About 80,900 coin types of Rome, the Roman Republic, Macedon, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, Bactria and the Levant, from the American Numismatic Society's online corpora.
Open a mint, or a city with a mint, to browse the coin types struck there: oldest first, filtered by corpus, each with its dates, metal, denomination, issuing authority, obverse and reverse legends and a link to the type in its corpus.
Issuing authorities open the ruler's record in the atlas.
The Coins layer draws a mint in the years its coin types are dated, sized by how many types it struck.
Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, PELLA, Seleucid Coins Online, Ptolemaic Coins Online, Bactrian and Indo-Greek Rulers and Levantine Coinages Online, American Numismatic Society, ODbL 1.0.
Towns and routes of the early Islamic world
1,101 towns, villages and way stations of the 9th and 10th-century Islamic world and 2,053 route sections join the atlas from the al-Ṯurayyā Gazetteer, from al-Andalus to Transoxiana and Sind.
New places include al-Multan, al-Mansura in Sind, the Khazar capital Itil, Barda, Borujerd, Isbijab, Marw al-Rudh and hundreds of caravan stations across Iran, Arabia and Central Asia, each with its Arabic name.
251 places already in the atlas, from Damascus and Baghdad to Bukhara and Cordoba, now list the gazetteer as a further source.
The routes appear on the Roads and trade routes layer between 800 and 1000 CE.
Source: al-Ṯurayyā Gazetteer Project (Masoumeh Seydi and Maxim Romanov), after Georgette Cornu's Atlas du monde arabo-islamique à l'époque classique, CC BY 4.0.
Japanese and Buddhist authority files
About 2,500 people and 120 places are now confirmed by the National Diet Library of Japan or the Buddhist studies authority files of the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, adding independent sources for Chinese, Japanese and Korean figures.
Web NDL Authorities confirms about 2,100 people and 116 places; each record links to its NDL entry.
The DILA person and place authorities confirm about 600 emperors, monks, scholars and poets of China, Japan, Korea and India, with names in their own scripts.
A person counts as confirmed when a name in the authority file is one of the person's recorded names and the life dates match within a year. Where the life dates differ, both values are shown with their sources.
Data obtained from Web NDL Authorities (National Diet Library). Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (DILA) Authority Databases, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Tsunamis from the NOAA hazard database
111 historical earthquakes now record the tsunami they caused, and 33 more pre-1800 tsunamis and earthquakes from NOAA's global hazard database join the disasters layer.
Earthquakes such as Rhodes 1481, the Banda Sea 1629 and Calabria 1783 list the tsunami NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information record for them.
29 tsunamis that NOAA grades as questionable appear as "Possible tsunami", with NOAA's own validity grade shown on the record.
Earthquakes at Istanbul (1542), Cairo (1481), Zakynthos (1555) and Alexandria (320) are placed at the city NOAA names.
Source: NOAA NCEI/WDS Global Historical Tsunami and Significant Earthquake Databases (public domain).
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages
381 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages from AIATSIS Austlang join the languages of the atlas, each with its Austlang name and code, the region where it is spoken and its language family.
Each language keeps the name Austlang gives it, with its other spellings searchable, an approximate location for the language variety, and its family from Glottolog.
Each record links to its entry in Austlang, the national database of Australian Indigenous languages.
Austlang, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), CC BY 4.0.
Getty Union List of Artist Names
About 3,300 artists, architects, patrons and rulers are now confirmed by the Getty Union List of Artist Names, with a link to each Getty record.
A person counts as confirmed by the Getty list when the names agree and the life dates match within a year wherever Getty gives exact years.
Where Getty gives different life dates, the record shows both values side by side with their sources.
This dataset contains information from the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)® of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which is made available under the ODC Attribution License.
Archaeological sites from Open Context
55 archaeological sites in China, Japan, Central Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas join the atlas from Open Context, and 32 known sites gain Open Context as a further source.
New sites include Shimao, Zhouyuan, Fenghao and Wangjinglou from the Oracle Bones in East Asia project, the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, the Tomb of Liu Sheng, Apollo 11 Cave, Florisbad, Sehonghong, the Spanish colonial town of Puerto Real in Haiti, and Cerro de Trincheras.
