History Globe
historyglobe.app is a free 3D atlas of biblical history. A time
slider moves the map through the centuries: state borders by year, cities in the years they
stood, roads, journeys and battles. Each place has the verses that name it, its candidate
sites when the identification is disputed, where it is today, and, for 746 of them, an
article with its sources. The site has no accounts, no ads and no fees. It is made by Vadym Arnaut.
What it holds
As of the release of 2026-10-25 (api/v1/index.json, built_at):
- 21 languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian,
Dutch, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål, Danish, Tagalog, Serbian, Hungarian, Finnish,
Vietnamese, Romanian and Bulgarian. No language
comes first (ADR 0015).
- 1,231 places named in the Bible, each with its verses and a page of its own (1,288 place
records in all); 746 place articles and 200 answered questions.
- 54 tours, 329 dated events and 57 battles.
- 2,994 people (STEPBible TIPNR) in the open data; 2,153 of them with their families on the
map.
- 773 notes on what ancient authors wrote about 439 of the places; 531 sites of the ancient
world the Bible does not name on the map; 320 photographs.
- State borders by year from 3500 BC to AD 1300 (Cliopatria, corrected for the lands of the
Bible); Roman roads (Itiner-e).
How it is checked
The places, verses and points come from open scholarly datasets (OpenBible.info, STEPBible
TIPNR, Pleiades, Wikidata, Cliopatria); where we depart from them, the reason and the source
are given. The
articles, tours and events are drafted by the author with the assistance of large language
models and then checked against their sources in separate review passes. The last full pass,
finished on 2026-10-17, re-read every article against its sources. These passes are the
project's own checks, not peer review. Reviews by specialists are published under their names:
an article a specialist has reviewed names the reviewer and links to the review (Juan Manuel
Tebes has reviewed five articles on Edom and the Arabah); every other article page says it has
not been read by a historian yet. How each layer is made and
what is uncertain: methodology.
Errors we found in the datasets we draw on, and our own disagreements with them, are listed
with their evidence in docs/crosswalk/their-errors.md.
Links
Licences
| What | Licence |
|---|
| The data (places, names, tours, events, people, API) | CC BY 4.0 |
| The place articles and the answered questions | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 |
| The code, the site and its design | all rights reserved; public to read |
Third-party data keeps its own licence (docs/ATTRIBUTIONS.md). Details: LICENSE, ADR 0014
and ADR 0016.
How to cite
As the methodology gives it (https://historyglobe.app/docs/methodology.html#cite); the date of
the data is built_at in api/v1/index.json, also at the foot of every documentation page.
The site:
Arnaut, Vadym. History Globe: an atlas of biblical history. https://historyglobe.app/
(data of <built_at>; accessed …).
A page, by its title and address:
“Jerusalem.” In Vadym Arnaut, History Globe. https://historyglobe.app/en/place/jerusalem/
(data of <built_at>; accessed …).
The data, by the date of the snapshot that the dataset's card gives:
Arnaut, Vadym. History Globe dataset. Hugging Face, snapshot of ….
https://huggingface.co/datasets/ArVaViT/history-globe. CC BY 4.0.
CITATION.cff has the same in machine-readable form.
Contact
[email protected] — corrections, reviews, questions and security reports
(SECURITY.md). A correction can also be filed as a GitHub issue ("Report an error"); an
email needs no account.
For developers
pnpm install
pnpm data # download the open data sets and build apps/web/public/data (Python 3.11+)
pnpm dev # http://localhost:5173
pnpm gate # everything that must pass before a merge
pnpm gate runs format, lint, types, unit and pipeline tests, the content checks, links, the
build, the CSP hashes and the JS budget. It runs locally; releases are built on the owner's
machine and deployed prebuilt (ADR 0012). What the data and content checks refuse, and why:
docs/data-checks.md.
Keys in the app: [ ] move the year by 10 (with Shift by 100), Space plays, / searches,
← → step through a tour, N turns north up, Esc closes.
Principles
- Every fact has a source; disputed things are shown as disputed, with named proponents.
- Scripture speaks for itself. The Bible is a separate layer, never pulled into
scholarly disputes.
- Clean data provenance. The data we take in is public domain, CC0 or CC BY only;
nothing share-alike or non-commercial (ADR 0008).
- Decisions are written down in
docs/adr/ before they are coded.
Docs
AGENTS.md — rules for coding agents (and humans).docs/adr/ — architecture decisions:
