About this app

John B. Sparks published the Histomap in 1931: one sheet, four thousand years deep, with the relative power of peoples drawn as bands that swell and pinch as they rise and fall. It is a beautiful object and a bad history. England gets a confident column from the tenth century while Aksum — minting its own gold coinage, writing in its own script, ranked by a Persian contemporary as one of the four great powers on earth — does not appear at all. The Sahara is blank. The Americas get a strip. Africa below the Nile, the whole Pacific and nearly all of South-East Asia are simply absent. This is the same instrument with the data fixed. Two hundred polities from the Uruk city-states to the present, drawn in the original palette: aged stock, warm near-black type, thin rules and muted earth bands. Scroll the chart and the year moves; the world map beside it redraws to that year, with every contemporary state in its own colour clipped to a real coastline. Click a band to hold an empire in both views; click a territory on the map and it lights up on the chart. A corrections mode shows only the bands the original omitted — Kerma, Kush, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, the Swahili city-states, Great Zimbabwe, Benin, Kongo, the Garamantes, Urartu, Elam, the Khazars, the Tibetan Empire, the Kushans, the Cholas, Srivijaya, Angkor, Majapahit, Norte Chico, Cahokia, Chaco, the Casarabe culture of the Amazon, the Comanche, the Polynesian voyaging world and the Aboriginal Australian nations. Some of them could not have been on a 1931 chart at any price: Caral, the Nok terracottas and the lidar surveys of the Llanos de Mojos are all later discoveries. The rest were there to be counted and were not. Every entry carries its dates, its seat of power, what it actually did, and where contested chronology is contested. Band width is an editorial estimate of contemporary reach rather than a measured quantity, the vertical scale is deliberately non-linear, and both are stated on the page rather than hidden.