Hattusha, Erlitou, Sanxingdui, Niya, Saqqara, Mayapan, Ur and others now list the Open Context project that recorded them.
Each site keeps its project's credit and licence (CC BY 4.0) with a link to the Open Context record. Locations are shown exactly as the projects publish them.
Papyri on the place timeline
Around 130 towns and villages of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, and a few places beyond it, now show on their timeline the earliest and latest exactly dated Greek papyrus written there.
The place timeline marks the earliest and latest exactly dated papyrus from the place, with the number of papyri the Heidelberg list of Greek documentary papyri (HGV) records as written there, and a link to each document on papyri.info.
Oxyrhynchus runs from 257 BCE to 646 across 4,343 papyri, Karanis from 218 BCE to 439, Masada from 72 to 74.
Papyri: Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV), via papyri.info, CC BY 3.0.
Research papers from OpenAlex
The papers feed now draws on OpenAlex, the open catalogue of scholarly works, adding new archaeology and ancient and medieval history research from journals around the world.
Two new feeds follow archaeology and ancient and medieval history topics across every journal OpenAlex indexes, beyond the journals already followed by name.
Each paper links to its DOI, with title, journal and date from OpenAlex (CC0). Abstracts are not copied.
Papers that name an atlas place are linked to it, and an editor reviews each paper before it appears.
National heritage registers as sources
About 2,900 castles, abbeys, cathedrals and ancient sites in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Italy are now confirmed by their country's official heritage register, and 65 landmark buildings join the monuments layer.
Places and monuments are matched to their entries in six official registers: Historic England's National Heritage List for England, Historic Environment Scotland (designations and Canmore), the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, the French Ministry of Culture's Mérimée base, the Dutch Rijksmonumentenregister and Italy's Catalogo generale dei beni culturali. Each register is listed among the record's sources with a link to its entry.
A register entry counts only when its name, location and kind of site agree with the record.
65 landmark buildings from these registers are new on the map, among them Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Château de Chenonceau, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Het Loo Palace and Palazzo Chiericati.
World Heritage sites now show UNESCO's own details: year inscribed, criteria, inscribed area, in-danger status and official names in six languages, with each fact linked to UNESCO.
Places and monuments on the UNESCO World Heritage List show a World Heritage section taken from UNESCO's own list: the year the property was inscribed, the criteria it was inscribed under, its inscribed area, and whether it is on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Each fact links to the property's page at UNESCO.
Parts of larger properties say so: a cave, fort or church that belongs to a serial property reads Component of or Within the property, and a living city such as Damascus, Rome or Istanbul shows the World Heritage property it is home to.
Names over time lists the names UNESCO uses in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, and search finds a site by any of them.
The year of inscription appears on the place's timeline.
The list covers 970 of UNESCO's 1,273 World Heritage properties across about 2,200 places and monuments. Data: UNESCO World Heritage List, CC BY-SA 4.0.
See where our records are thin
A new Record coverage layer shades the map by how many places, people and events the atlas holds in each area for the century you are looking at, with thin areas marked, and a table shows coverage by region and era.
Turn on Record coverage (thin areas marked) in Layers. Each 5° square is shaded by the records the atlas holds for the timeline's century; squares with fewer than 10 records are amber with a dashed edge. Move the timeline and the shading follows.
Tap a square for its counts of places, people and events, and a Help fill this link to the questions where specialists can help in that region.
Coverage map in Explore (Research) shows every region against ten eras, with thin cells marked, a Help fill this link per region and a button to show the layer.
The figures are rebuilt every night. They show where our records are thin, not how much history happened there.
Your week in history
The weekly email on what you follow now brings anniversaries from the week ahead, a nearby place to explore and new records near what you follow.
This week in history: births, deaths and battles whose day falls in the coming week, near the places you follow or in the time of the people and empires you follow. Each date links to its source.
A place to explore: one well-described place near what you follow that you have not followed yet, a different one each week.
New near what you follow: records added to the atlas in the last week near your places.
It comes with the weekly digest on Sundays. In Email preferences you can have it every week whatever your other settings, switch it off, or keep only the sections you like. Each section in the email also has its own one-click link to stop it.
Listen and read along on the map
Podcast companions for The Rest Is History, Emperors of Rome, The History of Byzantium and In Our Time, and eight new book companions from SPQR to The Silk Roads. Pick an episode or a stop and the map and timeline go there.
