans never used metals for practical purposes, whether in farming or warfare. They certainly knew about metals – the fabulous objects made with gold, silver or copper illustrate this – and they knew how to smelt them.
However, tin is apparently much rarer even than in Eurasia, at least in deposits that can be easily reached. This meant that bronze working never developed (bronze being an alloy of copper and tin). In Eurasia t he techniques developed and honed for bronze working were crucial for iron working as well, so an Iron Age never arrived in the New World. Given the profound boost that first bronze, then, even more so, iron, gave to the development of civilization in Eurasia, the lack of useful metals must have slowed the rise of high cultures.
Impressive achievements
All these things makes the achievements of such cultures as the Moche, the Maya, the people of Teotihuacan, the Incas and the Aztecs, all the more impressive. The cultures of Mesoamerica developed sophisticated writing systems and mathematics – the Maya discovered the concept of zero around the same time that it was discovered in the Old World, in India. The Spaniards were astonished at the size of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, a city larger than any in Spain at that time; and the Inca conquered and administered an empire that was large by any standards, and had an impressive road network, postal system and ability to organize labor on a mass scale.
Two heartlands
There were two main heartlands of American civilization – Central America (often known as “Mesoamerican”), on the one hand, and the area of northwest South America which is modern-day Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Much of this region is covered by the highlands and mountains of the Andes, but these drop down to a narrow plain which borders on the Pacific ocean.
Central America
In Central America, the Olmec people were the first to develop such features of civilization as monumental art and architecture. Their culture began to produce such works around 1500 BCE.
To what extent the Olmec were an urban society is the subject of debate. However, they were succeeded by cultures which were truly urban in nature, and also literate. The Zatopec, Maya and Teotihuacan civilizations were the outstanding examples. In many respects, the Maya city-states brought Pre-Columbian civilization to its highest point.
All these civilizations had vanished or gone into decline by 1000 CE, clearing the way for the final great civilization to emerge in Mesoamerica, that of the Aztecs. Their empire was still expanding when it encountered the diseases, guns and horses of the Spanish conquistador, Henan Cortez and his small band.
The Pacific coast of northwest South America was the cradle of South American civilization. In the early first millennium BCE, the great ceremonial center of Chavin de Huantar was built. This gives its name to the period known as the Chavin Horizon, which lasted until c. 200 BCE. This was centered in the Andean highlands; the next “horizon” to emerge was centered on the coastal city of Moche, and lasted from c. 100 CE to 750 CE.
There followed a period of regional cultures, before probably the most sophisticated civilization of Pre-Columbian South America, emerged, that of the Chimor. This was centered on the large coastal city of Chan Chan.
The final phase of Pre-Columbian civilization in South America belongs to the Incas. Their point of origin was in the Andean highlands, and had conquered many of their highland neighbors before expanding into the coastal plain, where they took over the Chimor kingdom and its culture. They then pushed out their borders in all directions to cover an enormous area along the Pacific coast of South America.
As in Central America, this impressive South American state collapsed in the face of the germs, horses and guns of the Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro.
We now turn to the developments within Eurasia which led to the Europeans arriving in the Americas.
The early modern world was characterized by several key developments, all of which had their origins in the Medieval world but now began to come into their own.
The first of these was the emergence of a bundle of technologies which gave Eurasian societies additional power. Gunpowder warfare, both on land and sea, was one of these. Printing was another. Advances in navigation and shipbuilding were also crucial.
All these affected that region of Eurasia which had, during the Medieval period, appeared to lag behind the rest. This was Europe, and the second characteristic of the early modern age was the rise – in military power, territorial reach, commercial success and technological advance – of European civilization to a position of leadership in the world.
Closely associated with this process was a third characteristic: the contact between the “Old World” of Europe, Asia and Africa and the “New World” of North and South America. The “Columbian” exchanges which followed had a truly transformative impact on both hemispheres.
The Rise of Europe
Transformation
These developments paved the way for a major transition in Europe. The first manifestation of this was the flowering of the Italian Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries). This saw itself as a rebirth of Greek and Roman learning; in fact it was nothing less than a revolution in European thinking. It made scholars take responsibility for their own search for truth, rather than relying on the authority of preceding generations.
In doing so, it gave birth to two further movements, the Scientific Revolution, and the Reformation. Both these occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Reformation split the Christian church into two camps, Catholic and Protestant, and set European nations against each other.
Out of these struggles emerged the nation-states of Europe, in which centralized royal power rather than localized baronial power formed the driving force. This change was made possible by the advent of the cannon, which shifted military advantage decisively away from nobles and towards monarchs; but the ideological identities created by the wars of religion gave these new centralized states a much larger measure of support from the broad population.
One of the political upheavals of the Reformation period was the struggle between king and parliament in 17th century England, These culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9. This resulted in the triumph of parliament, and to the establishment of a “constitutional monarchy”. One element of this political settlement was the guaranteeing of the rights of individual citizens in law. During the 18th and 19th centuries, on the foundations laid here would evolve the first parliamentary democracy in the world.
The Scientific Revolution and Reformation gave birth to the Enlightenment, of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Its development was boosted by the democratic (for the time) political settlement in England. Enlightenment thinkers called for rational solutions to issues of all kinds, whether scientific, political or social.
These political, cultural and religious developments between them transformed the mindset of educated Europeans. The new ideas were propagated by the development of the printing press, which created an unstoppable momentum for change.
Exploration, discovery and expansion
Concurrently with these developments within Europe were the voyages of discovery which European explorers were making.
Interestingly, the Ming dynasty of China had already organized similar expeditions in the early 15th century, taking Chinese ships as far as Africa. These voyages were soon abandoned, however. The mid-15th century European voyages, on the other hand, were just the start. The profits that these voyages were soon yielding, and the rivalry between Europe’s nation-states, ensured that overseas exploration received sustained support from their royal courts.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, European ships visited all the oceans of the world, except perhaps the Antarctic. They discovered that India, South East Asia and China were reachable from Europe by sea. Most dramatically, they stumbled across a massive landmasses of North and South America and transformed the trajectory of world history by linking the Eastern and Western Hemispheres together.
On the back of these discoveries, maritime trade networks were set up, spanning the oceans of the world and reaching out along the coasts of Eurasia – in Africa, India and South East Asia, and even (as tiny toe-holds) in China and Japan. The produce of far flung lands was soon flowing back to Europe in European ships.
The Americas
In the Americas something different and even more dramatic occurred. The first European expedition there, led by Christopher Columbus, was followed by many other voyages which mapped the coasts of the newly-discovered continents. This initial period of discovery was followed by one of conquest. The early- to mid-16th centuries saw the Inca and Aztec civilizations of these regions, heirs to millennia of cultural development, wiped out and in their place huge empires ruled from Spain and Portugal established.
In the 17th century, northern Europeans, primarily English and French, colonized the east coast of North America.
The Americas effectively became vast new extensions of European civilization. This process was tragically aided by the spread of European diseases amongst the native populations of the Americas, which, helped by European brutality, led to a drastic drop in numbers.
The Columbian Exchange
For the denuding of the Americas of their native inhabitants led to the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Millions of Africans, captured in their homeland, were forcibly shipped to the Americas and put to work as slaves on sugar plantations, in silver mines, and wherever else forced labor was needed. In due course, people of African descent came to form a major component of the new population mix in the Americas.
The rise of African-American slavery was just one element in a wider process which modern scholars call the “Columbian Exchange”. From Europe came settlers, together with their crops and domestic animals, their ways of life, their technologies, their deadly germs, and of course their African slaves. From America to Europe came crops such as maize, potatoes and squashes; and an abundance of natural resources such as furs, timbers and precious metals.
The American crops formed a valuable supplement to European ones and acted as a major boost to population growth throughout the whole of Eurasia. Meanwhile precious metals from America boosted commerce, both between regions and within them. The economies of Europe, India and China all benefitted from the stimulus that silver from America provided.
Nevertheless, the profits from the new trans-global trade disproportionately profited Europeans, as it was they who ultimately controlled it and therefore set the terms by which it was conducted. They also evolved the tools for further expansion at this time, such as ever-more refined sailing ships and weaponry, joint-stock companies, stick exchanges, more sophisticated insurance, and new kinds of investment banking.
Limits to European Power in the Early Modern Age
Apart from in the Americas, the 15th to 18th centuries saw European expansion limited to coastal areas, and to maritime trade. In much of Eurasia, some of the most powerful empires in world history held sway and barely noticed these off-shore developments.
The 16th century Middle East was contested between the Ottoman empire of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and the Safavid empire of Persia and Iraq. India was under the expanding rule of the Mughal empire, which by the late 17th century covered almost the whole of the subcontinent. In East Asia, the rule of the Ming dynasty in China was replaced in the mid-17th century by the Manchus, a non-Chinese group from central Asia who established the Qing dynasty. This was one of the greatest dynasties in all China’s long history, and expanded China’s borders so that it became the largest empire of the 18th century world, at least in terms of population.
Even in Africa and South East Asia, where there were no huge empires, Europeans were confined to coasts and islands, as they could not establish their power much beyond the range of the ships’ guns. Also, tropical diseases were particularly dangerous to Europeans, and this acted as a serious disincentive to traveling inland, whether for trade or conquest.
The limitations to European power noted above were swept away by the coming of the industrial revolution in Europe and its offshoots, and all that flowed from that.
An Age of Revolution
Ironically, these very principles which Britain pioneered in the late 17th century led to a rebellion against her rule by her American colonies in the late 18th century. Out of this would come the United States of America.
The Constitution of the United States owed much to British political practices, but it also embodied the rational principles of the European Enlightenment. An even more open avowal of these principles was a driving force behind the outbreak of the French Revolution, in 1789.
This led to a generation of warfare within Europe, prolonged by the limitless ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, the leader of the French after 1799.
Napoleon was eventually defeated in 1815, but the political ideals of the French Revolution – above all democracy and national self-determination – could not be put back in a box. Despite a period in which the “old guard” tried to turn the clock back, revolutionary uprisings continued to trouble Europe, gradually growing in strength as the 19th century drew on. And not only in Europe: the Revolutionary momentum swept through South and Central America, as Wars of Independence drove the Spanish and Portuguese from their empires there and created a dozen or more independent new countries.
Growing pains in North America
The dominant motif in North American in the late-18th century and through much of the 19th century was the westward movement of people of European descent across the continent – a process that pushed the frontiers of the nations of the United States and Canada (which remained under British oversight) to the Pacific Ocean.
As the USA expanded, tensions grew between its northern states, whose inhabitants on the whole disapproved of slavery, and the southern ones, which shared an economy which depended upon slavery. These tensions led to the US Civil War (1861-5), which was won by the North, thanks mainly to their larger population and economic base.
The USA renewed its economic expansion after the war, and during the later 19th century became the wealthiest nation in the world.
Other European offshoots around the world
The late 18th century and early 19th century saw Europe put out other offshoots around the world. In Australia, several British colonies grew up from tiny beginnings after 1788, finally merging in 1900. New Zealand was settled less systematically and only became a formal British colony in 1840. Both Australia and New Zealand developed to become dynamic Western-style nations.
The Cape of South Africa had been the site of a small Dutch farming colony since the late 17th century, which had been annexed by the British in the early 19th century. Many of the descendants of the original farmers had then migrated into the interior (the “Great Trek”) and established independent republics there.
That other European offshoot, Latin America, had a more complex history. The wars of liberation left in place a hugely unequal society, which made for political instability and economic failure. Some of the countries experienced commodity booms, which brought great wealth to a tiny minority; but this wealth was not plowed back to diversify their economies and, as surely as day follows night, boom turned to bust.
By the early 19th century, therefore, offshoots of European civilization were established in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and in South Africa. Apart from these places, the European presence was limited to trading bases on the coasts or island in or near Eurasia and Africa.
British seapower and the British Empire
The major exception in this situation was in South Asia. Here, the decline of the Mughal empire in the early 18th century had opened up opportunities for European expansion, and the British had emerged the winners from the resulting rivalries. As a consequence, in the late 18th century and early 19th century they had come to dominant the Indian subcontinent.
The British owed their success in India and elsewhere to their seapower. A series of wars between European powers in the 18th and early 19th centuries had left Britain’s navy in undisputed mastery of the seas. This underpinned the growing reach of the British Empire, which during the 19th century became the largest empire the world had ever seen.
Nevertheless, the British navy was used to keep the seas open to the trade of all nations – which by this time meant Western nations. No non-Western people seeking to resist western commercial power could shut it out for long: all countries with coasts were open to invasion, wherever and whenever Britain or her allies chose to strike.
In fact, though, one of the British navy’s main preoccupations in the first half of the 19th century was to stamp out the slave trade, by which captive Africans were shipped from their homelands to the Middle east, on the one hand, and the Americas, on the other.
The Opium Wars
The British navy was not used solely for such benign ends. In China, western merchants had become increasingly frustrated with their inability to persuade the Chinese authorities to open up their huge country to foreign trade; and many of them had taken to smuggling opium into China in order to pay for the goods – porcelain, silks and above all, tea – which fetched such a high price back home.
This naturally increased tensions between the westerners on the one hand, especially the British, and the Chinese, on the other. The Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) were the result. These both ended in defeat for China. They were followed by China’s interior being forcibly opened up to Western trade and Western missionaries.
