Atlas Through Time

Explore

Our dataset was made possible thanks to the work of many people — whose data we have joined, cleaned, processed and adapted into one unified dataset. Heartfelt thanks to:

Wikidata — polities, names, succession, rulers & population CC0
historical-basemaps by Aaron Ourednik — historical border outlines GPL-3.0
Wikipedia — article summaries & images, fetched live CC BY-SA
Flagpedia — country flags public domain
NASA Blue Marble via three-globe — globe imagery public domain
Atlas Through Time — curated city timelines & schematic trade routes, drawn by us from the historical record CC BY 4.0

Border outlines are shown for visual reference only and are not part of our data API. The dataset is continually expanded and refined — corrections welcome.

Time scale: logarithmic — 1 CE sits ~18% along the slider so recent centuries get more room.

The Atlas dataset is free to read over HTTPS. Principle: aggregate, never interpret — disputed facts are stored as multiple sourced rows, never adjudicated.

Base: https://cbvkgcvngigjvodnxgxg.supabase.co/rest/v1/

Headers:
apikey: <anon key — see db-config.js>
Accept-Profile: atlas

Tables: polity · polity_name · thread · thread_polity · relation · fact · territory · name_resolution · event · reference. Full schema: db/schema.sql.

Examples:

GET /polity?canonical_name=ilike.*france*
GET /thread?slug=eq.lithuania&select=id,display_name
GET /thread_polity?thread_id=eq.5&select=role,polity:polity_id(canonical_name)
GET /territory?source=eq.ohm-usa&valid_from=lte.1850&or=(valid_to.gte.1850,valid_to.is.null)
GET /fact?subject_type=eq.polity&key=eq.head_of_state&subject_id=eq.21

License: the combined dataset is CC BY 4.0. Commercial use and redistribution allowed with attribution to each upstream source (see About & data above). Per-source notes: Wikipedia text is live-only (CC BY-SA, not in the API); border outlines on this site are display-only — historical-basemaps is GPL-3.0 and is not in the API. The redistributable territory layer is sourced from OpenHistoricalMap (CC0).

No rate-limits yet on the public anon key. Open an issue on the GitHub repo for B2B integrations.