The dates and sovereignties seem in order, but the map is modern no matter how far you go back. The boundaries shift, but the coastline remains in its 2024 state. This means historical seas are missing, and present-day polders are present in the middle ages, etc.
You can change maps to many older maps under the "Explore Maps" option on the home page of the site. it seems you can either explore maps or history, but not both at the same time.
For New Zealand in particular, the flags that are used through history are wildly inaccurate. It's missing the initial flag used before the Union Jack was officially adopted. And the signalling flag that is on there between 1907-1947 was never an official flag and was only kind of used between 1899-1902 before the current flag (Union Jack in the corner with the red Southern Cross stars on a blue background) was adopted in 1902.
Suggestion 1: you could show the name of bigger entities also in the corners of the screen - now you must scroll up to Italy to see that the green region is the Roman empire.
Suggestion 2: I expected to be able to drag the timeline left and right. Dragging the cursor over the screen edge for the next time period makes you unwillingly jump a few hundred years.
The TimeMap is in fact loading the data from OpenHistoricalMap on the deep zoomlevels (streets) so if you edit OpenHistoricalMap roads and houses it will be displayed there.
See Lille for example - and play with timeline here:
I don't see mention of OHM anywhere within TimeMap, is there something I'm missing? Is there a page about where the historical data comes from for the map?
Imagine you are holding a very, very nicely done history textbook. Excellent illustrations made with love, excellent typeface, high quality print, packaging, etc.
Except it's all totally wrong.
Could you appreciate the work that went into this?
I'm also puzzled by many of the comments that are (for HN standards) exceptionally angry and dismissive.
Yeah, apparently the data is incomplete and there are some errors/disputes. But that will always be the case when processing huge amounts of data in a way that's never done before. I'd hope we could provide more helpful feedback (what _exactly_ is incorrect and what is the source of the correct information).
Edit: upon closer inspection I found many of the comments originating from the same users, so maybe it's just a very passionate topic for a small but vocal group.
Perhaps also of interest: A more curated example of a local initiative can be found here: https://kaart.gentgemapt.be/. This combines historical maps of a city in Belgium with information on local heritage.
This is awesome. Love this idea. What a great way to make history more alive. I've only spent ~30s with it so far but I hope to find ways to contribute to it (content and code/different visualizations)
There's a great big coffee table version of this [1]. As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times.
Arguably the ultimate commentary on that aspect of history and politics is to take T.E. Lawrence's original map showing his suggestion for dividing up the Middle East based on linguistic groupings and factional differences and religious factions and interactions and to then overlay it with any more recent map.
> As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times
That is pretty hard to do, because nationalism wasn't really a thing before the 19th century in Europe.
So how do you identify 18th century people living in Wallonia under the HRE or Netherlands, speaking French and being Catholic? What are they? How would they identify themselves? Or people born in Thessaloniki/Salonika/Solun in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, being Orthodox and Slav? Or people speaking Polish but considering themselves German in post-WWI disputed territories? Or Baltic Germans living in Russia for generations? Or the family in Macedonia where 3 brothers considered themselves Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian respectively.
Depending on the point in time, locality and even individuals, people would identify with their religion, main language, local area, monarch, nation state first. Or a combination of all of the above. How would you represent that sort of wild variety on a 2D map?
That’s kind of my point. That’s the interesting stuff (the fact that Macedonia at some point nominally controlled Kyrgyzstan is much less interesting imo) but it’s much too complex (and unrecorded) to convey in a satisfying way.
And it was rarely clear enough on the ground, let alone in the little available data. Just in the first quarter of the 20th century there were a ton of conflicts all over Europe to try to clarify borders based on different interpretations of identity based on culture/religion/language/history.
A notable observation from a lecture which touched on linguistics I attended:
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
> >Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.
One thing you could do is use different axes. A two-color pattern where the pattern would be religion, the hue of one color language, the other family structure, etc.