The Industrial Revolution
The Opium Wars had shown the superiority of Western forces over those of non-Western nations,. The gap between them would only get wider as the 19th century drew on. This was because Europe was being transformed by another kind of revolution: the Industrial Revolution.
This had started in Britain in the late 18th century, and spread to Europe after the end of the long Napoleonic wars. It brought social and economic upheaval, out of which began to emerge a completely new kind of society, in which more and more people left farms and countryside to work in factories and towns.
The mid-19th century saw railway networks spread out across the region, along with the dramatic expansion of towns and the appearance of new social groups – an industrial working class and a managerial and professional middle class.
Political change
Linked these developments came further political change, as many parts of western and central Europe. The rise of an educated and ambitious middle class led to the decline of the influence of the old feudal order, as represented by monarchs and aristocracies. Democratic institutions such as assemblies elected by popular voting became much more influential in many countries. Nationalism also gained ground, leading to the appearance of two major new European states, Germany and Italy.
The Industrial Revolution spreads around the world
The Industrial Revolution spread to North America at about the same as it swept through Europe, and later spread to Australia and New Zealand, and even South America. Indeed, it is possible to discern a new, global, industrial civilization emerging from the mid-19th century onwards, consisting of Europe and its offshoots around the world. We can label this civilization “the West”. Such was its power that, from this time, no region on Earth could escape its impact, and the histories of all the nations of the world would now be drawn into a single overarching pattern of events.
Within Western societies, relentless industrial advance was ceaseless. New inventions – the car, telephone, airplane – continued to change the lives of Westerners, and industrial technological breakthroughs such as the development of artificial fertilizers and refrigerated cargo ships transformed economies around the world. The advent of steamships made long-distance transport quicker, more reliable and less expensive.
Global trade continued to expand. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) and the Panama Canal (1914) further strengthened international commerce. The latter in particular was symbolic of the USA‘s economic rise. The later 19th century saw a surge of economic growth, and the USA became the wealthiest nation on Earth. In Europe, Germany also rose to be a leading industrial power, drawing ahead of Britain by 1900.
Western military power
Being the first to experience the transformations which industrialization brought, the Western nations found themselves with a huge (though, as it would eventually turn out, temporary) military advantage over all other societies on the planet. They naturally set about exploiting this to full effect by applying modern technologies to warfare. At sea, steam-powered iron-built warships armed with huge guns, and on land, troops equipped with rapid-fire machine-guns, gave Western navies and armies overwhelming military superiority.
Almost no non-Western societies had any effective answers to this entirely new kind of challenge. The economic and military effectiveness of the Ottoman empire had by now fallen well behind those of the leading European nations. Its European provinces fell prey to the ambitions of Austria and Russia, while the Middle East came under increasing British and French influence.
British control of India expanded throughout the 19th century. A brief but violent uprising against British power in 1857-8 was (as violently) crushed, and the British continued to push out their frontiers east into Burma and northwest towards central Asia.
South East Asia ended the 19th century almost completely divided between the Dutch, British and French; only Thailand remained nominally independent.
China, Japan and Korea
The impact of Western nations on East Asia varied from country to country.
In China, the Great Taiping Rebellion (1850-65) was much more catastrophic than the Opium Wars had been. The causes of this terrible episode were rooted in Chinese conditions, but it was at least partly inspired by Western ideas. Before the rebellion could be crushed it had cost as many as 40 million lives, making it the second deadliest conflict in the history of the world.
In the decades that followed, some limited attempts at modernization were attempted, but this was compromised by the sheer scale of the task, lack of consistent direction from the government and growing hatred of the West within Chinese society.
Korea managed to keep Westerners largely at arms length. Japan, however, was forced to end its isolation and open its economy to Western influences in the wake of American military expeditions in 1852-4. After a period of confusion, Japan began a program of modernization.
In doing so successfully it became the one outstanding example of a non-Western society meeting the challenge of the West head on – and in the process effectively becoming a Western nation. This has allowed it, first to defeat China, and then, startlingly, Russia, one of the leading powers of Europe. It then went on to annex Korea.
Japan’s defeat of China further undermined the prestige of the Qing dynasty, and helped end the long succession of imperial dynasties in China. In 1912, China became a republic.
The Scramble for Africa
In Africa, the middle decades of the 19th century saw the Atlantic slave trade at last go into steep decline. This, however, was the signal for Europeans to step up their interest in the interior of continent, which up to that point had been a mystery to them. Various expeditions explored the region, sending back reports of bountiful natural resources and populations ripe for “civilizing”.
Towards the end of the century, European nations, especially Britain and France, began to move out of their coastal enclaves and annex huge territories. They were joined by other nations, Germany, Belgium and Italy. In what must be the most audacious land-grab in history, Western nations divided almost the entire continent between them in an episode labelled the “Scramble for Africa”. The only country to escape coming under European domination was Ethiopia – though this did not do it much good: the isolated country remained as backward and poverty stricken as before.
At the same period, the Pacific islands also fell under Western control. One archipelago is Hawaii, which comes under the United States. The end of the 19th century marked the short period when the USA became an imperial power, taking control of the Philippines, Cuba and other places in the Caribbean.
A global economy
The “take-over” of the world by Western powers – whether by outright conquests or the imposition of “spheres of influence” – was followed by economic exploitation. Railways started appearing in lands far and wide. The oceans were linked by an ever-intensifying network of sea routes, all converging on Western ports and capitals. Western (above all British and American) finance reached into all corners.
A global economy had arrived, with the commodities of the planet being shipped to Western nations to be consumed or turned into manufactured goods. Many of these were then shipped back out to worldwide markets. The world’s commerce was dominated by Western finance, with the bulk of the profits flowing back to Europe and America.
It was not only goods and money that moved around the planet. So too did people, on an unprecedented scale. Indian laborers were sent to South and East Africa, South East Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean; Chinese migrants fled the poverty and chaos in their own country to South East Asia, Lebanese appeared in West Africa, Chinese and Japanese laborers travelled to North and South America, and Europeans settled in very land but especially to North and South America, South Africa, East Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
European tensions
Back in Europe, however, trouble was brewing. The international political situation was being destabilized by two factors. One was the “Eastern Question”, in which the weakness of the Ottoman empire was exciting the ambition of the European powers. The second was the rise of Germany as the most powerful nation in the region.
In a mounting frenzy of greed and fear, European nations sought alliances and counter-alliances with each other. Eventually two clear camps emerged – Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy on one side, Britain, France and Russia on the other. It would not take much of a spark to set these nations against each other. In 1914 that spark came.
To be completed: the 20th century
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World History Timeline
The first attempt (1769) at creating World History Timeline belongs to the British polymath Joseph Priestley.
A New Chart of History
A poster he created called ‘New Chart of History’ shows empires’ continuation to give learners a more global picture of history across space and time.
The Chart of History poster chronicles milestones in 106 separate locations. The map poster depicts Priestley’s idea that the whole world’s history was important.
The world’s history is split into the following geographical sections: Great Britain, Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Persia, India, China, Africa, and America.
Also, Joseph Priestley created a chart in which he depicted famous personalities who influenced history.
A Chart of Biography
The Chart of Biography (1765) covers a broad period, from 1200 BC to 1800 AD, and holds 2,000 names. Joseph Priestley created his list into 6 categories:
He tried to list them in the category under which their most significant work had been done (for example, Machiavelli is listed as a historian first than a statesman). The chart poster was also arranged in order of importance.
Since then, many attempts have been made to depict countries and their time of existence and the lifetime of influential historical figures on one map.
World History Timeline
It is impossible to show everything that has happened in world history on a small map poster. The central part of this Chart shows the rise and fall of the great empires and nations throughout history. It is arranged according to continents, and where possible continents that are next to each other on the globe are next to each other on the map poster. It shows how people moved out of their homeland to conquer new territories, sometimes far from home. Each continent is shown in a limited color range. For example, Europe if red-orange-yellow. You can easily see when a European state took control of a country outside Europe because its color remains ‘European’ even though it is outside Europe. The length of the color shows the length of time the empire lasted, and the width shows how extensive was the territory they controlled.
Aggressive states were not present everywhere at all times. In many parts of the world, people lived in small groups without making great conquests. While the conquering nations are shown with bold colors, the peaceful people are demonstrated in lighter colors. You will see that some of them existed for many hundreds of years.
The further we go back in time, the less we know about what happened. That is mainly because until writing was invented between 5000 and 4000 years ago (or much later in some areas), nobody could record events. This is the period we call ‘prehistory,’ where archaeology (digging up actual remains) is the mam source of our knowledge. There were probably just as many exciting events and people then, but the chart has more empty spaces because information about them is lost.
For this reason, the space allowed for each century gets smaller as we go back in time. Also, the space allowed for each continent is not proportional to its actual size – more space is given where most of the recorded history took place. Can you imagine what the Chart would look like if we allowed precisely the same space for each century and allowed space for each continent according to its actual area?
Below the main chart is a Timeline of important events and personalities in the past. These people and events have all influenced our world today – even though many of them are far distant in time. They include kings and queens, politicians, religious and cultural leaders, and inventors.
In this chart, you can find some of the different ‘Ages’ that you learn about in history. The colors show which continent the event or person belongs to, as used on the main chart. The dots indicate that something happened at a single point in time, and the bars show the active lifetime of a person or the time of an event. You can find out more about these people and events by looking in an encyclopedia or on the Internet.
World map history
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The historical atlas covers the history of mankind since 3000 BC. The historical maps are interactive and there’s one for each year. This version, in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Chinese, ables you to position in any geographical area, zoom and navigate in time 
The historical atlas covers the history of mankind since 3000 BC. The historical maps are interactive and there’s one for each year. This version, in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Chinese, ables you to position in any geographical area, zoom and navigate in time Annual Historical Atlas
Labels displayed on the screen have documentary links available 
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Menu that includes major periods of the History of Mankind incorporating GeaCron Maps 
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Click on 3D button and watch History on globe. HTML5 Browser Support 
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More Zoom available 
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Select Date, center the Map and Print 
Select Date, center the Map and Print Print
You can search for any term shown in the maps, once the category Area, City or Event has been selected 
You can search for any term shown in the maps, once the category Area, City or Event has been selected Search by Terms
Timelines allow the study of comparative history. Information is classified and structured in large historical entities that may be political, military, art, philosophy, literature or science since 3000 BC 
Timelines allow the study of comparative history. Information is classified and structured in large historical entities that may be political, military, art, philosophy, literature or science since 3000 BC Timelines
Menu that includes major periods of the History of Mankind incorporating GeaCron Maps & Timelines 
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A popup will show the name of the political entity selected. You may click on the label inside the popup. Specific information will be displayed based on country and date selected 
A popup will show the name of the political entity selected. You may click on the label inside the popup. Specific information will be displayed based on country and date selected Integrated Info clicking on any point!
Percentage of the surface of the political entity selected, compared to the total area of political entities considered, and coast-perimeter relationship at a scale of 1: 5000000 
Percentage of the surface of the political entity selected, compared to the total area of political entities considered, and coast-perimeter relationship at a scale of 1: 5000000 Relative surface and coast-perimeter
Approximate surface of the political entity selected for the selected date, surface of the biggest country at that time, surface occupied by that country, surface of that country occupied by others, surface of other territories. All surfaces are displayed in km2 and sq mi 
Approximate surface of the political entity selected for the selected date, surface of the biggest country at that time, surface occupied by that country, surface of that country occupied by others, surface of other territories. All surfaces are displayed in km2 and sq mi Surface of the country and other territories
When a border change happens, click on that area and reasons for specific border changes related to the country at that year will be shown. Although a large number of resources have been consulted, at least one close link to digital encyclopedias will be available 
When a border change happens, click on that area and reasons for specific border changes related to the country at that year will be shown. Although a large number of resources have been consulted, at least one close link to digital encyclopedias will be available Border change reason
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Political Context for political entity and date selected. It can be specific for the country and date selected, a close primary political entity or, at least, a general timeline Political Context
Art. Historical context for selected date 
Art. Historical context for selected date Historical Context: Art
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Literature. Historical context for selected date Historical Context: Literature
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Philosophy. Historical context for selected date Historical Context: Philosophy
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Science. Historical context for selected date Historical Context: Science
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World map 1 AD
Primary Sources for East-Hem_001ad.jpg:
World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com.
I – African information
* North Africa borders and tribal locations are from:
* Sub-Saharan Africa tribal locations are from:
(Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.)
II – Asian Information
Note: Asian information is derived primarily from a combination of these sources:
* Central Asia peoples and borders are derived from:
* Chinese Empire (Han Dynasty) borders:
* Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan):
* Kashmir (Chach) is described in:
* Korean & Manchurian information is from:
* Pahlava (Indo-Parthian) Empire borders derive from:
possibly the Surena family, along the empire’s eastern border).
* Parthian Empire borders derive from:
* Southeast Asian borders: (Funan, Sa Huynh Culture, Malay Kingdoms, Pyu Cities, etc.)
* Southwest Asia (Parthian Empire, Indo-Scythians, Tocharians/Yuezhi, etc.)
III – European Information
* European information is derived from:
Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies.
