What Panchronica is
Panchronica is a map of world culture you scrub through time. Pick a year between 3000 BCE and 2010, and the map redraws: the states of that era, the cities, the people who lived there, the buildings, the books, the music, the discoveries.
Click a territory and you get a written guide to it. Click a dot and you get a person, a place, a work or an event, with a link to where it came from. The point is breadth: not one civilisation told well, but the whole world at any year, in one view.
Two kinds of content, and how to tell them apart
Everything on the map belongs to one of two tiers. The site marks which is which, and the difference matters when you decide how much to trust a line.
Curated Written and checked by us
The guide text for a territory, the era descriptions, and the curated entries. These are written in our own words from sources, and checked against those sources before they ship. This is the part of the site we are personally answerable for.
Wikidata Machine-collected, source-linked
The great majority of the dots. These records are pulled automatically from Wikidata and Wikipedia — name, date, coordinates, and often a first paragraph taken straight from the Wikipedia article. Nobody here has read them one by one. Instead, every one of them carries a badge saying where it came from and a link you can follow to check it yourself. Think of it as an atlas gazetteer: it is sourced, not hand-verified.
What we do not promise
This is the honest list. Please read it before you cite anything here.
- Borders are approximate, and they are dated to a snapshot, not to your year. The historical map is drawn from 29 snapshots — 3000 BCE, 2000 BCE, 1500 BCE, 1000 BCE, 700 BCE, 500 BCE, 1 BCE, then 200, 400, 600, 700 and 800, then every hundred years from 1000 to 1900, then 1914, 1920, 1938, 1945, 1960, 1994 and 2010. Move the slider to 1650 and you are looking at the 1600 snapshot. Frontiers in most of history were zones rather than lines anyway, and the underlying dataset says so itself: it is a best-effort reconstruction, not a survey.
- Machine-collected records are not checked by us. A record badged Wikidata carries whatever Wikidata and Wikipedia say. If the date there is wrong, it is wrong here too. We show the source link precisely so you can see that for yourself rather than take our word for it.
- Dates can be approximate — and where we know that, we say so. Many founding years and lifespans in the sources are estimates. Where a date is marked approximate upstream, or where we have supplied an estimate ourselves, the record says "approximate". A bare year is not a claim of precision to the day.
- A position is where the sources put it, not a survey point. Coordinates come from the same automatic sources. A settlement that moved, or one whose site is disputed, sits at one point on our map.
- Coverage is uneven, and the gaps are not a judgement. Some regions and periods are far better represented than others, because the open datasets we draw on are themselves uneven. An empty area means we have no record there yet — never that nothing happened there.
- Not all of our own prose has had its second check yet. Panchronica is young and still filling in. Curated text is written from sources, but a systematic re-verification of every regional overview is still running. If a sentence looks wrong to you, it may well be — please tell us.
- The Wikipedia paragraph in a popup is Wikipedia's wording, not ours. It is shown verbatim, credited and linked, under the licence below. We have not rewritten or fact-checked it.
Found an error?
Tell us — it is the fastest way this gets better. Use the Report an error link at the bottom of the map page. We read every message. If you can, say which year and which record or territory you were looking at.
Sources, licences and credits
Panchronica is built almost entirely on open data, and every source below is credited on the page where it is used as well as here.
| What | Source and licence |
|---|---|
| Historical borders the coloured territories at every year |
historical-basemaps by André Ourednik and contributors, under the GNU General Public License v3.0. The slices are reconstructions and are labelled approximate throughout. |
| Rivers, lakes, landforms and the shaded relief | Natural Earth. Natural Earth states that all its raster and vector map data is in the public domain and that no permission or credit is required — we credit it anyway. The relief on our map is built from their Shaded Relief (SR_HR) raster and served from our own servers, so the site depends on no third-party tile service. |
| Records: names, dates, coordinates, identifiers | Wikidata, whose structured data is released under CC0 1.0 (see Wikidata:Licensing). Every such record shows its Wikidata identifier and links back to it. |
| The descriptive paragraph in a popup | First paragraphs from Wikipedia, shown verbatim with a link to the article. Wikipedia text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and co-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (Wikipedia:Copyrights). Our own curated prose is not derived from it. |
| Pictures | Wikimedia Commons. Commons has no single licence: every file carries its own, stated on its file description page (Commons:Licensing). So every picture here is shown with its author, its licence name linked to the licence deed, and a link to its Commons file page. A picture whose credit is incomplete is not displayed at all. |
| Recordings | Also Wikimedia Commons, under the same per-file rule, and hotlinked from Commons rather than re-hosted. Each track shows its performer or uploader, its own licence and its file page. Licences in use range from public domain through CC0 and the CC BY / CC BY-SA family; some tracks are computer renderings rather than human performances, and say so. Where the music is still in copyright and no free recording exists, we say that instead of playing something misleading. |
| Map rendering | MapLibre GL JS 4.7.1, under the 3-Clause BSD licence, which also carries bundled third-party notices (mapbox-gl-js v1.13 and earlier, BSD-3-Clause; glfx.js, MIT; d3-color, BSD-3-Clause). |
| Category icons | Tabler Icons by Paweł Kuna, MIT licence (full text ships with the site at /icons/LICENSE-tabler.txt). |
| Typefaces | None are loaded. The site uses whatever serif and sans-serif your device already has, so nothing is fetched from a font service and nothing is tracked by one. |
Our own writing — the guide text, the era descriptions and the curated entries — is © Panchronica. We intend to release it under an open licence and will state the terms here when that is settled; until then, please ask before reusing it. For everything else, check the licence of the specific item: a picture, a recording and a paragraph on the same popup can each be under different terms, and each one names its own.
If you believe something here infringes your rights, or a credit is wrong or missing, use the Report an error link and we will correct or remove it.