The Narrator button, top right, reads each card aloud in your browser's own voice — no audio files, nothing downloaded. Turn it on before opening a Journey and it walks you through, stop by stop, in order.

Lines between moments mean they're related — the same figure lived through both, or one led to the other in a Journey. They glow as the timeline passes near them, the same way the moments themselves do.

A slow traveling light follows some of them. On the rare moment tied to conflict or migration, watch for a small boat, plane, or mounted arrow instead — crossing water, or land before or after flight existed. Tap anywhere along one of these roads to see why the atlas connects those two moments.

A wash of colour gathers across the world as a great power rises, holds at its height, and drains away as it falls — each empire in its own hue. Scrub the years and watch one breathe.

The depth of the light is how long that ground was held, not merely whether it was — so an empire's old heartland burns while its newest frontier barely glows. There are no borders drawn here on purpose: a frontier was usually a wide zone rather than a line, and a line would claim a precision the history doesn't have.

See the Legend pill, top right, for every empire's own colour.

Five thousand years of the human story, told on a turning world — 129 moments, every continent, 3500 BCE to today.

Coastlines: Natural Earth · globe: d3-geo · portraits: Wikimedia Commons