Roman Empire
Tiberius, under order of Emperor Augustus, quells revolts in Germania (AD 1–5).[1]
Quirinius becomes a chief advisor to Gaius in Armenia.
Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus serves in the Armenia campaigns.
Asia
Confucius is given his first royal title (posthumous name) of Lord Baochengxun Ni.
Sapadbizes, Yuezhi prince and king of Kush (Bactria), dies. Heraios succeeds him as king.
Africa
The Kingdom of Aksum, centered in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, is founded (approximate date).
Amanishakheto, queen of Kush (Nubia), dies. Her son, Natakamani, becomes king of Kush.
Americas
Moxos ceases to be a significant religious area in South America (approximate date).[clarification needed]
The Teotihuacan culture in Mesoamerica begins (approximate date).
The Olmec 2 phase of the Olmec civilization begins; San Lorenzo and La Venta grow in population.
History of Maps | From Ancient Maps to GIS
The evolution of maps has taken a long and winding road.
For thousands of years, humans have documented their surroundings in the form of cave paintings, stone tablets, religious maps, printed maps, and the multi-layered digital maps of modern day.
This post starts at the beginning, tracing the history of maps through the ages.
Table of Contents
Ancient Maps
The oldest map in the world
According to some scholars, this 9ft wide cave painting is the oldest map known to man.
Discovered in what was once Anatolia (now modern day Turkey) and dated between 6100 to 6300 BC, this cave drawing is thought to outline the ancient city of Çatalhöyük.
It’s believed by some that the drawing depicts a volcano and some 80 buildings in a distinct honeycomb pattern. That said, there is some disagreement about whether or not this illustration is actually a map.
Some believe the squares are simply a geometric design, and that the volcano is actually a leopard skin. With so little evidence for either argument, it’s difficult to say one way or another.
Anaximander’s map of the world
Greek academic Anaximander is believed to have created the first world map in 6th century BC.
Anaximander reportedly believed that Earth was shaped like a cylinder, and that humans lived on the flat, top portion. This belief is reflected in reproductions of his map and, upon examination, it’s clear Anaximander’s overall understanding of global geography was incomplete.
Despite its limitations, Anaximander’s illustration is the first known attempt to include the entire world on one map.
Previous maps were limited to a city, or potentially a country, but representing the entire globe was a novel concept.
Babylonian stone tablet
Dated between 700-500 BC, this clay tablet depicts the ancient city of Babylon as the center of the world. Approximately the same size and shape of an iPhone, this map is quite detailed and fairly advanced for it’s time.
The Babylonian tablet is as much a record of spiritual and cultural belief, as it is a map.
Babylon is shown at the center of the map i.e. the center of the world, and in the space beyond there are notes describing various heroes and mythical creatures. Despite clear records that Babylonians were aware of other civilizations, like the Persians, the tablet contains no mention of them or anyone else.
In the early centuries of cartography, maps were not always concerned with accurately representing reality. Rather, they were designed to tell stories.
So little was known about the world that any gaps in knowledge were filled in with religious or spiritual beliefs, and theories about what existed beyond the known.
Ptolemy accidentally invents geography
Ptolemy, another Greek philosopher and academic, is regarded as the world’s first geographer. However, inventing the field of geography was never his goal.
Alive in 2nd century AD, Ptolemy was obsessed with the idea of horoscopes. He tirelessly researched and recorded birthplaces for over 10,000 people: devising as he went a system of vertical and horizontal lines on which to plot his data.
He called this technique ‘geography.’
Maps in the Middle Ages (476 AD – 1453)
Ptolemy’s geographic foundation was lost for much of the Middle Ages.
Though some scholars expanded on his contributions, using the notes and writings of merchants, maps during this time period were again devices for storytelling.
While many maps offered a significant level of detail, much greater than in centuries past, most were not concerned with presenting an accurate geography.
Al-Sharif al-Idrisi and the Tabula Rogeriana
In 1154, Al-Sharif al-Idrisi published Tabula Rogeriana. An extensively researched geographical text, Tabula Rogeriana describes the world as a sphere and centers heavily on Arabian geography.
With 70 regional maps, it’s considered by some to be the world’s first atlas. There are lengthy descriptions for each geographical section: covering natural features, ethnic groups, socioeconomic trends, and more.
Regarded as the correct direction for prayer, all the maps in Tabula Rogeriana were oriented with South as the focal point.
Other maps from the Middle Ages have a clear Christian perspective.
Hereford Mappa Mundi
Created in 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi is a perfect example of Medieval religious mapmaking. An elaborate map, created on flayed calf skin, the Hereford Mappa Mundi displays Jerusalem as the center of the world.
This map orients East at the top, and includes an impressive geography with continents and some 420 cities and towns.
It also displays a plethora of religious and mythological motifs. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are shown at the very top, while the Pillars of Hercules are shown to the West. There are mythological creatures, animals, birds, and 15 biblical scenes.
Many interpret this map, not as a guide from town to town, but as a route towards the divine.
The Renaissance (1300-1600AD)
The combination of these factors led to a new era of cartography, in which maps were not only increasingly accurate but more widely available. Improved accuracy was especially important.
The Age of Exploration had begun, and explorers and traders needed maps with which they could effectively navigate over land and across oceans.
As the New World was charted and explored, merchants navigated the oceans for trade, and Kings surveyed lands with an eye to building empires.
Maps began to inform military strategy and, for the first time, included compass lines to guide sailors. The Mercator Projection, one of the greatest mapping innovations after Ptolemy, was unveiled in 1569.
The Mercator Projection
Inventor Gerard Mercator set out to create a map that would assist with global navigation.
To solve the problem of representing a 3D sphere in a 2D rectangle, Mercator created a projection that lengthened the latitudes North and South of the equator. This distorted the poles significantly, but provided a surprisingly accurate depiction of areas closer to the equator.
This projection was so popular amongst European navigators that by the 18th century, it had been adopted near universally.
19th Century and the Industrial Revolution
The trend towards accurate mapping increased even further during the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution.
The invention of the railroad made travel faster, cheaper, and even more accessible. Leisure travel became popular among the middle class.
As a byproduct, maps had to be smaller and more practical, so travelers could bring them on the journey. They also needed to be up-to-date in terms of roadways, railways, and transportation hubs.
Maps in this era had become almost entirely factual.
This period also saw the emergence of thematic maps i.e. maps that use data in conjunction with geography to illustrate a trend or theme.
In the 1880s, social reformer Charles Booth created a moral map of London that color-coded houses by income and criminal tendencies. His goal was to help inspire the poor by showing that geography was tied to destiny.
Unfortunately, though not necessarily a surprise, his plan backfired. U.S. banks adopted this strategy to “redline” poor neighbors and refuse loans to anyone in those precincts.
Modern Cartography
With the rise of digital technology, modern cartographers now use a plethora of hardware to collect data and do most of their work on a computer.
Satellites enable large-scale global imaging and the global positioning system (GPS), which in turn enables location-based technologies like Google Maps or Google Earth.
Geographic information systems (GIS), which emerged in the 1980’s, gave cartographers the ability to combine geographic data sets with topography and street maps.
With GIS, users can design multi-layered maps, conduct deep data analysis, and even create 3D visualizations of cities, forests, and natural landmarks. Plus, the recent development of Mobile GIS brings these powerful map making tools onto any mobile device.
In many ways, GIS is the pinnacle of modern map making, a stark example of just how far cartography has come.
A quick guide to modern cartography
Using the Timemap of World History
Contents
Using the TimeMap of World History
For Teachers and Students
Quick Reference
Short Activity
Appendix: The Structure of the TimeMap
Preamble
The TimeMap of World History is made up of an Atlas and an Encyclopedia.
The Atlas is for browsing all the world’s history, ranging over wide periods of time and regions of the world.
The Encyclopedia is for digging deeper into topics.
The TimeMap is for learners of all ages to use and enjoy. They should come with a reasonable level of intelligence and literacy, and a healthy dose of curiosity. The website currently has two and half million users (and rising) a year. Like you, they are using this resource to expand their knowledge of history and their understanding of the world.
Please enjoy this website, and do, please, send me your comments and suggestions to help us improve it.
Peter Britton
CEO TimeMaps
Using the TimeMap of World History
Searches
This function can be accessed from a box towards the top of each page. It performs in a similar way to a Google search. Even if your spelling isn’t spot on it should get you results.
When you enter a query, a list of found items appears. This list will contain both maps and articles (the entries with dates are map pages). Just as with a Google search, don’t just go straight to the top entry. Look over the list for what seems the best fit for your requirements.
Atlas Home Page
The Atlas homepage can be accessed from the menu near the top of each page. It contains two “find” lists:
Atlas Map Pages
More navigation functions can be found on the map pages themselves.
Each map page has a title – the region or country it covers, plus the date. In free maps this will always be one of the Key Dates (see below, Appendix).
Every map in the free area of the TimeMaps website fits within a uniform framework of twenty Key Dates. So, for example, the world map dated 1648 is preceded by the world map dated 1453, and followed by the world map dated 1789.
Exactly the same Key Dates apply to maps of Europe – so Europe 1648 is proceeded by Europe 1453 and followed by Europe 1789. And so on for all the maps.
The framework allows users to explore all the regions of the world at these Key Dates. In effect, it provides twenty snapshots of the world – along with its separate regions and countries – through history.
The premium map pages work in a slightly different way. They do not conform to an over-arching scheme of dates as they focus on particular episodes. The dates are therefore relevant to these episodes.
Forward and Back arrows
These are located to the left and right of the screens. The back arrow takes you back in history to the previous Key Date, and forward arrow takes you forward to the next Key Date.
Arrows to neighbouring maps
Around most maps below the World level there are some small arrows. These allow you to move to a neighbouring map (again, at the same Key Date). By this means you can move around the world at a specific time in history, gaining a snapshot of what was happening in the world at that time.
Above the map itself, on the left, is a “breadcrumb” trail. This is a navigation device which you can use to go up to maps at higher levels, at the same date. So, you can go to the World level or, where appropriate, to the relevant Big Region level. From those maps you will be able to explore other countries in the region, or other regions in the world, all at the same Key Date. This allows you to explore the world at a particular point in time.
Hide/Show Marker button
Above the map, on the right, there may be a “hide marker” button. This appears if there are information markers on the map (see below). Click this button if you don’t want to see the markers (which can obscure bits of the map). Once you have clicked the button you’ll see it become “show markers”, and you can click this to get the markers back.
Many maps contain information markers – follow these to go down a level to a more close-up map of a region or country. These are at the same key dates.
Across the bottom of the page is the active timeline. This allows you to go forward or backwards in time.
You can either use the arrows at either end, which take you to the next/previous map in the sequence of Key Dates. Alternatively you can click on one of the circles which punctuate the timeline itself. These represent the Key Dates, and when you hover over one of them a Key Date is shown.
This lies in a broad band below the map (it is not present for every map). It shows where, in history, the civilizations or specific episodes relating to that particular area of the world occurred. Clicking on these will take you to an article on that civilization.
What else is happening in the world
At the bottom of some map pages is a section called “What else is happening in the world”. This contains links to different regions of the world at the same date as the map on the screen.
To the left of the map is a small bit of text. This is a brief summary. Clicking on “read more” takes you to fuller information below the map.
This is located below the maps, and contains a fuller description of the area shown by the map at that particular Key Date. Many of these texts have embedded links anthem taking you to other maps or articles.
Encyclopedia
The Encyclopedia contains short but informative articles about civilizations, empires, regions and historical episodes. Many articles also provide suggestions for further study.
It can be accessed from the menu near the top of each page in the website.
Encyclopedia Home Page
The Encyclopedia home page contains three “find” lists: an A-Z list of articles; a list of articles in rough chronological order; and a list of articles by the regions they are related to.
Use these lists if you have a specific civilization, empire, region or historical episode in mind; or you want to know more about what happened in a particular period in world history; or you want to find out about the history of a particular Big Region (see below) of the world.
Articles
These pages do not have many navigation devices, however:
The articles themselves have embedded links to other relevant articles and maps, and there is also a related articles;
There is often (and eventually always) a further study section at the bottom, containing links to both internal resources and external sources.
There is also often a box on the right hand side containing links to relevant maps in the atlas.
For Teachers and Students
The TimeMap of World History covers all civilizations, regions and countries, and is ideal for teaching history with. This is true of world history on particular, of course, but is certainly not confined to this. For example teachers use it in they teaching of AP European History.
We have developed a range of lesson ideas to use with the TimeMap, and are continuing to develop more. Click here for more information about teaching using the TimeMap of World History.
To give you some general idea of how the site could support teaching and learning, the following is a brief list:
1. Worldwide roots
…give topics a worldwide context. For example, what were the non-European roots and global contexts which helped shape early modern Europe and spark the rise of the West?
2. Connections
…provide background information studying connections between different regions and civilizations, to make them more meaningful for students.
3. Historical background
…provide quick historical background to different players in such frequently-taught subjects as Early Modern Europe (what WAS the Holy Roman Empire?); The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (ditto! – and what about Prussia?); World War 1 (the Holy Roman Empire’s gone, but the Austro-Hungarian empire’s almost as enigmatic!) and much more.
4. Track any country
…allow your students to track the history of any country in the world, from its origins through to the 21st century (this will be useful for those whose families come from regions which are not being
focussed on in your main study).
