Map of World Civilizations
Every marker is a real ancient capital or historical site, from Babylon to Chang’an, Samarkand to Niani. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter by civilization; the dashed lines are cross-civilizational trade routes such as the Silk Road and Zheng He’s voyages.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
Mesopotamia
Ancient Egypt
The Persian Empire
The Mediterranean World
Chinese Civilization
The South Asian Subcontinent
The Islamic World
The Steppe Empires
Sub-Saharan Africa
The map covers the Horn of Africa to East Asia (Natural Earth geographical data); the American civilizations (Pachacuti, Montezuma II, Atahualpa, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro) and the more southerly Zulu Kingdom of Shaka cannot be plotted here, but the figure cards, relationship graph, and timeline content are fully preserved. Coordinates use standard historical-geographical identifications; the exact location of a few ancient cities is still debated by scholars.
Places on this map
Akkad
Where Sargon founded the first known multi-ethnic empire in human history, unifying the Sumerian city-states; the exact site of the city of Akkad has still not been fully determined by archaeologists.
Connected figures: Sargon
Ur
An important Sumerian city-state and the worship center of the moon god Nanna, where Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna served as high priestess of the moon and wrote the earliest known named personal poetry in the world.
Connected figures: Enheduanna
Uruk
One of the oldest and most important Sumerian city-states, where the legendary king Gilgamesh ruled, and whose Epic of Gilgamesh records his legendary quest for immortality.
Connected figures: Gilgamesh
Babylon
Where Hammurabi promulgated a systematic written law code; Nebuchadnezzar II later rebuilt Babylon as the most magnificent capital of the ancient Near East, and the legendary "Hanging Gardens" are by tradition located here.
Connected figures: Hammurabi · Nebuchadnezzar II
Nineveh
The capital of the late Neo-Assyrian Empire, where Ashurbanipal built the most systematic library of the ancient Near East, holding tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets including the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Connected figures: Ashurbanipal
Memphis and Saqqara
One of the earliest capitals of ancient Egypt, where the vizier Imhotep designed and built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara for the pharaoh Djoser, the first large stone building in human history.
Connected figures: Imhotep
Thebes and the Valley of the Kings
The religious and political center of New Kingdom Egypt, where the female pharaoh Hatshepsut built the mortuary temple of Deir el-Bahri, and where the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun was found in the nearby Valley of the Kings.
Connected figures: Hatshepsut · Tutankhamun
Amarna
The new capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten, where the famous painted bust of his queen Nefertiti was unearthed in the ruins of a court sculptor’s workshop.
Connected figures: Nefertiti
Abu Simbel
The colossal rock-cut temple Ramesses II ordered built, whose four huge seated pharaoh statues are one of the most representative symbols of ancient Egyptian architectural achievement.
Connected figures: Ramesses II
Pasargadae
The first capital of the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great, where his own tomb still stands, the earliest ceremonial center of the Achaemenid dynasty.
Connected figures: Cyrus the Great
Persepolis
The ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire built by Darius I, its palace reliefs depicting the subject peoples bringing tribute to the empire; his son Xerxes I further expanded it, and it was later destroyed in the fires of Alexander the Great’s eastern campaign.
Alexandria
The Egyptian capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty, where Euclid wrote the Elements, Ptolemy built the geocentric system, the woman mathematician Hypatia taught and at last perished, and the last queen Cleopatra also ruled.
Connected figures: Euclid · Ptolemy · Hypatia · Cleopatra VII
Syracuse
One of the most important Greek city-states of Sicily, where Archimedes studied the principles of buoyancy and the lever, designed defensive machines during the Roman siege, and at last perished when the city fell.
Connected figures: Archimedes
Carthage
A North African Phoenician city-state, the hometown of the general Hannibal, from which he set out in the Second Punic War to strike at the Italian mainland, though Carthage was in the end defeated by Rome at the Battle of Zama.
Connected figures: Hannibal
Rome
The large-scale revolt led by the slave gladiator Spartacus for a time threw the Roman Republic into panic; though at last suppressed, it became the most famous symbolic event of resistance to slavery in Western history.
Connected figures: Spartacus
Constantinople
The capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, where Justinian directed the compilation of the Code of Justinian and built the Hagia Sophia, seeking to revive the former glory of the Roman Empire.
Connected figures: Justinian I
Palmyra
An oasis trading city-state in the Syrian desert, where Queen Zenobia expanded swiftly amid Roman civil strife, briefly founding a sphere of power spanning Egypt to Asia Minor.
Connected figures: Zenobia
Alesia
Where the Gallic leader Vercingetorix fought a decisive siege battle against Caesar’s Roman legions, at last defeated and surrendering, then taken to Rome and executed — the last resistance of Gallic independence.
Connected figures: Vercingetorix
Londinium
The British queen Boudica led her forces in revolt against Roman rule and for a time took and burned this important town of the Roman province of Britain.
Connected figures: Boudica
Pannonia (the Hunnic Court)
The heartland of the power of the Hunnic ruler Attila, from which he launched repeated invasions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, called the "Scourge of God" by the Christian tradition.
Connected figures: Attila
Halicarnassus
The hometown of Herodotus, who, after traveling to Egypt, Babylon, and elsewhere, wrote the Histories, systematically recounting the whole course of the Greco-Persian Wars, and was honored as the "father of history."
