About Timeline History

Timeline History is an interactive map of recorded history: 111,389 events from 3001 BC to 2026, each placed where it happened and dated to when it happened, so you can slide through time and watch the world fill in.

What it is

Most history online is organised by topic. You read about the Crusades, or about Song dynasty China, and each sits in its own article as though the rest of the world were paused. This site is organised by time instead. Move the slider to 1150 and you get the Baptistery of Parma, the Taifa of Tavira dissolving, and the Tiwanaku polity ending — things that had nothing to do with each other beyond happening at once.

Every year with recorded events also has its own page, written as plain HTML with no JavaScript, so it loads instantly and can be read, linked and searched without the map.

Where the data comes from

Every event is drawn from Wikidata, the structured database behind Wikipedia. Nothing here is written by hand: titles, descriptions, dates and coordinates are all taken from Wikidata items, which is why coverage is broad but uneven, and why the site is best understood as a view onto Wikidata rather than an encyclopedia of its own.

Full details of sources and licensing are on the attribution page.

How it was built

Events are collected by category — wars, treaties, buildings, discoveries, births and deaths, and so on — through the Wikidata Query Service, then deduplicated, given coordinates where the item or its location carries them, and split into chunks the map loads on demand. The whole dataset is 28MB, so loading it up front cost about six seconds before the first marker appeared; it now arrives in pieces as you move through time.

What it gets wrong

It is worth being direct about the limits, because they are not small.

Coverage is skewed. Wikidata reflects who has written about what. Europe and North America are covered far more densely than the rest of the world, and the modern era far more densely than antiquity. A thin year on this map means thin records, not a quiet year.

Dates are sometimes only approximate. Wikidata often knows only that something happened in, say, the 12th century, and stores that as a placeholder date of 1101 or 1150. Events like these are labelled with the period actually recorded — "12th century" rather than a year — and on year pages they are listed separately under "Dated to the wider period". 6,832 events currently carry such a label. They still appear at their placeholder year on the map, because it is the only position available and it is right to within a century, but the site does not claim they happened in that exact year.

Locations are approximate too. A battle is placed at its named location's coordinates, which may be a modern city centre rather than the field it was fought on.

It is a snapshot. The dataset was captured at a point in time and does not update live as Wikidata changes.

If something looks wrong, it is usually wrong in Wikidata, and fixing it there fixes it for everyone. Each event links to its Wikidata item or Wikipedia article so you can check.