About the project
I have always been the kind of person who loses an afternoon to a map. History and geography have been with me for as long as I can remember — not as school subjects, but as the most interesting question there is: how did the world end up looking like this?
Why this exists
A war, a marriage, a treaty signed in a hurry, a river that happened to be in the way. Once you start noticing that the lines on a modern map are the residue of centuries of decisions, you can't stop. A news report about a disputed region sends you looking for its history. The history sends you to an old map. The old map raises three new questions — and suddenly it's two in the morning.
For years I followed those rabbit holes with a dozen tabs open: an encyclopedia here, a scanned atlas there, a timeline somewhere else, none of them talking to each other. Each one showed a single frozen moment. What I actually wanted was to see the whole picture move — and then be able to stop anywhere and ask what I was looking at.
“I wanted one place where history, geopolitics and geography stop being separate subjects and become one story you can explore with your own hands.”
The World Through Time is my attempt at that place: an interactive compendium for people who are, like me, thirsty for knowledge about how the world came to be the way it is. It isn't a textbook and it isn't a quiz. It's a tool for curiosity — one that is honest about what we know and what we don't, and that always shows you where its information comes from.
I'm building it slowly and carefully, region by region, because I'd rather publish something true than something fast. If it helps you understand a headline, settle a dinner-table argument, or simply lose an afternoon the way I do — it's doing its job.
— Joschka Weiss
Three parts, one idea
The project is built as three pieces that feed into each other. The map shows you what happened and where. The glossary tells you who and how. The knowledge blog will tackle the why.
The heart of the project. Two thousand years of borders on a single slider — every territory clickable, every year reachable, in an equal-area projection so that the sizes you see are the sizes that were.
The long read behind every shape: where a state came from, who ruled it, how big it really got and how it ended. Each entry is researched against named sources and linked back to the exact year it stood on the map.
A blog for the stories that don't fit into a glossary entry. Why a border ended up exactly where it did. How today's conflicts grew out of yesterday's maps. What you notice when you put two moments in history side by side.
Why the map is worth your time
A printed atlas freezes the world at a handful of dates and leaves you to imagine what happened in between. The World Through Time fills in the between.
Drag the slider and the borders move with your hand. Press play and watch Rome recede, the caliphates sweep west, the Mongols ride out of the steppe and Europe shatter into confetti and reassemble.
Most world maps inflate Russia and Canada into monsters. This one defaults to the Equal Earth projection, so when an empire looks enormous, it really was — and you can compare them fairly.
Every shape is clickable. Name, dates, capital, peak size, how it rose and how it fell — and 95% of what's on screen at any moment has a written description, not just a database label.
Blank land means no state claimed it. Borders before 1648 are approximations of overlapping rights. Where the data is coarse or disputed, the map says so instead of pretending.
Every border comes from published academic datasets, and every glossary entry names the books, papers and archives it was written from — all collected on the sources page.
No account, no install, no paywall. It runs in your browser on a laptop or a phone — and when you find something worth showing, just send a friend the link. They'll see exactly what you saw.
Who it's for
Start exploring
The one you were born. The one your town was founded. The one you had to learn at school and never quite pictured.