HistorIQly Map is a discovery tool for exploring broad changes in world geography. It is not a cadastral survey or a substitute for specialist regional scholarship. This page explains what each snapshot represents, where the boundary geometry comes from, and how to report a correction.
Methodology page last updated: 13 October 2026
Boundary source
Historical Basemaps
The political and cultural boundary layer is adapted from André Ourednik and contributors' Historical Basemaps project. It publishes georeferenced boundaries of countries and cultural regions as GeoJSON and is distributed under the GPL-3.0 license.
The source project describes the maps as a work in progress intended for global- and continental-scale use. HistorIQly preserves its core labels and boundary-precision field, then adds display colors and connects the map to separate layers for conflicts, landmarks, trade routes, and historical figures.
Context layers
Conflicts, landmarks, routes, and people
These overlays are maintained as separate HistorIQly editorial datasets and are joined to each map snapshot by date and location. They are not part of Historical Basemaps and should not be read as claims made or endorsed by that project.
Selected war and landmark details display links supporting reviewed fields; the catalog does not yet have a complete item-level bibliography. Treat their dates, summaries, belligerents, quotations, and classifications as discovery context, and verify a specific claim with specialist scholarship before citing it in academic, journalistic, or legal work. Corrections are reviewed against the supporting source supplied by the reporter.
The 700 BC, 1650 and 1700 references also include original explanations with section-level historical sources. These AI-assisted notes distinguish regional context from the inherited boundary reconstruction. Their sources support the written claims; they do not certify every polygon, and no independent historical review is recorded.
What a date means
Snapshots, not a claim of year-by-year precision
Border snapshots and event dates
The map contains 49 selected snapshots. Moving the timeline picks the nearest available border reconstruction; it does not interpolate a newly researched border for every calendar year. Conflict markers and territory cards use the selected calendar year within each record’s inclusive start/end interval. A short conflict between border snapshots remains discoverable at its nearest snapshot, labelled “nearby in time”, and through search. Selected year, border snapshot and event interval are separate values. A coverage-limit label identifies a dataset cutoff, not a confirmed end to hostilities.
Approximate pre-modern borders
Ancient and medieval authority often overlapped or changed seasonally. A polygon is a useful teaching abstraction, not proof of a surveyed border in the modern sense.
Disputed interpretations
Historical names, territorial extent, sovereignty, and dates can be disputed. Where the source marks a geometry as approximate, the corresponding year page reports that count.
Modern endpoint
A note about the 2026 timeline label
The interface currently uses 2026 as its present-day navigation endpoint. Its boundary geometry duplicates HistorIQly's 2010 Historical Basemaps snapshot; it is not a 2026 geopolitical dataset. Treat it as a historical comparison endpoint, not an authoritative map of current borders, international recognition, or active disputes.
Reproducibility
Inspect the data behind a year page
Every dated landing page links to the exact GeoJSON file rendered in its static preview and interactive map. Start with one of these representative snapshots:
Send the year, territory or feature name, the disputed claim, and a reliable supporting source to historiqly@cyril.page. Boundary changes should also be reported upstream when they originate in Historical Basemaps.