5. The byways of history
….allow exploration of the byways of history (i.e. most of history!). For example, what happened to the Ancient Egyptians after they were famous? or the Greeks?
Quick Reference
(This might be easier to use if you print it out, or cut and paste it into a seperate document which you can refer to.)
Section 1: Using the TimeMap for browsing
Q1: Do you want to increase your knowledge but don’t want to do in-depth research?
A: If yes, go to the Atlas home page, then go to Q2, below.
If you do want to do research, probably best to go to section 2, below.
Q2: Do you want to know about a specific region or country of the world?
A: If yes, in the Atlas home page, go to the A-Z list in the Atlas home page, and choose the relevant entry.
Otherwise go to Q3, below.
Q3: Do you want to know what’s happening in the world at a particular date?
A: If yes, in the Atlas home page, go to the Year list, choose one of the years, and choose one of the regions or countries.
Otherwise go to Q4.
Q4: Do you just want to browse at random?
A: In the Atlas home page, go to either the A-Z list or the Year list and alight on an option which sparks your interest.
Alternatively, go directly from website home page via the link in the top banner, and browse from there.
Section 2: Using the TimeMap for research
Q1: Do you want to research a specific topic at some depth?
A: If yes, probably best to go to the Encyclopedia, and to Q2, below; but you could also start with the atlas – go to Section 1, Q2.
If you simply want to browse, probably best to go to section 1, Q1, above.
Q2: Is it a particular civilization, empire, region of historical episode you’re interested in?
A: If yes, go to the A-Z List and choose the relevant item.
If the topic you want is not listed, use the Search function at the top of the page.
Otherwise, go to Q3, below.
Q3: Is it a particular period you’re interested in?
A: If yes, go to the Encyclopedia home page, Chronology list, and choose the appropriate period.
If the topic you want is not listed, use the Search function at the top of the page.
Otherwise go to Q4, below.
Q4: Do you know the region of the world?
A: If yes, go to the Encyclopedia home page, Region list, and choose the appropriate region.
If the topic you want is not listed, use the Search function at the top of the page.
Otherwise use the Search function at the top of the page.
Section 3: What to do…
You’re on a map page and you want to….
Go up a level:
Use the breadcrumb trail just above the map, on the left.
Go down a level:
Use an information marker to take you to a more close-up map
Go to a neighbouring map:
Use one of the arrows at the side of the map
Jump to another part of the world at the same date:
Either go up one or two levels (to a regional or world map) and then down again to a different location;
Or use the “Find out what’s happening elsewhere in the world” section, if there is one, situated near the bottom of the page.
Move forward to the next date:
Use the active timeline at the bottom of the page, clicking on the right hand arrow.
Go back to the previous date:
Use the active timeline at the bottom of the page, clicking on the left hand arrow.
Jump to a date at a different point in history:
Use the the Active timeline at the bottom of the page, clicking on one of the circles on the timeline.
Go to an article for more relevant information:
Either go to the Dig Deeper box and follow a link.
Or go to the Civilizations timeline (if there is one) and click on one of the entries
Or follow a link from within the map information.
Short Activity
So, you want to find out….
Q1: Did Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, build the Great Pyramids of Giza?
What to do: use the search function.
Enter the words Great Pyramids of Giza.
Then Enter the word Cleopatra.
Q2: When did literate and urban civilization emerge in China?
What to do: go to the Atlas home page, then the A-Z index, and than China (under “C” if you’re in any doubt!).
Which map to start at? I suggest starting at the beginning and moving forward.
Q3: What civilization in Europe appeared at around the same time?
What to do: From the China page you’re on, use the breadcrumb at the top left of the map and click on World. Once in the world map, click on the marker on Europe. Once there you’ll find the answer.
Q4: So, you’re now in Europe in…ah, almost gave the game away. But in the neighbouring region of the Middle East, what new piece of military kit has changed the face of warfare?
What to do: follow the SE arrow, at the bottom left of the map, to take you to the Middle East.
Q5: While all this is happening in Europe and Asia, what’s happening in North America?
What to do: Either head for the bottom of the page to “What’s happening in the rest of the world?” and click on the relevant link there; or go back to the world map and click on the marker on North America.
Q6: What happens in this region next?
What to do: go down to the active timeline at the bottom of the screen and click on the right hand arrow. This takes you forward to the next Key Date.
Q7: Jump forward several hundred years to 500 CE. What civilization is described there as “one of the most remarkable in world history”?
What to do: move along the active timeline to the circle at 500 CE, and click on that.
Appendix: How is the TimeMap structured?
The TimeMap of World History is formed by an Atlas and an Encyclopedia.
The Atlas
The Atlas consists of a series of map sequences. These are grouped at three different levels and organized according to a uniform set of Key Dates.
Three Levels
The top level consist of the World maps.
The next level down consists of the Big regions of the world – from east to west: Oceania, East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America, North America. Another one, Central Asia, will follow.
The bottom level (at the moment) consists of countries, or small groups of countries.
Key Dates
All the map sequences in the atlas are organized around twenty key dates. This sequence starts at 3500 BCE and ends at 2005 CE. Most countries in fact do not cover all the early dates, as they emerge into the light of history at different periods.
The Key Dates have been carefully selected to give the optimum coverage of both world and regional histories.
The Encyclopedia
The Encyclopedia contains a growing range of articles on history’s civilization and empires. These articles support the Atlas maps by allowing users dig deeper into a topic. The articles are designed to be readable but authoritative, giving users a broad view of the subjects they cover.
The Encyclopedia is still incomplete, thought it is growing all the time. The ancient and medieval worlds are largely covered, but the modern world still needs a lot of work.
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World 500 BCE
Some of the greatest thinkers in all world history are living at this time. Their teachings will have a lasting impact on the history of humanity, right up to the present day.
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Civilizations
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Great thinkers
At this time, many of the classical civilizations of the ancient world enter their period of greatness: Greek, Chinese, Indian and Israelite civilizations all experience a burst of creativity, each producing thinkers who will profoundly shape the future course of world history. The Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the Greek philosophers of the Ionian school, and the Jewish prophets of ancient Israel – all lay down modes of thought whose influence is still with us today.
Technology and culture
Over the past few centuries, Iron Age technology has been spreading far and wide in the Eastern Hemisphere. It has now reached South East Asia, and is rippling down into Africa. Wherever it arrives it replaces the Stone Age tools used by farmers for millennia. This allows agricultural productivity to rise, populations to expand, towns and cities to grow, and civilization to advance. It is one of the great turning points in global history.
At the same time, the use of alphabetic scripts has been becoming widespread. The Aramaean script is now used throughout the Middle East. Its employment is fostered by the rise of huge imperial states in the region, and the transfers of population that this has involved.
Beyond the Middle East, the closely-related Sanskrit script has evolved amongst the Aryans in India. To the west, Phoenician traders have carried the alphabet to the Greeks, Italians (including of course the Romans) and other peoples of the Mediterranean.
The Middle East
In the Middle East, the past few centuries have seen the rise and fall of a succession of great empires – the Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian and the Median. Now the Persian empire rules, the largest empire so far.
Europe and Asia
The Celts are now coming to dominate France and other parts of western Europe, populating it with their hill forts and warlike chieftainships.
In the steppes of central Asia, the nomadic horsemen have become a major threat to the settled civilizations of Eurasia. In the East, these “barbarians” have already had an impact on Chinese history by helping break up the unified Zhou kingdom into numerous different states; and in the West, deep raids by the Cimmerians have caused much destruction.
North of the Black Sea, the Cimmerians have been replaced as the dominant people by the Scythians, whose tribes are fanning out over a huge area from eastern Europe to central Asia. In the Easter steppes it was the Quanrong – probably related to the later Xiongnu (Huns) – who seem to predominate.
Africa
In Africa, Iron Age farming has taken root amongst the Bantu peoples of the West African rainforest. They have started expanding outwards from their homelands.
Civilization is penetrating inner Africa from the north via the kingdom of Nubia, becoming more “African” as it travels.
The Americas
In the Western Hemisphere, several centers of the Olmec civilization of Mexico have experienced a mysterious development, with the ritual burial of great sculptures accompanying the destruction of their communities. Nevertheless, by now the Olmec culture’s influence has spread over a large area of central America.
Far to the south, the Chavin civilization, the first of a long series of urban cultures in the Andean region of South America, has appeared.
Dig Deeper
For details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above.
More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map.
History-Maps.ru: История. Карты. Бесплатный хостинг.
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Здесь любой может загрузить карту! Для загрузки картинок необходима регистрация Historical MapsThe Periodis-Web shows the historical evolution of Europe through a sequence of 21 historical maps, every map depicting the political situation at the end of each century. Altorient, the Historical Atlas of the Ancient Orient offers 30 history maps of Southeastern Europe and Middle East in the Antiquity: 1 map per century from 300 B.C. until 3300 B.C. Hisatlas illustrates the history of political boundaries with a comprehensive selection of political and historical maps from 1789 to the present days. Various historical atlases available in the Euratlas Shop: Periodis Expert, Altorient, Hisatlas, Germany 1789. Reconstructed maps of the seven original hills, the 14 Augustean districts of Rome and active map of Rome in year 100 AD. Vector and historical geographical information system maps available in the Euratlas Shop. A video animation showing the countries of Europe, at the exact end of each century, from year 1 to year 2000 AD. Blank maps version of ‘2000 Names 2000 Colors’. The soundtrack is a Ranz des Vaches in Franco-Provençal dialect. Watch a video showing how to create custom history maps with the software Euratlas Periodis Expert. Fast animation with a lively medieval music. A brief history of Europe, from AD 1 to AD 1000 with maps, pictures and concise explanation. Подборка интерактивных карт по историиКрутим глобус времен динозавров, запускаем навигатор по античным дорогам и созерцаем, как менялся мир под воздействием человека в последние тысячелетия
С каждым годом процесс обучения становится все более интересным и наглядным. Вот некоторые примеры того, как можно соединить историю, географию и компьютерные технологии. ПалеоглобусПалеоглобус — это модель Земли, во многом похожая на Google Earth, только показывающая не современность, а прошлое. Одним из создателей палеоглобусов является Paleomap Project, созданный в 2011 году геологом Christopher R. Scotese. Во время гибели динозавров сориентироваться на карте довольно легко, однако, если отправиться еще на несколько сотен миллионов лет назад, обнаружить знакомые очертания современных материков становится гораздо сложнее. Например, около 300 млн. лет назад все они были «слеплены» воедино и образовывали Пангею. На помощь приходит необычная карта, которую сделал Massimo Pietrobon. Поверх Пангеи он наложил границы современных государств, что сразу сделало картинку более наглядной и понятной. Вся история в одной картеПонятно, что в реальности никаких стран во времена динозавров не было, потому что они появились только в последние несколько тысяч лет. Разобраться в том, где, когда и какие именно государства действительно существовали, можно с помощью сайта, который сделали Luis Múzquiz и его команда в 2011 году. На сайте представлена карта с отмеченными границами всех стран, которые существовали начиная с 3000 лет до н. э. и заканчивая 2021 годом. Перемещаясь с шагом в год, десятилетие или век, можно наблюдать как возникли первые государственные образования в Египте и Месопотамии, как потом росли и гибли Персия, эллинистические государства, Римская империя, как дробилась и объединялась Европа, как заселялся Новый Свет и, наконец, как сложилась современная политическая карта мира. Осознать общие тенденции развития человечества можно с помощью еще одного проекта. На карте, охватывающей период с 1 г. н. э. до 2050 года, один кружок соответствует одному миллиону человек, которые проживают в данном регионе.
А чтобы лучше ориентироваться в окружающей обстановке в тот или иной отрезок времени, можно посмотреть, какие тогда происходили значимые для социальной истории события (например, эпидемии или технические изобретения). Кроме того, можно посмотреть, как вместе с числом людей изменяется количество выбросов углекислого газа, распространяется урбанизация и увеличивается продолжительность жизни с разной скоростью в разных регионах. Любителям античностиПроект Orbis был создан при Кембриджском университете. С его помощью можно узнать, сколько времени и денег потребовалось бы вам, чтобы добраться из одного города в другой, во времена, когда не было ни машин, ни поездов, ни самолетов.