I would love if historical maps at least qualified what they show and what they don’t show.
In a sense, all of the countries today have more in common with each other than with a given unique culture they subsumed (or in some cases annihilated). Putting all focus on separating the former and largely ignoring the latter is a narrow take on the meaning of “history”, and a more specific term (perhaps “political history”) seems more fitting.
For example, Russia did not naturally expand into a vacant spot eastward, despite resources such as Timemap.org perpetuating an image of peacefully walking into vast empty lands rather than annexing with a heavy dose of brutality, deadly smallpox, forced conversion to Christianity, and just plain old mass murder the territories where a range of cultures (Yakuts, Nenets, etc.) lived for centuries prior to that (or to Russia actually existing as such for that matter).
Had multiple iterations, and put a lot of effort into finding and drawing the maps.
Later we found some support from the community and they promised to provide us with verifiable and trusted map sources...
It's fascinating to see how much more (and more accurate) data your project comprised, but how much better the interface is for this one. Perhaps they can leverage the data you collected for a best of both worlds approach.
I have been looking for a map like this for a while and even considered creating one. Really nice job! I cannot verify the actual historical accuracy but it looks great.
Love it. One suggestion is to have cities only appear when they were founded. Looking at Ireland it felt off seeing limerick Dublin and cork in 4000 bc.
191 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadGonna play around with this and report back! Looks amazing so far.
Slider does not work though
Suggestion 1: you could show the name of bigger entities also in the corners of the screen - now you must scroll up to Italy to see that the green region is the Roman empire.
Suggestion 2: I expected to be able to drag the timeline left and right. Dragging the cursor over the screen edge for the next time period makes you unwillingly jump a few hundred years.
See Lille for example - and play with timeline here:
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=13...
You will see directly how the town center has developed, fortifications, railways or highway... damn cool! :-)
Except it's all totally wrong.
Could you appreciate the work that went into this?
Yeah, apparently the data is incomplete and there are some errors/disputes. But that will always be the case when processing huge amounts of data in a way that's never done before. I'd hope we could provide more helpful feedback (what _exactly_ is incorrect and what is the source of the correct information).
Edit: upon closer inspection I found many of the comments originating from the same users, so maybe it's just a very passionate topic for a small but vocal group.
[1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...
That is pretty hard to do, because nationalism wasn't really a thing before the 19th century in Europe.
So how do you identify 18th century people living in Wallonia under the HRE or Netherlands, speaking French and being Catholic? What are they? How would they identify themselves? Or people born in Thessaloniki/Salonika/Solun in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, being Orthodox and Slav? Or people speaking Polish but considering themselves German in post-WWI disputed territories? Or Baltic Germans living in Russia for generations? Or the family in Macedonia where 3 brothers considered themselves Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian respectively.
Depending on the point in time, locality and even individuals, people would identify with their religion, main language, local area, monarch, nation state first. Or a combination of all of the above. How would you represent that sort of wild variety on a 2D map?
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...
Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.
In a sense, all of the countries today have more in common with each other than with a given unique culture they subsumed (or in some cases annihilated). Putting all focus on separating the former and largely ignoring the latter is a narrow take on the meaning of “history”, and a more specific term (perhaps “political history”) seems more fitting.
For example, Russia did not naturally expand into a vacant spot eastward, despite resources such as Timemap.org perpetuating an image of peacefully walking into vast empty lands rather than annexing with a heavy dose of brutality, deadly smallpox, forced conversion to Christianity, and just plain old mass murder the territories where a range of cultures (Yakuts, Nenets, etc.) lived for centuries prior to that (or to Russia actually existing as such for that matter).
We did a similar project and closed it about 5 years ago https://maps.chron.ist/
Had multiple iterations, and put a lot of effort into finding and drawing the maps. Later we found some support from the community and they promised to provide us with verifiable and trusted map sources...
The source code is available here https://github.com/chronhq