Tell
Tin from Afghanistan. Lapis from Badakhshan. Carnelian from Gujarat. Copper from Oman — all moving through Mesopotamian cities that wrote the transactions down in clay. Tell maps that system in time and space, and every mark on it traces to an open dataset.
Existing tools force a choice: single-civilization depth, or global-but-shallow border animation. Nobody covers Mesopotamia, Persia and India as one connected system, and nobody puts pre-classical deep time on a usable timeline — because linear timelines break at that scale.
A slider spanning the Bronze Age gives Sumer to Babylon under a fiftieth of its travel. So Tell doesn't use one.
A tell is an archaeological mound built from stacked occupation layers — compressed time made spatial, which is exactly this problem. The timeline works the same way: each era is a band, and a band's size is set by how much evidence survives from it, not how long it lasted. Non-linearity is structural, so the interface never fights the data.
Attested places per band, middle chronology. Widths are computed from the data by the ETL — never hand-set, so the picture cannot flatter itself.
Every place carries at least one citable source with its licence — that rule is enforced by the build, not by good intentions. Exact and approximate locations are drawn differently, so you can tell evidence from estimate without clicking.
settlementCities, towns, forts
in data
geologyRivers, coastline, marsh, canals
in data
economyProduction sites, goods, trade edges
in data
flora-faunaAttested species, agricultural regime
planned
religionTemples, ziggurats, deity associations
planned
cultureMaterial culture, script, language zones
planned
textsTablets and inscriptions, incl. proverbs and satire
planned
artifactsMuseum objects, with findspot confidence
planned
Mesopotamian cities were cities because they sat on a channel. When the Euphrates avulsed, the city it fed was abandoned — site abandonment and channel migration are the same event told twice. Ur is described as a port and sits 200 km inland today.
So the water is a record type of its own, and it changes between bands. Because published reconstructions disagree by tens of kilometres, every channel carries a certainty tier — surveyed, reconstructed, or schematic — and inference is drawn so it looks like inference. A crisp blue line where nobody actually knows the course would be a lie.
Most history sites tell you what they have. This one also tells you what it lacks, because a gap you can't see reads as a fact.
62 places against a target of 150. Pleiades' dates for this region mostly begin around 750 BCE — after the Bronze Age — so a naive filter found 23 places and excluded Babylon entirely. Resolving Pleiades' period attestations through PeriodO recovered it and most of the rest. The shortfall is measured and documented, not glossed.
Mesopotamian absolute chronology before ~1500 BCE is genuinely unsettled; competing schemes disagree by up to 150 years. Tell uses the middle chronology and says so wherever it shows a date, rather than implying a precision the field does not have.
A major Old Babylonian city with enormous tablet archives — but no Bronze Age period attestation exists in the gazetteer to find. Excluding it is right. Inventing a date for it would not be.