Наконец, на сайте Pleiades содержится крупнейшая база данных различных античных мест: это и поселения, и конкретные сооружения, и географические объекты, упоминаемые в старинных текстах. В этой базе содержится информация о 37 588 местах, каждое из которых четко привязано к координатам. Этот проект предназначен скорее для реальных научных исследований, однако может быть интересен и широкой публике. Тем более, что каждый может предложить правки и добавить новые места. Что в итоге?На примере этих сайтов хорошо видна тенденция в развитии просветительской деятельности. Благодаря междисциплинарному подходу создаются проекты, которые не только могут быть использованы учеными-профессионалами в своих исследованиях, но также позволяют увлечь будущих специалистов. В конце концов, даже человек, далекий от этой сферы, сможет с пользой провести время и узнать что-нибудь интересное для себя. World 2500 BCESubscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads In 2500 BCE much of the world is still populated by hunter-gatherers. But farming and pastoral populations are continuing to encroach on their lands, and in many parts of the world the rise of civilization is astonishing. The Middle East and EgyptIn the Middle East of the early Bronze Age the two great civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt are flourishing. They have sophisticated writing systems, bronze technologies and highly developed public administrations. The first literatures are flowering, and already some of the most spectacular structures in all world history, the Great Pyramids, have been built in the Nile valley. South AsiaAn urban civilization has also appeared on the Indian sub-continent, in the Indus valley. This shows advanced features such as town planning and effective drainage systems. East AsiaIn the river valleys of China, villages are growing in number and size, and their technologies are advancing. Soon one of the world’s great civilizations will emerge here. South East Asia and OceaniaOn the islands and coasts of southern China the ancestors of the Malays and Polynesians are starting their great migration down into South East Asian waters. From here, in the course of their history they will travel over a vast area of the globe: eastwards as far as Hawaii and Easter Island, and westwards as far as Madagascar. Europe and Central AsiaAnother group who, in the course of history will come to cover a large part of he globe, are spreading outwards from the steppes north of the Black Sea. These are horse-breeding peoples who have been moving both eastwards across central Asia, and westwards into Europe. They take their ancestral Indo-European language with them. By this time, they have harnessed horses to the first wheeled vehicles. The first of these are heavy carts, but it will not be long before they evolve into light, two-wheeled chariots. The AmericasIn North America, arctic hunters, ancestors of the present-day Inuit, are beginning to spread over the far north. In South America, farming is expanding over a wide area, and large, permanent villages are appearing in Peru. The majority of the continent, however, remains home to hunter-gatherers. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. World 1453 CEAll the advances made in all regions of Eurasia have now reached Europe. Here, they combine and fizz, and begin to change every aspect of European civilization. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads The past couple of centuries have seen events of truly world-shaping significance dissolve barriers between the different parts of Eurasia. None of the great centers of Eurasian civilization were left untouched. The Mongol EmpireFirst, Genghis Khan and his successors forged the huge Mongol empire, which took in much of Eurasia, from Russia to China. After Mongol rule had declined, another central Asian conqueror, Timur the Lame, briefly seized a large territory. These conquerors spread terror and destruction on an epic scale, but the Mongol empire in particular fostered much closer links between the different regions of the Eastern Hemisphere than had ever been the case before. Along these travelled trade, ideas, technological innovations – and disease. The Black DeathIn the mid-14th century the Black Death killed millions of people, and was the biggest recorded catastrophe to hit the human race (in numbers of dead, larger even than the tragedy about to engulf the inhabitants of the Americas when Europeans arrive). EuropeThese great events have brought new opportunities to Europe, a region which has for centuries been something of a backwater. These opportunities will be seized with vigor, and the great age of European dominance is not far off. The growing links with other parts of the eastern Hemisphere have brought East Asian technologies to backward Europe. The compass, gunpowder and printing are reshaping European civilization. (Printing may have been an indigenous European invention rather than an Asian import, but even so it is very likely that the concept of printing, if not the actual techniques, came from the East). Europeans have already embarked on their long-distance ocean voyages. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, these will not be abandoned. They will end some centuries hence only with the European nations dominating all the seas of the world. From this much else will flow. Europe will also be changed by another development which has started by now. This is the Italian Renaissance. This sees itself as a rebirth of Greek and Roman learning; in fact it is nothing less than a revolution in European culture. Along with the voyages of exploration, it forms a major turning point in world history. Amongst other things, it will give birth to modern science. RussiaMongol power, though ejected from other areas of the world, has retained its hold on Russia until very recently. Now the Russians, under the leadership of the rulers of Muscovy, have asserted their independence. This independence remains precarious, however: Mongol khans remain powerful to the east, and to the west the huge Polish-Lithuanian kingdom has Muscovy in its sites. Central AsiaThe peoples of Central Asia formed the motive-power for the empires of Genghis Khan and Timur. Since the decline of these empires, the steppe peoples have fragmented under the rule of different khans. The Middle EastMuch of the Middle East did fall to both the Mongols and Timur. One region which did not was Asia Minor. However, a side swipe by Timur was a major set back for the rising power of the Ottoman empire there. The Ottomans have recovered, and this year they capture the city of Constantinople. This brings a final end to the long history of the Roman/Byzantine empire. The fall of the city, one of the great historic centers of Christianity, comes as a huge shock to the Christian world of Europe. AfricaAfrica is being drawn into the international maritime trading networks of Europe and the Middle East. Coastal trading communities are expanding on both the east and west coasts. A key commercial element on both coasts is the trade in human beings. South AsiaMuslim-ruled states now cover much of the Indian sub-continent. In particular, the last couple of centuries have seen the dramatic rise and decline of the Delhi Sultanate. East AsiaThe countries of East Asia, especially China and Korea, re-asserted their independence from Mongol rule in the late-14th century, and are ruled by native dynasties. The Ming dynasty presides over a China that is expanding in wealth and population. An early Ming emperor even sent great expeditions overseas which took Chinese ships as far as Africa, but these were soon abandoned. Japan narrowly escaped Mongol rule. However, it has not escaped political instability and recurrent bouts of civil war. South East AsiaTwo new elements are making their presence felt in South East Asia. On the mainland, Thai tribes have been migrating down into the region from their homeland in southern China; and the coasts and islands of South East Asia have been drawn into the trading networks of Muslim merchants. The nodes of this trading system are a growing number of small coastal sultanates, which have been established here. OceaniaIn Oceania, the Maori settlers of New Zealand are having to adapt to their new homeland as the native fauna gets hunted to extinction. The AmericasIn Central America, Toltec power has vanished, and the Aztec empire is expanding. To the north, farming societies across North America have been experiencing difficulties, though the reasons for these are unclear. In South America, the Inca empire is growing, but has not yet reached its full expanse. The Chimu kingdom continues to flourish, for now. To the east, the complex societies of the Amazon basin are continuing to evolve and expand. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map. World 1960 CETitanic conflicts between 1914 and 1945 have gravely weakened the European nations. Their world-wide power has gone and new superpowers dominate the world. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads World History in 1960, with the USA and Russia the leading superpowersGlobal ConflictThe period between 1914 and 1960 has been marked by great changes in all parts of the world, and in all areas of life; it has also been marred by some of the most terrible violence in world history. The killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany saw state-organized murder stoop to new depths; the mass killings of Stalin’s Russia and Mao Tse-tung’s China were not far behind. World War 1World War 1 (1914-8), a conflict far more terrible than could possibly have been imagined by the politicians and generals who led their nations into it, sent history spinning along a new, darker trajectory. Apart from the deaths of 10 million soldiers, it led to the fall of four of the great powers involved, the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. Russia fell under communist rule in the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the end of World War 1, the victors, the USA, France and Britain, led the world in forming the first great pan-Global organization, the League of Nations. This failed in its aim of keeping peace in the world, largely because the USA, by now the wealthiest and most important nation, decided not to join. The Great Depression of the early 1930s, beginning with the Wall Street stock market Crash in the USA and spreading to most parts of the world, had been instrumental in the rise of unsavory regimes in several European countries, culminating in the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party in Germany. On the other side of the world it had brought a militaristic regime to power in Japan. World War 2These developments led to the outbreak of the most lethal conflict in history, World War 2. This ended in the defeat of Nazi Germany and of militaristic Japan by an alliance of powers led by the USA, the Soviet Union and Britain. The Cold WarThe world entered a new age with the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan which brought World War 2 to a close (1945). The main victors of this war, the USA and the USSR, now faced off against each other in the Cold War. Much of the rest of the world has fallen in behind these two superpowers, the two camps, capitalist against communist, in tense hostility. The threat of general nuclear destruction hangs heavy over the world. League of Nations and United NationsThe end of World War I saw the first attempt to bring countries together in a world-wide international forum, to settled their differences peacefully: the League of Nations. This organization was weakened from the outset by the refusal of the USA to become a member, and was unable to restrain the militarism of Germany, Italy and Japan. The League’s successor, the United Nations, is proving somewhat more effective, but, in this Cold War climate, it too is being undermined by powerful international tensions beyond its control. The spread of CommunismThe communist seizure of the most populous country in the world, China, in 1949, is a massive blow to the US-led Western world. Ten years later the Caribbean island of Cuba, within a stone’s throw of the American homeland, also moves into the communist camp. There seems a very real prospect that communism regimes will spread around the world, and especially in those territories newly independent from their European colonial masters. The end of EmpireThe European empires are now fast disappearing. The two world wars left the leading European nations virtually bankrupt, and unable to maintain their huge overseas possessions in the face of newly potent anti-colonial movements. These are often invigorated by communist leadership, ideology and support. In South East Asia the Dutch East Indian Empire has become the independent nation of Indonesia; and in the South Asian sub-continent Britain’s Indian empire is now divided between the independent states of India and Pakistan. The French have left most of their African territories, although a brutal war of independence is taking place in Algeria, where many families of European origin have settled. Britain has started to do give freedom to its possessions. The Belgians have withdrawn from their enormous territories in the Congo, which are now sliding into dreadful anarchy. Around the WorldAfricaWhite rule is not on the wane in all parts of Africa. The Portuguese show no sign of leaving their territories, and in South Africa a white regime has become entrenched, holding the majority Black population in subordination. EuropeBack in Europe, the continent which so recently (but so briefly) ruled most of the world is now divided into two, its nations relegated to second-rate status. The countries of the Western half look to the USA for leadership; the Eastern ones are under the heel of communist Russia. The USA has put in massive amounts of economic aid to its allies, with startling results: by 1960, just a decade and a half after the continent lay in ruins after World War 2, the standard of living of the people of Western Europe is higher than it has ever been before. East AsiaThe same is true for Japan. After its defeat and devastation in World War 2, Japan is again rising fast, with American support. Its people are becoming amongst the most prosperous on Earth. The Korean peninsula, on the other hand, is divided between a communist North and a capitalist South; on both sides of the border there is wide-spread poverty – but (also with US aid) the economy in the south is now trending strongly upwards. The Middle EastThe disappearance of the Ottoman empire after World War 1 left the Middle East (after a brief period of British and French domination between the wars) divided between several independent nations. This region, as so many other parts of the world, feels the influence of the Cold War. Some of the Middle Eastern states, in particular the monarchies of the Arabian peninsula and Gulf region, have continued to maintain strong links with the West – links which are increasingly lucrative to them due the the rising Western demand for their oil. Other states, such as army-ruled Egypt and Syria, are veering towards the Soviet camp. Anti-Western sentiments in the Middle East are given a boost by a new and unsettling feature of the geopolitical landscape of the region. This is the existence of the state of Israel. This has been created mainly by immigrant Jews, many fleeing the Holocaust in Nazi-dominated Europe. The Arabs of the region watch this development with deeply-felt hostility. They see this new state as essentially an alien, Western creation, and so sends many Arabs looking to the anti-Western camp for succor. This is a dangerous situation for the West when so much of its energy needs are dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. South AmericaThe countries of South America have, on the surface at least, been somewhat less affected by great events such as the two world wars. The political instability so prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries has continued: South American countries there are known for their coups and military dictatorships. One flash of color in the political landscape of the content has been the rise and untimely death of Eva Peron of Argentina, who was widely worshipped for her sympathy with the people and whose popularity greatly boosted that of her husband, the country’s president. OceaniaLike the rest of the world, the Pacific region has seen great changes; in particular, the fighting between the Japanese and the Allies in World War 2 directly affected much of the region. The European hold on the region has been gradually slackening: Australia and New Zealand have become fully sovereign nations in their own right, whilst remaining members of the Commonwealth; and other Pacific nations are on the road to either full independence or equal status within the colonizing nation’s citizenry. Continued ChangePolitical and social changesDespite the great wars of the period from 1914, there have been enormous social and economic advances for many of the peoples of the world. Most democratic nations have seen a giant leap forward with the granting of political rights for women. This is a major element within a process which is seeing greater equality between the sexes. After World War I the flappers shocked conservative society with their public expressions of freedom, and paved the way for a more equal place for women in the public space. The need for women to replace male workers in offices and factories during the wars, and to take important roles within the armed forces, forced a recognition that their role was no longer limited to certain “female” spheres. The spread of contraception also made women’s lives more free, less home-bound. These decades saw a general shaking off of traditional cultural mores. The emergence of modern art, music and architecture revolutionized the fine arts. In the popular arena, jazz, rock and now the beginnings of pop have given the younger generations in the West their own identity vis-à-vis their elders. Technological advancesThese cultural transformations have paralleled – and are deeply connected to – a range of technological advances which have liberated people in Western countries and broadened their horizons. Many of these have come about as a direct result of the wars, but they have changed millions of civilian lives as well. The spread of cars, air travel, domestic electrical appliances, radios, TVs, the cinema and so on have made lives in industrialized countries more varied and comfortable. New medicines – most notably antibiotics – have increased levels of health and allowed people to live longer. At a more rarified level, technological advance is seen dramatically in the space race, as the first man goes into orbit around the world; and in computers, which are huge room-sized contraptions used by governments and giant corporations for major number-crunching tasks. Progress and povertyThe past decade have also seen great changes for people in colonized and ex-colonized countries in Africa and Asia. Railways, roads, western-style education and jobs in factories, offices, on railways and roads, have transformed lives. Access to western healthcare has helped combat disease. However, billions remain in dire poverty. Dramatic population growth is putting increasing pressure on their environments, and making life for many tougher than it was for their forebears. