An interactive astrolabe of world history. Five thousand years wound into a single turning sky — 331 peoples, empires and cultures, each placed by when it lived, how long it lasted, where on earth it stood, and the language it spoke. The deep past sits at the heart of it; the bright rim is this morning.
Every arc of light was a people who farmed, argued, buried their dead, and gave names to the stars overhead. The chart is a clock, read from the inside out.
How far an arc sits from the centre is when it lived. The core is 3100 BCE; the outer rim is the year 2000.
How far an arc reaches outward is how long it endured. Rome runs long. The Aztec Empire is a bright, brief flare.
Each slice of the wheel is a region of the world, named around the rim.
The colour of an arc is the family of language its people spoke. Neighbours in a wedge may be strangers in tongue.
Arcs share a wedge when their lives overlapped. Crowding is the history.
The glowing core is everything before the first city — 300,000 years, drawn on a folded scale so that it fits. Inward is still older, but the stride is no longer even.
The wheel holds 331 societies, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Indus Valley to the Mongol, Mughal, Ottoman and British empires. You can jump to any of six eras — Bronze Age, Classical, Early Medieval, Late Medieval, Early Modern and Modern — sweep through all of them with the play control, or search for a people by name.
They are grouped into fifteen regions of the world: Europe; the Middle East and Persia; Central Asia and the Steppe; South Asia; East Asia; Southeast Asia; Oceania and Australia; North America; Mesoamerica and the Caribbean; the Andes and South America; the Southern Cone; Southern Africa; West and Central Africa; North Africa, the Maghreb; and Northeast Africa and the Nile.
Colour marks seventeen language families — Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Turkic, Dravidian, Uralic, Austroasiatic, Kra-Dai, Mongolic, Japonic, Koreanic, Nilo-Saharan, Amerindian, ancient isolates, and a handful still unclassified. Set side by side, you can see how far Indo-European speech travelled, and how many worlds it never reached.
Dates for ancient societies are arguments rather than facts. Each entry's years were drawn from published reference works and cross-checked, and every society in the wheel links out to further reading so you can weigh the claim yourself. Where sources disagree, the arc takes a defensible middle rather than pretending to a precision nobody has. The principal sources are:
The Cosmos of History was designed and built by Araxie Miller. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, no account, and no tracking.
More work by Araxie Miller