Sources

The workings.

Every interactive on this site is a reconstruction: real terrain, real primary sources, and honest guesswork where the record runs out. Here is where it all comes from.

Hannibal's Crossing

Polybius, The Histories, Book 3 — the closest thing to an eyewitness account. Polybius interviewed survivors and walked parts of the route himself. The army figures (46,000 in, ~26,000 out) and the fifteen-day crossing come from him.
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 21 — written about two centuries later, more dramatic and less reliable, but the source of several famous episodes along the march.
The three candidate passes reflect the main scholarly camps. Neither Polybius nor Livy names the pass, and historians have argued about it for over two thousand years — so the map lets you march all three instead of declaring a winner.
Elevation data: Terrain Tiles on AWS — © Mapzen and USGS, rendered as a real heightfield of the western Alps.

Attila — The Walls That Held

Priscus of Panium, Fragments — the gold standard: a contemporary diplomat who dined at Attila's court. The Margus bishop, the siege of Naissus, the treaty terms and the bones by the river all come from him.
Jordanes, Getica (551), Marcellinus Comes (the earthquake and the 57 fallen towers), Callinicus's Life of Hypatius (the «more than a hundred cities»), and the rebuilt walls' own inscriptions — still in place at the Mevlevihane Gate.
Dates the historians still argue about are flagged on the cards: most scholars put the fall of Naissus and Serdica in the first Balkan war (441–443); a minority redates them to 447. The map follows the majority and says so.
Modern guides: E. A. Thompson, The Huns; Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns; Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire; Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun.
Terrain: Terrain Tiles on AWS (© Mapzen/USGS); coastlines and rivers from Natural Earth. Routes between stops are schematic connectors, not surveyed marching routes.
The card illustrations are AI-generated artistic interpretations made for this map, not period artwork — expect the occasional anachronism (the great domed Hagia Sophia, for one, wasn't built until 537).

The Odyssey — The Long Way Home

Homer, Odyssey — line references follow the Greek text; site quotes use Emily Wilson's 2018 translation (Norton), chosen because her line numbers track the Greek closely.
Thucydides 1.25.4, 3.88, 4.24 & 6.2; Herodotus 4.177; Strabo, Geography 1.2 (incl. 1.2.15); Pausanias 1.17.5; Plutarch, De facie 941a — the ancient testimony behind each stop's identification, argued over since antiquity.
A. Heubeck, S. West & J.B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey (Oxford, 1988–92) — the standard commentary and the skeptical baseline for every identification on this map.
V. Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée (Paris, 1902–03) — source of the Bonifacio identification for the Laestrygonians.
J.V. Luce, Celebrating Homer's Landscapes (Yale, 1998) — a careful, sympathetic case for real ground behind Ithaca and Troy.
A. Bonanno, «The Maltese Islands in the Odyssey» — the Callimachus/Gozo evidence behind Calypso's Ogygia.
Kiwi Hellenist, «Odysseus' wanderings» — a classicist's clear-eyed rundown of Eratosthenes vs. Strabo on whether the voyage can be mapped at all.
The Conversation, «Can we map the Odyssey?» and its companion piece — how ancient geographers and modern researchers have each tried to pin the route to a map.
J. Burgess, «In the Wake of Odysseus» — an academic survey of where scholars have localized each stop.
Atlynx, «Charting the Odyssey» — a comparable mapping project, used here only as a cross-check on the identifications.
Elevation data: Terrain Tiles on AWS (© Mapzen and USGS); coastlines from Natural Earth; stop thumbnails from EOX's Sentinel-2 cloudless satellite imagery.