Connected figures: Herodotus
Guanzhong (Xianyang / Chang’an)
Qin Shi Huang set his capital at Xianyang to complete the grand unification; later Emperor Wu of Han and the Tang monk Xuanzang carried out rule and scripture translation centered on Chang’an; Zhang Qian set out from here on his mission to the Western Regions, Sima Qian wrote the Records of the Grand Historian here, and Wu Zetian too reigned here.
Connected figures: Qin Shi Huang · Emperor Wu of Han · Sima Qian · Zhang Qian · Xuanzang · Wu Zetian
Luoyang
The Eastern Han capital, where Ban Zhao continued the Book of Han and taught the classics at court, and where Zhang Heng invented the seismoscope and the armillary sphere and systematically expounded the "sphere-heaven" cosmology.
Connected figures: Ban Zhao · Zhang Heng
Dadu (Yuan Dadu)
Where Kublai Khan set his capital after founding the Yuan dynasty and received the Venetian merchant Marco Polo; Guo Shoujing was commissioned to direct the nationwide astronomical observation network here and compile the precise Shoushi Calendar.
Connected figures: Kublai Khan · Guo Shoujing
The State of Wu (Gusu)
The region of the Spring and Autumn Wu capital, where Sun Tzu won the appointment of King Helü of Wu by the strict discipline of "beheading the concubines to drill the troops" and wrote the enduring Art of War.
Connected figures: Sun Tzu
The Nanjing Treasure Shipyard
The building site of the Ming ocean fleet of unprecedented scale, from which Zheng He’s vast fleet set out on its seven voyages reaching Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and even the coast of East Africa.
Connected figures: Zheng He
Mê Linh
The core stronghold of the Trung Sisters’ revolt against Han rule, which for a time drove out the Han garrison and set up an independent kingdom, thereafter long seen as a symbol of the Vietnamese national spirit of resistance to foreign rule.
Connected figures: The Trung Sisters
Pataliputra
The Maurya capital, where Ashoka converted to Buddhism after the Kalinga war and turned to spreading the ideal of compassionate governance through his pillar edicts; the later Gupta astronomer Aryabhata also carried out his astronomical and mathematical research in this region of deep scholarly tradition.
Gandhara
One of the important birthplaces of the ancient Indian linguistic tradition, where the linguist Panini was by tradition born, whose Ashtadhyayi systematically built the formalized system of Sanskrit grammar.
Connected figures: Panini
Agra and Fatehpur Sikri
The seat of the capital of the Mughal emperor Akbar, where he carried out a relatively tolerant policy of governance and received scholars of various religious traditions for theological debate.
Connected figures: Akbar the Great
Jhansi
The domain of Rani Lakshmibai, queen of the princely state of Jhansi, who after the outbreak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion led her army on horseback in armor against British colonial rule, fighting to the death.
Connected figures: Rani Lakshmibai
Baghdad
The most prosperous scholarly and trade center under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, where the mathematician al-Khwarizmi systematically expounded the methods of solving algebra at the city’s "House of Wisdom."
Connected figures: Harun al-Rashid · Al-Khwarizmi
Tunis
The hometown of the historian Ibn Khaldun, who in his later years proposed in the Muqaddimah a social-theoretical framework explaining the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, seen as an important forerunner of sociology and the philosophy of history.
Connected figures: Ibn Khaldun
Tangier
The hometown of the traveler Ibn Battuta, who set out from here at 21 for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and thereafter over nearly thirty years traveled almost the whole of the known Islamic world and beyond.
Connected figures: Ibn Battuta
Tus
The hometown of the Persian poet Ferdowsi, who spent nearly thirty years here composing the national epic masterwork the Shahnameh, carrying on the tradition of Persian language and culture in pure Persian.
Connected figures: Ferdowsi
Palermo
The seat of the court of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, where the geographer al-Idrisi, at the invitation of the Christian king Roger II, spent fifteen years drawing the most precise and detailed world map of the known world of the time.
Connected figures: Al-Idrisi
Karakorum
The region of the early Mongol Empire capital founded after Genghis Khan unified the tribes of the Mongol steppe, the empire thereafter expanding to become the largest contiguous land empire in human history.
Connected figures: Genghis Khan
Samarkand
The imperial capital founded by Tamerlane, who claimed to be an heir of the golden lineage of Genghis Khan and made the city a resplendent jewel of Central Asian Islamic architecture, the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum being his own tomb.
Connected figures: Tamerlane
Niani
The early capital of the West African Mali Empire, where Sundiata Keita founded the imperial foundation, later inherited and vigorously developed by Mansa Musa, whose lavish gold scattered on his pilgrimage to Mecca through Timbuktu shook the whole Mediterranean world.
Connected figures: Sundiata Keita · Mansa Musa
Aksum
The capital of the East African Kingdom of Aksum, where King Ezana converted to Christianity and established it as the state religion, making Aksum one of the earliest states in the world to have Christianity as its state religion.
Connected figures: Ezana
Marib (Land of Sheba)
The seat of the capital of the ancient kingdom of Sheba in Yemen; tradition holds that the Queen of Sheba journeyed from here to Jerusalem to visit King Solomon, while the Ethiopian tradition believes her royal lineage originated here.
Connected figures: The Queen of Sheba