The Cosmos of History · an astrolabe of civilizations

How to read this wheel

Every arc of light was a people who farmed, argued, buried their dead, and gave names to the stars overhead. Here is how to find them. It is a clock, read from the inside out.

DistanceHow far an arc sits from the center is when it lived. The core is 3100 BCE; the outer rim is the year 2000.

LengthHow far an arc reaches outward is how long it endured. Rome runs long. The Aztec Empire is a bright, brief flare.

WedgeEach slice of the wheel is a region of the world, named around the rim.

ColorThe family of language its people spoke. Neighbours in a wedge may be strangers in tongue.

Side by sideArcs share a wedge when their lives overlapped. Crowding is the history.

The hubThe glowing core is everything before the first city: 300,000 years, on a folded scale so it will fit. Inward is still older, but the stride is no longer even. Open it and see.

clickopen a people

playsweep through the ages

scrollzoom in; small names appear

dragmove across the sky

rimtap a region to focus it

/search

Click any people and five doors open: Wikipedia, an atlas set to their century, and three reviewed sources, one an academic library. Be warned that dates are the tidy approximations of scholars, and every one is argued over. These 331 are a chosen few, not a census of humankind. Read it as a poem about time, and check the footnotes before you quote it.

What this is. An interactive chart of 331 peoples, empires and cultures, each placed by when it lived, how long it lasted, where on earth, and the language it spoke.

OpenHistoricalMap · World History Encyclopedia · List of empires