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads World map 50 ADPrimary Sources for East-Hem_050ad.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. I – African information * North Africa borders and tribal locations are from: * Sub-Saharan Africa tribal locations are from: (Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) II – Asian Information * Central Asia peoples and borders are derived from: * Chinese Empire (Han Dynasty) borders: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Korean borders derive from: * Pahlava (Indo-Parthian) Empire borders derive from: dynasty, possibly the Surena family, along the empire’s eastern border). * Parthian Empire borders derive from: * Southeast Asian borders: (Funan, Lâm Áp/Linyi, Malay Kingdoms, Pyu Cities, etc.) III – European Information * European information is derived from: Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies. Roman Empire South Asia Americas World map 100 ADPrimary Sources for East-Hem_100ad.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. I – African information * North Africa borders and tribal locations are from: * Sub-Saharan Africa tribal locations are from: (Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) II – Asian Information * Central Asia peoples and borders are derived from: * Chinese Empire (Han Dynasty) borders: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Korean borders derive from: * Kushan Empire borders are derived from a mix of the sources below: * Parthian Empire borders derive from: John Nelson. Interactive Historical Atlas of the World. Map of “Countries of the World 1/1/100 CE.” * Roman Empire borders in Asia are derived from: * Southeast Asian borders: (Funan, Lâm Áp/Linyi, Malay Kingdoms, Pyu Cities, etc.) III – European Information * European information is derived from: Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies. Roman Empire Europe Asia Americas World map historyAnd if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: The oldest known world map was made in Babylon in the 6th century BC. The map shows Babylon in the center of a world that extends no further than the edges of Mesopotamia. Around the world is a round «bitter river.» The seven points beyond the river are islands that cannot, they believed, be reached. Wikimedia Commons Hecataeus of Miletus’ map of the world, made in the 5th or 6th century BC. Hecataeus divides the world into three parts: Europe, Asia, and Libya, centered around the Mediterranean Sea. His world is a round disc surrounded by an ocean. David Rumsey Map Collection Posidonius’ world map, made in the 2nd century BC. This map expands on the early Greek vision of the world, including discoveries of Alexander the Great. Wikimedia Commons Ptolemy’s world map, designed in 150 AD. Ptolemy was the first to add longitudinal and latitudinal lines to his map in the world. Wikimedia Commons The center of the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 4th century Roman map outlining the road network of the Roman Empire. The full map is extremely long, extending from Iberia to India, with Rome as the center of the world. Wikimedia Commons Cosmas Indicopleustes’s model of the world, from Christian Topography. 6th century AD. Cosmas showed the world as a flat place, with the sky overhead shaped like a chest and heaven watching over it all. Wikimedia Commons A fanciful rendition of the «T and O» map developed by Isidor of Sevilla in the 7th century. These maps divided the world into three, perfectly divided parts: Asia, Europe, and Africa, with Jerusalem at the center of the world. This version of the map was drawn by Jean Mansel between 1459-1463. Wikimedia Commons A later Christian map, the Bunting Clover Leaf Map, drawn by Heinrich Bunting in Germany in 1581. This map is not meant to depict the world as it is, but instead the world as an extension of the Christian trinity, with Jerusalem as the center that holds the world together. Wikimedia Commons The Anglo-Saxon Cotton Map, created between 1025 and 1050 AD. The eastern parts of the world make the topmost part of this map. The artist has painted every river in Africa red, misunderstanding descriptions of the Red Sea. Wikimedia Commons The world according to Beatus of Libeana, and Asturian monk, created in the 8th century AD. Beatus’s map is called a «Christian Map,» based on the T and O design. Wikimedia Commons The «Map of the Track of Yu Gong» was carved into a stone in Shaanxi, China, in 1137. This map, depicting the scope of the Chinese empire, was meticulously drawn on a rectangular grid. Wikimedia Commons Mahmud al-Kashgari’s map of the world, drawn in the 11th century. This map centers the world around Balasagun, an ancient city in the place where Krygyzstan now stands. It includes places prophesied to appear in the end times, like Gog and Magog. Wikimedia Commons Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana, drawn in 1154 AD. This map was created based on the reports of Arab merchants who had travelled across the world. It was, at the time, the most accurate and extensive map of the world. Though the map depicts Europe and Asia extensively, it still only shows the northern parts of Africa. Wikimedia Commons The Psalter World Map, drawn by an unknown medieval monk in 1260 AD. Maps from this period often put the east at the top of the world, as the place where the sun rises, with Jesus watching over the world. Wikimedia Commons Gervase of Ebstorf’s world map, drawn in Germany in the 13th century. The Ebstorf Map is based on the medieval T and O model, with Jerusalem at the center of the world. It is decorated with illustrations from Biblical stories for each part of the world. Wikimedia Commons The Hereford Mappa Mundi, drawn by Richard of Haldingham in the 14th century. This is another T and O map, with Jerusalem at the center at the east at the top. The circle at the far south side of the map is the Garden of Eden. Wikimedia Commons Italian geographer Pietro Vesconte’s world map, drawn in 1321 AD. Vesconte, using nautical charts to map the seas, brought accuracy back into maps after centuries of T and O designs. Wikimedia Commons The Da Ming Hu Yi Tu, a Chinese map made in the late 14th century. This map shows the world as it appeared to China during the Ming Dynasty, with China dominating the overwhelming majority of the planet and all of Europe squeezed into a small space in the west. Wikimedia Commons The Kangnido World Map, created by Korean officials in 1402 AD. This map, created by the Joseon Dynasty, combined Chinese maps with information about the Western world, gathered from Mongolian Muslims. Wikimedia Commons The Genoese map, drawn in 1457 based on the descriptions of Niccolo da Conti. This map depicts a growing European understanding of the Asian world after the first trade routes with Mongolia and China opened. Wikimedia Commons A map made by Venetian monk Fra Mauro between 1457 and 1459. This map was made with the help of Andrea Bianco, a sailor and cartographer, and reflects his extensive knowledge of the world. Wikimedia Commons The Mer des Hystoires world map, drawn in 1491. Even during the age of exploration, some monks continued to make T and O maps, with Jerusalem at the center of the world and paradise as a real location in the eastern side of the world. Wikimedia Commons A projection of the Edapfel globe, produced by Martin Behaim in Germany in 1492. The Edapfel is the oldest known globe, showing the world as a sphere but with the undiscovered America as an empty ocean. David Rumsey Map Collection Johannes Ruysch’s map of the world, drawn in 1507. This map shows one of the first drawings of the New World. Wikimedia Commons Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann’s map, drawn in 1507. This was the first map to label the New World as «America,» drawn, here, as nothing more than the thin strip of the eastern coast. Wikimedia Commons Samuel Dunn’s map of the world, drawn in 1794 AD. Using the discoveries of Captain James Cook as his guide, Dunn was able to outline the whole world for the first time. Wikimedia Commons Like this gallery?
When Earth’s first people looked out around them, they couldn’t imagine how far the scope of the world extended beyond what stretched out before their own eyes. Their world was the land that surrounded and fed them, and as far as they knew, it extended no further. Eventually, the earliest human civilizations tried to measure the extent of the world and made maps that showed what, to them, was the whole world. The first of these ancient world maps was reportedly made in Babylon more than 2,500 years ago. It shows a world that extends little past their own empire, surrounded by bitter waters and pointed islands on which they believed no man could survive. Those waters surrounded most of the extant ancient world maps. The world, to them, was a round disc surrounded by an ocean, and a place consisting only of Africa, Europe, and Asia. As time passed, maps slowly grew larger as humans’ knowledge of what lay outside of the Mediterranean grew. The northern parts of Europe were fleshed out, Britain was discovered, and, in time, little markings were made south of Egypt warning that no person could survive beyond this point. These ancient world maps also became more and more accurate — until Christian theologians started insisting that the world was perfectly divided in the shape of a T, centered around Jerusalem. Under such influence, ancient world maps started showing an idealized vision of the real world, charted by Biblical events and often including places like the Garden of Eden and Magog as actual locations in the real world. With the dawn of the age of exploration in the 15th century, though, our concept of the world started to open up once more. Slowly, world maps started fleshing out the east to include China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. And, at the same time, Chinese explorers extended their world maps, expanding the tiny space they’d once given to Europe into the large continent they now knew it to be. Soon, the first globe was made the year before Christopher Columbus returned from the New World. It showed the world as a sphere, with a great, empty ocean where the Americas would soon be discovered. When Columbus returned, world maps started to take the shape we know today. The Americas were slowly charted, Australia and New Zealand began to appear, and explorers slowly revealed the world in its full scope. After this look at ancient world maps, check out more fascinating maps from the ancient world, or these 33 maps that explain America better than any textbook. World map 500 ADPrimary Sources for East-Hem_500ad.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. Harvard University Press 1935. Available at http://huhai.net. Euratlas-Nüssli, rue du Milieu 30, 1400 Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland I – African information: * African Tribal locations are derived from: (Bantus, Berber Tribes, Chadians, Cushites, Daamat, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisan Peoples, Kwa, Libyans, Mandes, Nilotic Peoples, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) * North African borders are derived from a combination of: * Nubian/Sudanese borders (Makuria, Nobatia, Alodia, Blemmyes, Bega, Axum, etc.): * Ghana’s location and estimated border is from: * North African borders are from a comparison of: II – Asian Information * Arabian borders & Tribal locations: Note: The information shown in these maps conflicts, even taking the 40-year difference between them. I used information in various Wikipedia articles to reconcile the sources and depict the locations to the best of my abilities. * East Asian borders are from: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Hephthalite borders are derived from a combination of: * Japanese Islands : * Korean borders: * Rouran/Juan-Juan Khaganate: * Persian Empire (Sassanid Dynasty): Map of the “Countries of the World 1/1/500 CE.” * Southeast Asia (Indochina, Indonesia, etc.): III – European Information Note: User:Bogomolov.PL has discovered possible discrepancies in my north European borders, compared to the Euratlas maps, due to the differences in the geographical layout of the maps. World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. * British Isles & Ireland (Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Romano-Celts, etc.) are derived from: Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Regnal Chronologies by Bruce Gordon. Year 500 (D) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Patricius and Hypatius. The denomination 500 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. The year 500 is considered the beginning of the Middle Ages, approximately. World map 475 ADPrimary Sources for East-Hem_475ad.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. Euratlas-Nüssli, rue du Milieu 30, 1400 Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland I – African information: * African Tribal locations are derived from: (Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) * North African borders are derived mostly from: II – Asian information: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Hephthalite borders are derived from a combination of: * Japanese Islands : * Korean & Manchurian information: III – European information: * British Isles information is from: * European borders are derived from a comparrison to these maps: IV – Australia, Siberia, & Other Fringe Areas Note: Fringe information is derived from comparisons of these sources: Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies. Roman Empire Asia Byzantine Empire World map 400 ADPrimary Sources for East-Hem_400ad.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. I – African information * African Tribal locations are derived from: (Bantus, Berbers, Chadians, Cushites, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisans, Mandes, Nilotics, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) II – Asian Information * Arabian Tribal locations are derived from: * Chinese (Eastern Jin Dynasty) borders: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Japanese Islands information: * Kidarite, East Kushan, and Kushansha borders are from: Note: These maps show Kidarites as ” Gandhara” and East Kushans as “Takasila” (Taxila). * Korean & Manchurian information derives from: * Persian Empire (Sassanid Dynasty) borders are derived from: * Rouran/Juan-Juan information is from: Note: My map shows the Rouran’s approximate location 2 years before they founded the Khaganate (402 AD). * Southeast Asia: (Funan, Lâm Áp/Linyi, Malay Kingdoms, Pyu Cities, Srivijaya, etc.) * Xionite (White Huns) are derived from: III – European Information * European information is derived from: IV – Australia, Siberia, & Other Fringe Areas Note: Fringe information is derived from comparisons of these sources: a – “The World in 250 CE”, pg 46 & “The World in 500 CE” pg 50. Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies. Roman Empire Europe Asia World 1789 CEThe Chinese empire of the Qing dynasty is the wealthiest and most populous state on the planet. However, the commerce of the globe is dominated by Westerners. