Explore
Any place, any year, on one globe.
Two controls — one for where, one for when — that you can hold at the same time. And every entry they return shows what it belongs to: the battle under its war, the war under its empire.
Draw an area
Trace a shape with your finger — a country, a valley, the water between two islands — and read everything that ever happened inside it, in order. Not a radius around a point, not a region somebody already named: the line you drew. Italy comes back with 6,590 entries from 3200 BC to today — battles, castles, treaties and shipwrecks in one column, plus 1,919 more those entries point to — and it takes about three hundredths of a second, because nothing is asked of anyone. No article exists for the shape you drew, which is exactly the point.
The time ruler
Move to any year — 1815, or 264 BC — and the world fills with what was happening in it. Ninety thousand dated things live in the page, so the globe redraws while your finger is still moving. And not only what began that year: what was still under way, drawn fainter than what had just started.
They multiply, they don't take turns
Each control fixes one dimension and leaves the other free:
| Control | Holds still | Leaves free |
|---|---|---|
| An area | the place | every century that touched it |
| The ruler | the year | the whole planet |
Use one and you get a list or a snapshot. Use both and you get the thing neither can say alone: this place, these years. Draw around Rome, then walk the ruler forward, and the city's thirty-nine centuries go past one at a time — the sack, the siege, the republic, the march.
An area is a filter that stays; the ruler is a filter you can switch off. Nothing closes anything.
The ruler follows the place
With an area selected, the ruler stops being an axis of years and becomes a list of stops — one for every year in which something was going on there, and nothing for the rest. Corsica returns forty-seven entries spread from 456 to 2015. Against the ruler's full six thousand years that is emptiness, and almost every drag lands on nothing. As 498 stops — one for each year in which something there was under way — it is a history you can walk through.
456 · 600 · 601 · 602 · 603 · 604 · 605 · 606 · 607 · 608 · 609 · 610 … 1768 · 1769 · 1794 · 1943 · 1958 · 1962 · 1975 · 1976 · 1981 · 1992 · 2015
The cost is worth stating: inside an area the spacing no longer matches elapsed time. 1943 and 1944 sit as far apart as 456 and 600. On a place, the question is not how much time passed but what else happened here.
An event is a stretch, not a spark
A thirty-year war is not a fact about 1618. Erask stores every event as an interval, so it stays on the globe for as long as it was going on, and is drawn fainter when it began before the year you are looking at. Without that, the Middle Ages look like a handful of sparks: at 1350 you would see four things instead of eleven.
Read by family, or by year
The list of an area opens by family: every entry sits under what contains it, the way Wikidata records it. Draw around southern Italy and the Second Punic War becomes one line that opens, with Cannae and Trasimene inside it — even though the war itself has no point on the map. The family head says how many of its members fall inside your shape, so you can tell at a glance which story the place was part of. A second tab puts everything back into one column by year, which is the place's history read straight through.
About half of what a shape returns has no family at all — a castle, a bridge, a lone shipwreck — and those stand on their own, in the order they happened.
The list reaches past the line you drew
An area answers with what happened inside it. But a battle is not a fact about a field: it belongs to a war, it was fought by people, it ended in a treaty signed somewhere else. Those things come back with the list, tinted so you can tell them from what the shape actually contains. Draw around Sicily and the Punic Wars come back with the list — a war fought across a sea the line never touched.
Every line that references something carries a +. Press it and what it references opens underneath, indented, one level at a time — the page you were reading stays where it was. From Battle of Cannae you reach the Second Punic War; open that and its seventy-four other battles are there, and its consuls, who have no place on the globe at all because nobody ever gave them coordinates. On a Wikipedia page a link is a departure; here it is a branch that opens beside the one it came from.
Think of each reference as a browser tab you could open — except it opens inside the line you were reading, indented under it, and the list you came for stays exactly where it was. You can leave four of them open at once and still see the year they all sit in.
This is where a list stops being a list. Sicily returns 339 entries. One level of references adds 124. Open those, and the second level adds 5,977 — the other Punic battles, the Roman consuls, the treaties, the wars those treaties ended. Three doors in, a shape drawn around one island reaches 11,881 entries, thirty-five times what the line itself enclosed. Italy goes from 6,590 to 23,986 the same way.
Forty thousand of the ninety-nine thousand entries — ninety thousand on the globe, and eight thousand wars, dynasties and treaties that have no place of their own — have something to open, 2.8 references each on average — the Ottoman Empire has 1,075. Where the graph is thin the + simply is not there, and that is honest: the connections are what Wikidata's editors actually recorded, which for events is a great deal and for buildings is almost nothing.
The same families, as a picture
The family tree behind these lists can also be seen whole. The graph lays out the forty thousand connected entries in three dimensions — empires and wars at the centre, their battles and treaties around them — and lights up whatever was standing in the year you choose.
Where to start
Centre somewhere you are curious about and press Draw area. It needs nothing from you except a place you already care about — and it answers with a chronology no encyclopedia has an article for.