Silk Roads Atlas

Live·3 November 2026

Silk Roads Atlas

Five thousand years of the Silk Roads on a satellite map, narrated.

A map of Eurasia that runs on a timeline. Drag through five thousand years and the routes brighten, fade and move out to sea; empires, caravan cities, monks, plagues and ships appear in the years they mattered. A narrated tour of about half an hour carries the whole span, with the map following the story. The overland and maritime roads are shown as one system that kept changing shape.

How it was made

One HTML page drawn with d3. NASA Blue Marble tiles are reprojected into the map's own projection, empire outlines come from historical-basemaps, relief and rivers from Natural Earth. The narration was rendered ahead of time with two synthetic voices and ships as audio files beside the page. Edited for holonomy: the narrator labels now say plainly that the voices are synthetic.

Themes

  • history
  • cartography
  • trade
  • voice

In History & attention

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Edited for holonomy from the version first published · 487 files, 61 MB ·index.html sha256 47b9e5b0c26b…

Open the piece on its own

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