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads Every part of the world is beginning to feel the impact of European expansion by this time, though some more than others. The Chinese empireThe Chinese empire has experienced a run of three of the most remarkable emperors in its history – in fact, in world history. It is the largest state in the world at this date, and by far the most populous. It is almost certainly the wealthiest. The British empireThe only other state which comes near to rivaling it is the British Empire which is in the process of acquiring large slices of India. This turn of events has been made possible by the decline of Mughal power in the sub-continent. The chaotic situation this caused allowed European nations to extend their influence from their small toe-holds on the Indian coast. Inevitably, rivalry set in between the different nationalities, and, thanks to its command of the seas, Britain has emerged as the leading power in India. The Ottoman empireTo the west, the Ottoman empire remains a huge state. Its economic and military effectiveness has by now fallen behind those of the leading European nations, but its government is still capable of real reform. The Ottoman sultans have succeeded in modernizing their empire to some extent; the trouble is, Europe is by now in a process of transformation which does not stand still. It has now just entered the early stages of industrialization. This will greatly add to her global effectiveness in the coming decades. ChangeIn the political sphere, also, Europe and its offshoots in the Americas have been experiencing unprecedented change. In England, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 led to rights of individual citizens being guaranteed by law. Ironically, these very principles which Britain pioneered led to a rebellion against her by her American colonies. Most of these have now broken away from British rule to form a new nation with its own deliberately designed constitution, the United States of America. This same political momentum is now bringing about Revolution in France, which starts in this year, 1789. This will soon transform the European political scene for ever. At the root of all this relentless change is the increasing flow of wealth into Europe – a wealth based on Europe’s dominance of the oceans of the world. Tragically, much of this is a cause of misery to countless millions. The Atlantic Slave Trade is at its height just at this date, sending tens of thousands of enslaved Africans each year to toil on plantations in the Americas. On the back of this trade, the sugar industry brings in huge profits to merchants and financiers of Britain, France and other European countries. This has helped fuel the rise of a new middle class, broadening the scope of the educated sections of society. As a result, the old, neo-feudal structures which have prevailed in much of Europe for centuries are coming under increasing attack. This has now spilled over into active Revolution. Change in AfricaThe impact of the slave trade on Africa has been wide ranging. Central Africa, which was already underpopulated before the slavers arrived in force, has suffered doubly from slavers from the Atlantic coast (Europeans) and from the Indian Ocean coast (Arabs). Nowhere is safe, and a vast region has been striped of a significant portion of its population. The survivors have had to militarize their societies, to the extent that the entire region has become a virtual war zone. West Africa, being much more densely populated, has not been so badly affected. Nevertheless some scholars think that the slave trade led to more frequent wars here, and, being now fought with European-sourced firearms, these were more deadly than before. One phenomenon which certainly appears in West Africa at this time, though probably unrelated to the slave trade, occurs on the inland grasslands south of the Sahara. A number of campaigns – “jihads” – install puritanical Muslim groups as rulers of several kingdoms. These are mostly the work of members of the Fulani, a cattle herding and trading people who have lived in and around the trading towns of the region for centuries. Change in North AmericaIn North America, Native American tribes still hold sway in most of the continent. Apart from in the east, people of European extraction live in widely scattered, very isolated settlements – trading posts, forts and mission stations – and make only the most minimal impact on their surroundings. The eastern parts of the continent, however, are now home to societies of European – mainly British – descent. Their way of life has been transplanted wholesale from their original homelands. Most of these societies are now part of the United States of America, a new, independent nation which in 1789 completes the task of equipping itself with a constitution whereby to govern itself. To the north, in that part of North America still under British rule, a large French-speaking community along the banks of the St Lawrence river stands out from the English-speaking settlements surrounding it. This political divide masks a more fundamental division within these American societies. Although of common ancestry, they fall into two quite different types. In the north, communities of merchants and farmers live in what is probably the most open and equal society in the world at this date, free from domination by a small hereditary elite of landowning families. To the south, one of the more unequal societies of the world exists, one dominated by a small group of white landowners who rely in slave labour of African extraction to work the tobacco and cotton plantations they own. Change in Central and South AmericaSouthern US society is in fact the most northern extension of a swathe of slave-owning societies that have become established in the Americas. This swathe takes in the fabulously wealthy Caribbean islands – the jewels on the crowns of the European powers which control them – and reach down to plantation-dominated Brazil. In all of these, rich families of European descent own land on which African slaves grow and process crops for export to Europe. No wonder there is such an insatiable demand for slaves for Africa. In the Spanish-ruled territories in the rest of Central and South America, a scarcely less equal society has grown up. Here, a small colonial elite has divided the land into vast estates, leaving the native population as impoverished serfs tied to the lands. Expanding European influenceEuropean off-shoots have not yet been established in any significant way in other parts of the world. A small farming colony has been planted in South Africa by the Dutch, mainly to provision the ships of the Dutch East India Company on their way to trade with the East; and a tiny penal colony has been established on the south-east coast of Australia by the British. However, other parts of the world are coming under European control, even though not settled to any great extent by European colonists. The Dutch have established their rule over much of the East Indies, and are expanding this control as the years go by. Similarly, and on a much larger scale, in the chaos left by the decline and fragmentation of the Mughal empire, the British are gaining control of more and more of the Indian subcontinent. In most of the rest of the world, in the Middle East, Africa and the East Asia, European influence is still confined to small coastal enclaves from which they trade with the native populations – either on a more or less equal footing or even in conditions of inferiority and difficulty. East AsiaIn East Asia, vibrant societies barely notice the European intrusion. China is a huge, self-contained empire; its enormous and sophisticated internal economy feels no need for European trade. Besides, the Chinese harbor a hearty contempt for those uncouth barbarians. Trade with the west is limited to the southern ports of Macau and Canton. Tokugawa Japan and Chosun Korea also actively keep the Europeans at arms length: Korea is known as the “Hermit Kingdom” for its closed-door policy, and Japan allows only a tiny Dutch trading settlement in its southern port of Nagasaki. It would be a mistake to think of these societies as being sunk in backward-looking stagnation: Japan, for example, has probably one of the most dynamic and “modern” commercial societies on earth during the 17th and 18th centuries. South East AsiaIn South East Asia, powerful kingdoms continue along their own trajectories, only marginally affected by Europeans. Burma and Thailand continue a centuries-long rivalry, and Vietnam continues its centuries-long expansion south, accompanied by civil wars. GlobalizationNevertheless, the global picture in 1789 is clear: the entire world is being drawn into one overall trading system, based on the ports of Western Europe. A globalized economy is taking shape, and world history has acquired a unifying momentum which is leaving no region of the world untouched. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map. American HistoryLatin American HistoryOlder Maps & ModulesFirst EditionThe American History part of this site includes the first edition maps. The European History part of this site includes the third edition maps. The following is an explanation of the different editions of the atlas. The First Edition of the atlas was published on this site in August, 1997. Some map modules require Shockwave. Editors: James Mohr and John Nicols, Department of History, University of Oregon. Second EditionA Second Edition, focusing on the history of the United States, was developed with Pearson Education and could be found at the Pearson Education History Place web site. Editors: James Mohr and John Nicols, Department of History, University of Oregon. Third EditionThe Third Edition is devoted to European history and was developed by historians at the University of Oregon and the Universität Münster. Editors: James Mohr and John Nicols, Department of History, Oregon and Professors Peter Funke and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger of Münster). ContributorsMapping History has been supported over the years by grants from the Oregon University System, the University of Oregon, the Norman Brown Family Fellowship Fund, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the UniversitГ¤t MГјnster. World map/History
Note that some locations are mirrored compared to the in-game map. This is because the original map editor contained a bug that caused things to be mirrored along the east-west axis. | |||||||||
 | November 2000 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This is the first known map of RuneScape. This shows the very basics of the current map, and only features a small part of the current free-to-play world map. It also shows that Jagex was planning to add player-owned houses, which were added more than 5 years later, in an update on 31 May 2006. | |||||||
 | 12 June 2001 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map includes Karamja and Asgarnia, but the Wilderness has not yet been released, and the «player owned houses» have not yet been removed. | |||||||
 | 23 September 2001 | This was an unofficial map, made by RuneScape users. This map shows the full map of RuneScape, including the Wilderness. The player owned houses have been removed. | |||||||
 | 8 December 2001 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map includes Draynor Village’s market. It is unknown why Karamja appears cropped. | |||||||
 | 25 March 2002 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map shows RuneScape shortly after the introduction of Membership and the Fletching skill. | |||||||
 | 17 June 2002 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map shows RuneScape after the release of East Ardougne and the Fishing Guild. Once again, the Wilderness has not been included. | |||||||
 | 23 July 2002 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map shows RuneScape after the release of the Fight Arena and Sea Slug quests. Note the absence of Tree Gnome Village, this may have been intentional, as it was described in the update as «secret». | |||||||
 | 24 September 2002 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map includes West Ardougne for the first time. | |||||||
 | 12 December 2002 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Since the last mapping, new areas like the Underground Pass have been added. It also has the newest skill training areas, like in the Tree Gnome Stronghold and the Barbarian Outpost, the latter of which is located near the Legends’ Guild’s current location. | |||||||
 | 3 March 2003 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map is very incomplete. It is missing areas like the Wilderness, Feldip Hills, south Karamja, Sinclair Mansion and more. The unofficial map below does show those areas. This is the last known officially released map of RuneScape Classic. | |||||||
 | 20 August 2003 | This was an unofficial map, made by RuneScape users. After the addition of the Legends’ Quest, the official map was not updated. This unofficial map shows areas found in the quest. | |||||||
 | 24 March 2004 (after re-opening of RuneScape Classic) | This was an unofficial map, made by RuneScape users. This unofficial map shows the final state of RuneScape Classic. | |||||||
 | March 2004 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. This map is the first map of RuneScape 2. It is also the only map to feature a key and a minimap like ingame on it. | |||||||
 | 25 May 2004 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Tutorial Island, the Mage Arena mine, the Duel Arena, and the area for the Big Chompy Bird Hunting quest were added. Because this map was based on an internal development build, it inadvertently leaked several areas not yet ingame, including Burthorpe and Silvarea. | |||||||
 | 9 August 2004 | This was an unofficial map, made by RuneScape users. On this date the world map applet was released, which used a customized file that allowed parts of the map to remain hidden. From now on, the inaccessible and mostly empty mapsquares, partially visible on the previous two maps, were not shown. Since Jagex did not release an official map accompanying this update, an unofficial version was compiled by users. A lot of areas were added, including Silvarea and Paterdomus, Morytania, Canifis, Burthorpe and Trollheim. | |||||||
 | 22 September 2004 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Several new areas have been added, including the Kalphite Hive, Tirannwn (Isafdar), and the Trollheim area has been expanded. Also, a small piece of Castle Wars was added west of the Observatory. | |||||||
 | 17 November 2004 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. More parts of Trollheim have been added, and Tirannwn has also been expanded with the Poison Waste. Also, the Haunted Woods and Mort’ton have been added to Morytania. Also, the whole part of the Fremennik Province that is not an island has been added, including the Lighthouse. Finally, two upcoming updates were added: Castle Wars (due December 2004) and Slayer Tower (due January 2005). | |||||||
 | 15 December 2004 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. In this map update Miscellania and Etceteria have been added to the Fremennik Province. Also, Ape Atoll and Crash Island appeared on the map. Finally, as stated on the previous world map version, Castle Wars opened its doors. | |||||||
 | 7 February 2005 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. In this update, Mort’ton got two green fields of the same size as the town south and east of it. These would later change to Burgh de Rott and Barrows. Slayer Tower was opened to public. Also, Karamja gained its dungeon filled with dragons and other monsters. | |||||||
 | 26 April 2005 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Morytania expanded further to the east: Fenkenstrain’s Castle and Port Phasmatys have been built there and a graveyard has been added just south of the Haunted Woods. The H.A.M. founded their organisation near Lumbridge, and in the Kharidian Desert(gaining its name this map update), the cities Sophanem and Menaphos have been added, with Sophanem being a city with buildings, and Menaphos being a plain area filled with sand. Finally, the Ice Path gained its place north of Trollheim. | |||||||
 | 8 July 2005 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Bridge from Castle wars to the area south was constructed and parts of wall to the east were demolished to allow access to minigame from Yanille. Map was updated with addition of new quests and minigames, such as The Lost Tribe, Tears of Guthix, Keldagrim and the Rogues’ Den. | |||||||
 | 11 July 2005 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Farming locations and shops were added. | |||||||
 | 5 January 2006 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Because Jagex didn’t release another world map for 5 months, there are a lot of changes. First of all Lletya opened to adventures, because the Mourning’s End Part I and II were released. North of Isafdar, an Outpost appeared. Also Waterbirth Island, with its dangerous monsters, was added. Also some Teak and Mahogany trees grew near Tai Bwo Wannai. In Varrock, Queen Ellamaria created a garden for her own, and everywhere through Gielinor Rat Pits appeared. The Mage Training Arena was also restored from the remains the Fremenniks left. South from Thurgo’s Peninsula, the Mudskipper Point rose from the sea. Furthermore, there were three unexplained disappearances. The first is the large island in the River Salve, the second is the water resource sign at Tutorial Island, and the third is the path between Port Sarim and Rimmington. | |||||||
