Map of Recorded Battles Over 4,000 Years: What It Shows and Misses

A Map of Recorded Battles Across Four Thousand Years

This interactive map plots the battles recorded in Wikipedia-derived databases, spread across roughly four thousand years of history, on a single world map with a timeline. It does not show every battle ever fought. It shows every battle that someone has documented online with a place and a date, and that difference is what makes the map both fascinating and easy to misread.

Below we explain who built it, where the data comes from, what the dense and empty patches really mean, and how to explore it yourself.

Who made the battle map

The visualisation comes from LAB1100, a small research and software studio in The Hague, Netherlands, founded by Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels. LAB1100 develops nodegoat, a web-based environment that lets historians and other humanities researchers store data and explore it through maps, networks and timelines.

The battle map began as a demonstration of what nodegoat can do with open data. In February 2016 nodegoat invited people to explore 12,703 battles spanning about 4,500 years, and outlets such as Silicon Republic and the Independent's indy100 site soon shared it under headlines about "every battle in 4,000 years".

Where the data comes from

The points are not drawn by hand. They come from two large open databases built from Wikipedia:

DBpedia, a project that extracts structured facts, such as dates and coordinates, from the information boxes on Wikipedia articles.
Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation's shared database, where each battle can carry properties like its location and point in time.

The software queries these sources for items classed as battles that have both a location and a date, then places each one on the map. Move the time slider and dots appear and disappear as centuries pass. Clicking a dot leads back to the underlying record.

This is a clever, transparent approach: anyone can trace a point to its source, and when volunteers improve an article or add coordinates, the map can pick up the change. It also means the map inherits every strength and every gap of Wikipedia.

What the empty spaces really mean

The first thing most people notice is how crowded Europe looks, and how thin the record seems for much of Africa, Central Asia, Oceania and the pre-colonial Americas. It would be a mistake to read that as a map of where people fought.

Written records. Battles are only "recorded" where someone wrote them down and the text survived. Many societies kept history orally, and their conflicts left few dated sources.
Language and editors. English and European-language Wikipedia editions have the most detailed military history articles, so European and North American wars are better covered.
Who wrote it. Colonial wars were often documented by only one side, and small raids or long sieges may never get their own article.
Missing data fields. A battle with an article but no coordinates or no exact date simply does not appear.

The earliest battles are especially uncertain. The Battle of Megiddo in the fifteenth century BCE, fought by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III, is often described as the first battle recorded in reliable detail, and the Battle of Kadesh, around 1274 BCE, is among the best documented of the ancient world. Even for these, scholars debate exact years, so early dots should be read as approximate.

Does the map show war increasing?

As the slider reaches modern times the map fills with dots, peaking around the world wars. That partly reflects real events, and partly reflects more people, more states, more record-keeping and far more modern history articles. The map counts entries; it does not measure deaths or the share of the population killed.

Whether war has become more or less deadly over the long run is a real and heated debate. Psychologist Steven Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that violence has declined; critics, including statisticians studying the risk of very large wars, dispute that conclusion. Researchers who study conflict usually rely on carefully coded datasets, such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the Correlates of War project, rather than on encyclopedia entries.

How to explore the map

You can open the map in full screen on nodegoat or try the embedded view below. Some browsers block older embedded pages, so the direct link is the most reliable way in.

Drag the timeline to watch conflicts shift from the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean to medieval Europe, then across the globe in the modern era.
Zoom into your own region and compare it with what you know of local history; missing battles are a reminder of the gaps described above.
Click individual points to see which record they come from, and follow it to the Wikipedia article.
Use it in class. Teachers can ask students why some areas look empty, a great exercise in source criticism.

The bigger lesson

A map like this is a mirror of what humanity has chosen to remember and write down, as much as a record of what happened. That makes it valuable twice over: it shows the long, sad persistence of organised violence, and it shows how the history we can see depends on who kept the records. Every dot is also a reminder of the people who lived and died there, many of whose names were never written down at all.

Sources: map by Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels / LAB1100 (nodegoat), battles.nodegoat.net; reports by indy100 (The Independent) and Silicon Republic, nodegoat news feed, LAB1100; background: DBpedia (Wikipedia), Wikidata (Wikipedia), Battle of Megiddo (Wikipedia), Battle of Kadesh (Wikipedia).