About Terra Scripta

What this site is

Terra Scripta puts world literature, philosophy, history, art and cultural heritage on a single map, year by year, from the earliest surviving texts to 1945. Move the timeline and you can see what was being written, thought and built in different parts of the world at the same time, and which states and peoples held each place.

It is a free educational project for curious readers of every age. Each article starts with a short, simple introduction and goes further down into intermediate and advanced detail, so a school student and a university reader can both find a place to start.

The site is available in English, Korean, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German and Russian.

Where the map and data come from

The map is drawn by the site itself, without an outside map service. Coastlines, rivers and lakes come from Natural Earth (public domain).

Historical borders combine two open datasets: yearly polity outlines from Cliopatria / Seshat Global History Databank (CC BY 4.0) and date-level borders from OpenHistoricalMap contributors (CC0). Borders before the modern era are approximate, and areas where a culture or people lived without a clear state are shown as hatched ranges rather than hard lines.

People, works, battles and places on the map are drawn from Wikidata (CC0) and the UNESCO World Heritage List. Coordinates always come from these sources; they are never guessed. Short descriptions shown on the map for these entries are excerpts from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and link to their source article.

Images come from Wikimedia Commons and are used only when they are in the public domain or under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA licences. The author and licence are shown with each image.

How the articles are written

The longer articles in the Library are written with the help of AI from published, openly available sources such as encyclopedias, museum and library pages, and scholarly references. Every article lists the sources it relies on, and statements are kept to what those sources support.

Translations into the other eight languages are also AI-assisted, using the established names for people, places and works in each language. Articles are marked as drafts until they have been reviewed, and they are revised when new research appears or when readers point out a mistake.

Corrections

History is contested and data can be wrong. If you find a mistake in a date, a border, a name or a translation, please tell us through the contact page. Corrections are checked against sources and applied as quickly as possible.

Advertising

Terra Scripta is free to use and is supported by advertising from Google AdSense on article pages. Ads are never placed on the map itself. The privacy policy explains how analytics and advertising cookies are used.