The Rest Is History: 51 multi-part series and 204 episodes in episode order, from the French Revolution and the Terror to the fall of the Aztecs and 1066. Each episode moves the timeline to its own year and the map to the places, people and battles it covers, with a note on where that year comes from.
Three more podcasts: Emperors of Rome, The History of Byzantium and In Our Time: History, arranged century by century.
Eight new book companions: SPQR, Rubicon, Dynasty, A Short History of Byzantium, The Silk Roads, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Alexander the Great and Herodotus' The Histories. Each stop shows the story's own year and opens the battles, rulers and places behind it. Myth and legend stops, such as Troy, are labelled.
Find them in the Reading list (More tools), in the Podcasts tab of the Discovery Feed and the News page, and on any episode that is part of a companion.
Lessons: teach with the atlas
Build a lesson from atlas views. Each step keeps the year, the map, the lens, the layers and the open record, with your own title and notes. Present it full screen, or share one link with your class.
Set up the map the way you want a step to look, then choose Add this view to a lesson in More tools (the ⋯ button). Start a new lesson or add the view to one you already have.
Open Lessons in More tools to rename steps, write notes for each one, reorder them, swap in the current view, or delete a lesson.
Present shows the lesson full screen: the map moves to each step and your notes sit in a card beside it. Use the arrow keys or the Previous and Next buttons; Esc leaves.
Copy link for students gives one link to the whole lesson. Members open it on the map and step through it at their own pace. Visitors without an account see the lesson's outline and can request an invite.
Follow what interests you
Follow places, people, empires, digs, open questions, claims and trip destinations. New finds, excavation seasons and specialist reviews arrive in the new bell, and in an email digest you choose.
Use Follow on any record card or profile, on a dig, an open question, a claim or a trip destination. Updates collect in the bell at the top of the atlas, each one linking straight to the record. Choose how you hear by email at Email preferences in the account menu: a weekly digest (the default), a daily digest, as it happens (at most three a day) or off. The same page manages the newsletter, updates on your own reports and contributions, and product updates. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
Ask HistoryTrack
Members can now ask questions in plain words. Answers come only from HistoryTrack records, link to each one, and can put the places on the map.
Type a question in search and pick Ask HistoryTrack at the bottom of the results, or tap the sparkle button in the search bar.
History question answers from the atlas itself: records, sourced statements, fact-checks, open questions, borders over time and dispersal models. Every record it names is a link you can open.
Where sources disagree, it lists each claim with its evidence level, and myth or legend is labelled as such. If the atlas does not have something yet, it says so and points you to Report or Suggest.
Show on map marks the places in the answer with labelled pins, sets the year, and opens or focuses the record (an empire, a war, a people) or plays a spread of languages and faiths.
How to use the app answers questions about lenses, layers, focus, trips, the reading list and more.
Members get 5 questions a day. Questions someone has already asked are answered instantly and do not count. Use the thumbs to tell us how an answer did.
Watch languages and faiths spread
A new lens draws how 13 language families and languages and 10 faiths spread across the map, from dated, sourced records, with competing theories side by side.
Choose Spread of languages & faiths in the lens menu, or search a family, faith or theory ("Indo-European", "Buddhism", "out of Taiwan"). The Faith lens now shows the same sourced spread in place of the old hand-drawn arrows.
Flows grow along the timeline. A solid line is a firm finding, a dashed line a probable one, a dotted line a weak or inferred link. Every line is an approximate route between dated or modelled points.
Where scholars disagree, the models sit side by side: the majority view first, the others dashed with a hatched homeland (Steppe, Anatolian and Southern Arc for Indo-European; three routes for Bantu).
Each model has a card: a plain summary, why it has its standing, the proposed homeland, every stage with its dates, dated waypoints linked to places and events, and the sources with DOI links.
For faiths, a soft glow shows where our records place each one in the viewed century, stronger where the evidence is dated.
Turn on Spoken today to see where a family's languages are spoken now (Glottolog), from 1900 on.
"Play the model" steps through a theory's stages in order, including the ones no source dates.
Week of 21 Sep 2026
Hear how names are said
A play button under the name of 845 places, people and empires plays a recording of the name, labelled with its language.