 | 21 March 2006 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. The Agility Pyramid and the Quarry were discovered in the Kharidian Desert, and when we are talking about sand, Sandy started his office in Brimhaven. Also Mos Le’Harmless has been opened, but just until the gates to prevent the horrors from attacking the pirates living there. A Canoe system has also started at the River Lum, which makes transport via it easier. Because of the effects of Recipe for Disaster some areas also changed, for example the Ape Atoll Agility Course. Finally, Burgh de Rott, the poorest town in Gielinor has been built, and it helps adventurers with getting supplies for fighting Vampyres. | |||||||
 | 28 July 2006 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Near Silvarea, a rift opened with the imaginations of a strange man. Another odd man settled near the Paterdomus mining site, and needs the help of adventurers who will search bones for his collection. Further away from modern civilisation, in Port Phasmatys, a ghost offered his services to go to the Dragontooth Island. On the other side of the world, the Void Knights need your help fighting pests. In the wilderness the lava became brighter of colour. In the same location, a volcano rose from the ground, and teleport pillars were placed here too. Meanwhile, the Gnomes are preparing for defending their lands, as they constructed a pen for battle tortoises. Next to it, the Piscatoris Fishing Colony needs the help of the Wise Old Man, because of the threat of Sea trolls. This is also the first chance a player can ever see the colony. All over the world, there appeared portals to player-owned houses, which were announced more than 5 years before the actual release. In Burthorpe a group of the strongest warriors founded the Warriors’ Guild. On Mos Le’Harmless, the pirates allowed players to explore the rest of the island, which was locked before. In the Fremennik lands, those pirates discovered the Lunar Isle, with the Moon Clan people living on it. And because this whole world of monsters (and scammers) was getting very dangerous, the Stronghold of Security was opened. The safety of people had to be tested by some strong monsters, and the series of new ones in the stronghold were capable of doing that. If you were going for the money, you could also go to Sophanem for the Pyramid Plunder. | |||||||
 | 4 September 2006 | Behind the poorest town in Gielinor(Burgh de Rott), another poor region appeared. The Sanguinesti region. Near Ardougne, the fishermen of Witchaven started up. | |||||||
 | 27 September 2006 | Many things happened in and around Lumbridge here: Father Urhney moved to a bit more to the west of the Lumbridge Swamps. This was because the Lumbridge government claimed it to reveal a mine at the old location of his house. in both south corners of the swamps new mines were discovered. | |||||||
 | 21 November 2006 | My Arm the troll started his farming patch near Troll Stronghold. In the Tree Gnome Stronghold another farming patch was made, a tree patch. In the Feldip Hills and Piscatoris areas, new Hunter locations appeared, at the Piscatoris area accompanied by the Eagles’ Peak. As Eagles need somewhere to land, there were also some of those landing spots added around the world. | |||||||
 | 10 January 2007 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Several icons were added here, and Barbarian Assault started. In Sophanem an altar and several shops were added. | |||||||
 | 29 January 2007 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. The Iceberg has been added, and on the place where the Fremennik Isles would come, a message saying «coming soon» was placed. | |||||||
 | 7 March 2007 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. The Fremennik Isles and Harmony Island have been added. | |||||||
 | 26 August 2008 | This was an official map, released by Jagex. Addition of Ullek, Oo’glog, God Wars Dungeon, Wilderness Volcano, Clan Wars, The Rock, Summoning obelisks and the change to Runescape HD. World 200 CEGreat religions spread along the trade routes of the Eastern Hemisphere. Meanwhile one of the largest cities in the whole world now flourishes in the Western Hemisphere. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads The great empires of Rome, China and India almost straddle Eurasia from east to west. Europe and the MediterraneanThe Roman empire is at its height, but is just about to enter its long decline. It has given its inhabitants two centuries of almost unbroken peace, and so, like the Han dynasty in China, ranks as one of the longest periods of peace in world history. The appearance of Roman merchants in south Chinese ports shows the strength of trade links between different parts of the Eastern Hemisphere by this time. East AsiaThe Chinese Han empire, however, is already in steep decline, and will not last for much longer. The Han empire still dominates eastern central Asia, despite its internal weaknesses. One group of Huns, refusing Chinese overlordship, has moved westward. In due course they will reappear in history as attackers of the Roman empire under their fearsome king, Attila. South AsiaThe Kushanas have succeeded the Scythians in ruling a huge empire stretching from central Asia into India. Their state plays a major role in global history by acting as the base for the spread of Buddhism to China and East Asia. The Middle EastAnother great state whose end is fast approaching is the Parthian empire, which has ruled much of the Middle East for the past 300 years (though without the stability of the Roman and Han empires). To the west, the small land of Judaea has been the springboard of the spread of two major religions. Christianity is finding millions of converts throughout the Roman and Parthian empires. At the same time, the Jewish people are now experiencing the early stages of their Diaspora, which by this time has also reached the frontiers of Rome and Parthia. The Jews will play a major role in the history of Europe, particularly in the development of commerce and finance. AfricaTrade links are being extended in West Africa, where Berber traders are pioneering the trans-Saharan trade routes, with the vital aid of camels. To the south, the Bantu migration is now moving down into southern Africa. South East Asia and OceaniaIndian-style kingdoms are emerging in South East Asia. In the Pacific, a variety of different societies are emerging on the numerous islands. The AmericasIn central America, the Mayan civilization is on the rise, while in Mexico one of the largest cities of the pre-Columbian Americas, Teotihuacan, is in its pomp. In South America, the Moche civilization is now flourishing, bringing Andean urban culture to new heights. TechnologyTwo developments stand out in this period as highly significant for the history of world technology. Paper has been invented in Han China. This will make the dissemination of written information much easier and cheaper. The heavy plow probably appears about now in northern Europe. This will be of great importance in opening up the heavy clay lowlands of the region to arable farming, and so be one the keys to future European growth. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map. History of the World Map by MapMaps don’t just show us where to go, but also where we’ve been. A stunning overview of all human history, side by side with 140 custom maps. Learn how something like the printing press can define a time, or how the Allies in Europe could defeat the Nazis. There is so much to read about in this remarkable history book, and just as much to look at. Maps are more than the topog Maps don’t just show us where to go, but also where we’ve been. A stunning overview of all human history, side by side with 140 custom maps. Learn how something like the printing press can define a time, or how the Allies in Europe could defeat the Nazis. There is so much to read about in this remarkable history book, and just as much to look at. Maps are more than the topography of the Earth or the borders of countries. Maps can represent the movement of people and ideas, and they provide a unique way to explain historical themes and explore sweeping periods of time. This stunning visual reference book starts with the evolution and migration of our oldest ancestors out of Africa. You can then look up maps about the Greece and Persian War, the Mongol Conquests, Medieval Europe’s trade routes, and the rise of the Ottomans. There are maps about the colonization of North America, the scientific revolution, Napoleon’s advances, and Britain’s control of India. There’s more in later centuries, like the Age of Imperialism, the American Civil War, industrialized Europe, and the transformation of Japan. This history book reaching across millennia gives you a broad view of the pivotal events in our past. With 140 maps, complimented with pictures, info boxes, and timelines, there’s so much to enjoy and learn about. You will gain a strong understanding of some of the forces and movements across continents that have shaped our world. A Map Guided Tour of World History Inside this beautiful cover are concise and fascinating historical information, 140 custom maps, and many ways to engage in history that will interest many readers, from students wanting additional resources for school to history buffs that love a good book and cartography. Go on a guided tour through time: World map 500 BCPrimary Sources for East-Hem_500bc.jpg: World History Maps Inc., Alexandria, VA, 2008. Available at www.WorldHistoryMaps.com. I – African information: * African Tribal locations are derived from: (Bantus, Berber Tribes, Chadians, Cushites, Daamat, Garamantes, Gur, Khoisan Peoples, Kwa, Libyans, Mandes, Nilotic Peoples, West Atlantic Peoples, etc.) * Carthage borders are derived from: (Shows Carthage borders in 500 BCE ). * Persian Egypt borders: II – Asian information: Note: Much of my Asian peoples and tribal locations are derived from: (Ainu, Dravidians, Finno-Ugrians, Korean Peoples, Malay Peoples, Mon-Khmer Peoples, Palaeosiberians, Papuans, Saba, Samoyed Peoples, Scythian Tribes, Tochari/Yuezhi, Tungus) (Ainu, Final Jomon Culture, Korean Peoples, Massagetae, Sakae) * East Asian ( China ) information: * Korean & Manchurian information: * Gerrha borders are derived from: * Greater India (Including modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan): * Persian Empire (Achaemenid Dynasty) borders: * Văn Lang borders are derived from: III – European information: Note: Much of my European peoples and tribal locations are derived from: (Baltic Peoples, Finno-Ugrians, Illyrians, Samoyed Peoples, Scythians, Thracians) * Brythonic Celts derive from: * Gaelic Celts and Priteni (aka Cruithne, Dál nAraidi, and Robogdii) derive from: * Gaulic Veneti are described in * Greek City-States & Colonies are derived from: (Section includes 2 maps of Greek mainland and colonies during this era.) * Hallstatt Culture derives from: * Iberian Peoples derive from: (Cantabri, Celtiberians, Iberians, Lusitani, Tartessians, Vasconi, etc.) * Italian Peoples information: * Thracian Tribes information: Note: Much of the information in this map was cross-checked with Bruce Gordon’s Regnal Chronologies. 500 BC—Bantu-speaking people migrate into south-west Uganda from the west. (approximate date) World 1914 CEWestern industrial civilization has swept all before it. European empires, above all the British empire, rule much of the world. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads CivilizationsSubscribe for more great content – and remove ads OverviewWestern ImperialismIn what must be the most audacious land-grab in history, Western nations divide much of the globe between them. The centerpiece of this process is an episode labelled the “Scramble for Africa“, in which European powers compete to annex as much of the continent as they can. The same process has been at work in South East Asia and the Pacific. As a result, Western Empires, with the British Empire in the lead, rule much of the world. Global economic controlThe conquests are followed by economic exploitation. Railways start appearing in all corners of the world – in Western-ruled colonies, such as in India and Africa, and in countries as yet beyond direct Western control, such as China and the countries of Latin America. The oceans are linked by an ever-intensifying network of sea routes, all converging on Western ports. A global economy has arrived by which the commodities of the planet are shipped to Western nations, there to be consumed, or turned into manufactured goods. Many of these are then shipped back out to worldwide markets, which are financed and controlled by Western capital. Continued industrial advanceWithin Western societies, relentless industrial advance has occurred. The middle classes continue to increase in numbers, and the working classes benefit from a rising standard of living. New inventions such as the lightbulb, gramophones, the telephone, cameras, the car, airplanes and artificial fertilizers – continue to change the lives of Westerners. The USA and Germany have drawn ahead of Britain as industrial powers. Around the worldEuropePolitically, Germany‘s rise has destabilized Europe. The resulting tensions have divided much of Europe into two camps – Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy on one side, Britain, France and Russia on the other. It will not take much of a spark to set these nations against each other, and this year that spark is lit. AfricaOver the past couple of decades, most of Africa has been parceled out amongst European powers, with British and French empires taking the lion’s share. Only Ethiopia escapes this fate. In some parts of Africa, the arrival of European powers is met by fierce resistance (as in German South West Africa). In other parts, it is followed by shocking brutality (as in the Belgian Congo). In all of European-ruled Africa, local societies are drawn forcibly into the modern world, with railways, roads, western education and missionary activity all beginning to alter them for ever. South Africa sees a major challenge to British imperial rule as the Boers rebel in 1899. The British only succeed in bringing the Boer territories under control after a long, tough fight. The Middle EastMuch of the Middle East has fallen under Western influence, though of a less direct kind than in Africa. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, has succeeded in tightening its grip on its territories – while losing most of its lands in the Balkans. South and East AsiaIn the Indian sub-continent, this period sees the high water mark of British rule. The contrasting fates of the different countries of East Asia could not be more different from one another – results dependent upon the effectiveness of their responses to the Western challenge. Japan has responded by meeting like with like: it has undergone the most startling modernization in the history of the world. This has allowed it to defeat, first China, then Russia (one of the leading powers of Europe), in war, and to annex Korea. Japan’s defeat of China further undermined the prestige of the Qing regime, and has helped lead to the end of the long succession of imperial dynasties in China. In 1912, China became a republic. Since then things have only gone from bad to worse with the country becoming fragmented amongst regional warlords. South East Asia and OceaniaSouth East Asia and the Pacific, like Africa, see Western powers take control of most territories. In South East Asia only Thailand succeeds in keeping a semblance of independence; in the Pacific, Tonga remains under the rule of its monarchs, but only as a protectorate of the British Empire. Australia and New Zealand continue to be settled by people of European (mostly British) extraction. Their economies are greatly stimulated by the advent of refrigerated cargo ships, which allows them to ship their produce (meat, wool and dairy products) to Britain. Australia’s colonization is boosted by a series of gold rushes. South and North AmericaThe same is true for Argentina, in South America. This country sees its economy expand and its population increase due to immigration. Other countries on the continent also see commodity booms and economic expansion. This leads to tensions between the nations, and indeed to a major war between Chile on the one hand, and Peru and Bolivia, on the other. Chile was victorious. The opening of the Panama Canal is symbolic of the USA‘s economic rise. The past few decades have seen a surge of economic growth, and the USA is now the wealthiest nation on Earth. Immigration continues to increase its population, and by now the whole of the USA has been fully (though in many places sparsely) settled by people of European descent. At the top of society, fabulous fortunes in this “Gilded Age” derive from control of vast business empires. This is also the period which sees the USA acquire an overseas empire of its own, as the Philippines, Cuba and other Caribbean countries fall under its control. The Canadian west has also been settled by people of European descent, thanks to the completion of the Canadian-Pacific railroad and to episodes such as the Yukon Gold Rush of 1896. Dig DeeperFor details of the different civilizations, click on the relevant timeline above. More ‘Dig Deeper’ links may be found in the regional maps. To access, click on the markers in the world map. Subscribe for more great content – and remove ads Источники:
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