How it works
Four moves, and you can go anywhere in time.
Pick a moment
Drag the timeline, scroll over it, type any year into the year box, or press ▶ to watch 125,000 years play out. ← → step one map at a time.
Follow the story
A story card rides along with the globe and tells you what was happening, while the camera flies to where it happened. Switch between a 3D globe and a flat map.
Filter the world
Combine filters: only Asia and Africa, only states over a million km², only names with "Sultanate". The rest fades away, and your filters stay on as time moves.
Open a story
Click any territory, or use Explore and search, to open an empire's full history: its maps, its size over time, its key moments and every ruler.
What's inside
A personal project built around one simple question: who ruled this place, and when?
A globe that flies
Pick a year and the camera spins and swoops to where history was happening, the way Google Earth used to.
A time-lapse of borders
The first cities, Alexander, Rome, the Arab conquests, the Mongols, the age of empires and the map of today.
66 empires, up close
Territory growing and shrinking, a chart of its size, key moments and a reign timeline of its rulers.
Who ruled here?
Click any spot on Earth and get every state that held it, from prehistory to 2026. Try your home town.
Filters you can stack
Region, size, type and name, all at once. See only the Khanates of Central Asia, or every empire bigger than a million km².
Search everything
Type an empire, a ruler or a city. "Akbar", "Lahore" or "Habsburg" take you straight there.
A look inside
The globe, an empire, and a homeland.
Two homelands
Pakistan and Austria, the two places I call home, have their own detailed views under Homelands: five thousand years of who ruled them, their leaders, and a map you can play through.
Pakistan
The land of the Indus: Mohenjo-daro, Gandhara, the Kushans at Peshawar, the Mughals at Lahore, and the country born in 1947.
- Indus Valley
- Gandhara
- Kushans
- Arab Sindh
- Ghaznavids
- Mughals
- Sikh Empire
- 1947
Austria
Where the Alps meet the Danube: Hallstatt salt, Roman Vindobona, the Babenbergs, six centuries of Habsburgs and the Second Republic.
- Hallstatt
- Noricum
- Babenbergs
- Habsburgs
- Austria-Hungary
- 1918
- 1955
This is random research by a curious person, not a history book. I'm not claiming that anything here is accurate.
Maps of the past are educated guesses. If you find a mistake, I'd love to hear about it.