Recordings come from Wikimedia Commons through Wikidata, most of them made by volunteers for Lingua Libre.
Each button is labelled with the language of the recording. When the speaker says a different form of the name (a modern town on an ancient site, a name in its own script), that word is shown next to the button.
Every recording carries its speaker and licence (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA) and links to its file.
Old maps over the atlas
Ten historical maps, from Ortelius's 1571 Roman Empire to Kiepert, Butler and Shepherd's classical atlases, laid over the map in the years they describe.
Turn on Old maps in the Layers panel. A map appears only while the timeline is inside the years it shows: Roman Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, Egypt, Phoenicia and Palestine, the Roman provinces of Europe, and the Holy Roman Empire around 1378.
An opacity slider lets you fade between the old map and today's coastlines, and each map can be switched off on its own.
Every map is a public-domain scan from Wikimedia Commons, aligned to the modern map on its own control points. The credit under each one names the atlas, the scan and how closely it lines up.
A living feed of finds, digs, debates and new research
The Discovery Feed now fills itself every few hours with new finds, excavations, debates and papers about the past, each linked to its source.
Tabs for Discoveries, Digs, Controversies and Papers, with the atlas's own discoveries, digs and claim checks underneath. Books and podcasts get their own tabs as soon as an editor has checked the first ones.
Every item shows where it comes from, its date and how far it has been checked: reported in the press, peer-reviewed, or announced by the museum or heritage body responsible.
Headlines are the source's own and link to the original article, paper or episode.
When a headline names a place in the atlas, a chip takes you straight to it on the map. Controversies link to the matching claim check.
Turn on Recent news (90 days) in the Layers panel to see the last three months of place-linked items as pins on the map.
The whole feed is also a page anyone can read at /news.
The weekly dispatch newsletter
A weekly email with the new discoveries, digs, debates and papers, each one linked to the map, plus anniversaries for the week ahead.
Subscribe at /newsletter; we confirm your address first, and every issue has a one-click unsubscribe.
Each issue will also be readable on the site at /newsletter once it has gone out.
Debates link straight to our fact-check, and places come with a small map.
Latin inscriptions
Nearly 60,000 dated Latin inscriptions from across the Roman world, each with its text, date range and findspot.
Inscriptions layer (off by default): each inscription appears in the years its date range covers. Zoom in to see more at once.
Inscription card: the text as edited, the letters as carved, the date range, where it was found, and a link to the full record in the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg.
Place cards list the inscriptions found at that place.
Search by EDH number, for example "HD000110".
Texts and data from the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Coins, mints and currencies
About 2,200 ancient and medieval mints on the map, plus the rulers who issued coins and the currencies each state used.
Coins layer: mints from Nomisma.org appear as gold rings, linked to their city in the atlas where there is one.
Coinage on cards: a city card names its mint, a ruler card shows the offices under which they issued coins, and a state card lists its issuing authorities and the currencies recorded for it.
Search finds denominations such as the denarius or the solidus, and mints by name.
Mint and coin facts come from Nomisma.org (CC BY); currencies from Wikidata.
Disasters, plagues and famines
About 2,000 earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis, floods, great fires, plagues and famines, each drawn at its year with its own warning triangle.
Disasters layer: turn on the Disasters chip to see earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, great fires, plagues and famines as coloured triangles. Filter by kind in the Layers panel.
Sources: named events from Wikidata, and 1,500 more earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis before 1800 from the NOAA global hazards databases, with magnitude, intensity or explosivity where recorded.
Death tolls appear only when a source gives them, as a count or a range, with the source named on the card.
Search finds them by name, for example "Lisbon earthquake".
This changelog and an ideas board
See what changed, week by week, and tell us what to build next.
This page lists every release with a link you can share.
On the ideas board, suggest a feature and vote for the ones you want most. Shipped ideas link to the release that delivered them.
A portal for specialists
Historians, archaeologists, epigraphers and curators can now confirm or correct what the atlas says, with citations and public credit.
Browse more than 4,400 open questions at historytrack.io/contribute, filtered by field, region and period.
Confirm, correct or dispute a fact with citations. A DOI fills in the reference for you.