The Silk Road — The Roads That Moved

The map is a network, not a line: «Silk Road» is Ferdinand von Richthofen's coinage of 1877, and nobody who travelled these roads called them that. Every era, place, road, cargo, people and link comes from a research dossier compiled for the site, with a three-way honesty tier on every row — fact, inference, or ours — that the cards show as badges.
Primary — Chinese: Sima Qian, Shiji 123 (Zhang Qian, the heavenly horses); Ban Gu, Hanshu 96 (the oasis kingdoms and the northern and southern routes); Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu 88 (Gan Ying, the «Andun» party, tr. Hill); Faxian, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms; Xuanzang, Record of the Western Regions and Huili's Biography; Ma Huan, Yingyai shenglan (Zheng He's ports); the Turfan and Dunhuang documents at the International Dunhuang Programme.
Primary — Greek, Latin, Syriac, Sogdian: Herodotus 5.52–54 and 8.98 (the Royal Road); Arrian, Anabasis 4.1.3; the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea §§41–64; Pliny, Natural History 6.20, 6.26, 12.41; Procopius, Wars 8.17 (the silkworm eggs) and 2.22 (the plague); Menander Protector fr. 10 (Maniakh's embassy); the Sogdian Ancient Letters (tr. Sims-Williams); the Xi'an stele of 781; the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma.
Primary — Arabic and Persian: Ibn Khurradadhbih (the Khorasan road and the Radhanites); Ibn Fadlan, Risala (Baghdad to Bulghar, 922); Juvaini (Otrar, Bukhara, Merv); Rashid al-Din; Ibn Battuta, Rihla (tr. Gibb & Beckingham); Clavijo's embassy to Timur; Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash's diary of 1419–22.
Primary — Latin and Italian travellers: Carpini and William of Rubruck (tr. Jackson & Morgan); Marco Polo, Yule–Cordier edition (1903), with Frances Wood's doubts and their rebuttals stated on the card; Pegolotti, Notices of the journey to Cathay; Gabriele de' Mussis on the siege of Caffa.
Modern — the accessible core: Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (2012) — the spine of this map, and the «silk was money, the state was the customer» argument; Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015); Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road; Liu Xinru, The Silk Road in World History; James Millward, The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction; Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders; Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia and the horse–silk trade paper of 1991; Thomas Allsen on Mongol exchange; Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print (2001) — the Talas story dismantled; Spyrou et al., «The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia» (Nature, 2022).
Disagreements the cards disclose: how much silk went overland rather than by sea (Hansen against the popular picture); where the Black Death began (Spyrou 2022, Hymes 2014, Green 2020); Marco Polo's credibility (Wood against de Rachewiltz and Vogel); the Talas paper story (Bloom against tradition); whether the caravan trade «declined» after 1400 (Rossabi and Levi against the textbook); and the identity of «Serinda» and the silkworm smugglers.
Reading links on the cards open in a new tab and come from Silk Road Seattle, the International Dunhuang Programme, Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Met's Heilbrunn Timeline, the British Museum, the Smithsonian's Sogdians exhibition, UNESCO, Khan Academy and Wikipedia. Each link carries a verified flag set only by a click-test script; the first run from the build environment was blocked for every host, so the flags stand on the dossier's own check until the script is run from an open connection.
Line names, km and day counts, and the width of every drawn road are ours. Three places (Kaifeng, Yinchuan, Ordu-Baliq) were added for the who-lived-here glyphs and their coordinates await a research check. Terrain: Terrain Tiles on AWS (© Mapzen/USGS); coastlines, lakes and rivers from Natural Earth.

Faces of the Atlas

Hannibal Barca — image credits: AI illustration made for The Ember Atlas; Fratelli Alinari, c. 1900. Quirinal Palace, Rome. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Monnaies. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Bardo National Museum, Tunis. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.
Alexander the Great — image credits: AI illustration made for The Ember Atlas; Musée du Louvre, Paris (Ma 436). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. CC0 (Met Open Access).. Sources and image credits on the biography page.
Attila — image credits: AI illustration made for The Ember Atlas; Mór Than, 1870. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (57.482). CC0.; The Cleveland Museum of Art (1930.226). CC0.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.
Xuanzang — image credits: 'Xuanzang Sanzō,' Tokyo National Museum (A-10600), Kamakura period, 14th century. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Genjō Sanzō-e, Nara National Museum, Kamakura period, c. 1350. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Shanghai Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; The Cleveland Museum of Art (1929.981). CC0.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.
Zhang Qian — image credits: Mogao Cave 323, north wall, Dunhuang — early Tang dynasty (7th century), painted some 700 years after his death. No likeness of Zhang Qian made in or near his own lifetime survives. Reproduction from Whitfield, Whitfield, Agnew & Conner, Cave Temples of Mogao (Getty, 2000). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; The Cleveland Museum of Art (1977.57). CC0.; Woven silk from Tomb 1 at Mawangdui, Changsha, Western Han dynasty, 2nd century BC. Hunan Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.

Legends of the Atlas

Gilgamesh — image credits: 'Hero mastering a lion,' from the palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad, 713–706 BC. Traditionally called Gilgamesh, but no inscription says so, and it was carved two thousand years after the king lived; scholars call it a protective hero. No likeness of Gilgamesh exists. Musée du Louvre (AO 19862). Photo: Jastrow. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 1933–34. Swiss National Library, Swiss Literary Archives (SLA-Schwarzenbach-A-5-03/137). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Serpentine cylinder seal with modern impression, Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Photo: Daderot. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.; British Museum (K.3375). Photo: BabelStone. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.. Sources, and the chapter on where history touches the legend, on the legend page.
Odysseus — image credits: Head of Odysseus from the Sperlonga grotto, Roman marble, 1st century AD after a Hellenistic model. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Sperlonga. No likeness from life exists — there was never a life; this is how Roman sculptors imagined him. Photo: Jastrow. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; National Archaeological Museum, Athens (no. 6568). Photo: Jebulon. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.; