Historic Borders

Visualize country borders from different times in history (2000 BC-1994)

As seen on r/dataisbeautiful.

Screenshot

Data

The data is pulled from aourednik's historical basemaps repo.

Keep in Mind

1. historical boundaries are even more disputed than contemporary ones, that
2. the actual concept of territory and national boundary becomes meaningful, in Europe, only since the Peace of Westphalia (1648), that
3. areas of civilizations actually overlap, especially in ancient history, and that
4. overlaying these ancient vector maps on contemporary physical maps can be misleading; rivers, lakes, shorelines do change very much over millenia; think for instance about the evolution of the Aral sea since the 1980s.

Finally, note that overlapping areas are useally dealt with as topological errors in traditional GIS. Fuzzy borders are difficult to handle. Certainly a field to investigate...