Every contribution is checked against its citations before it is published, then credited on the record under CC BY 4.0.
Stories for people and events
Person and event cards now open with a short story that places them in their time, built only from the facts shown on the card.
A few paragraphs on who they were or what happened, and why it mattered.
Stories are written from the facts on the card and checked against them, with the sources one tap away.
Peoples and migrations
Peoples such as the Goths, Vandals, Saxons and Huns are now records with sourced facts, and their migrations are drawn only between dated waypoints.
92 peoples, each with language, religion and the polities they formed, as dated and sourced facts.
16 migrations, drawn only where a dated waypoint supports each leg of the journey.
Roman roads and trade routes
The Roman road network from the Itiner-e project, plus 23 sourced trade routes with the goods that moved along them.
Turn on Routes to draw roads and trade routes over the map.
Road and route cards show dates, sources and the stops along the way.
Trade routes list their goods, so you can follow amber, silk or tin across the map.
Prehistory: archaeological cultures
535 archaeological cultures, from the Natufian to Bell Beaker, drawn as areas around their known sites on a timeline that reaches deep into prehistory.
Each culture's area is outlined around clusters of its sourced sites. Cultures known from fewer than six sites appear as rings instead.
Culture cards give dates in one consistent format, with the alternatives where specialists disagree.
Places named after a culture, such as a type site, are labelled so.
Wars and treaties
943 wars are now records of their own, with the sides that fought, the battles they include and the treaties that ended them.
Each war card lists its sides and commanders, its battles and the treaties signed, with sources for every fact.
Focus on a war, such as the Punic Wars or the Hundred Years' War, to see only its battles on the map.
Search finds wars by name.
Place names that change with the timeline
Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: map labels, cards and search now use the name a place had in the year you are viewing.
More than 29,000 dated names for places, each with its years and sources.
Move the timeline and labels change with it: Byzantium until 330 CE, Constantinople until 1453, then Istanbul.
The card lists every recorded name so you can see the whole history at a glance.
Confidence on every language, religion, script and capital
Facts that change over time now carry their own dates, sources and a confidence score. Tap the dot next to a value to see why we believe it.
Languages, religions, scripts and capitals are stored as separate dated facts, each with its own sources.
The dot beside a value opens its evidence: confidence out of 100, the kind of evidence, the sources, and any other values scholars propose.
Values that apply at the year on the timeline are highlighted. Undated ones are listed under Also recorded.
Close to 100,000 sourced facts are live across the atlas.
Focus mode and a clearer map
Open a record and the map shows only that record and what connects to it. Labels are ranked so the places that matter most stay readable.
Focus mode: an open record is all the map shows, with its links drawn around it. Close the card to bring everything back.
One ranking decides which labels appear at each zoom, so busy regions no longer pile up.
Type chips filter the map by kind of place.
Drop a pin anywhere to see what stood there over time.
Chronos Atlas is now HistoryTrack
A new name, a new home at historytrack.io and a new look: a navy mark, IBM Plex type and a calmer dark map.
The atlas lives at historytrack.io. Old links still work and forward here.
Text is set in IBM Plex Sans and Mono throughout, with a navy accent.
The map opens in the dark theme; switch to light from the account menu.
Access is by invitation while we open up in stages.
Travel: trips for Malta, Rome, Athens, Istanbul and Cairo
Curated itineraries of two, three, four or five days for each city, with what to notice at every stop and the history behind it.
Open Travel from the menu, choose a city and how many days you have.
Every stop has visiting notes and a short list of things to look for once you are there.
You can also build your own trip from any places on the map.
Discoveries and open questions
A feed of 32 landmark discoveries and the people who made them, plus 11 open questions in archaeology with the competing answers laid side by side.
Discoveries: from Schliemann at Mycenae to the Griffin Warrior at Pylos, each pinned on the map with its date and its discoverer.
Open questions: the Bronze Age collapse, the date of the Thera eruption, the decipherment of Linear A and more. Together they hold 26 competing hypotheses, each with the evidence for and against.
Find both under Explore, in the tools row.
Week of 14 Sep 2026
Borders that move with the years
Empire borders now animate between years as you drag the timeline, so you can watch territory grow and shrink.
Drag the year slider and borders reshape smoothly instead of jumping from one snapshot to the next.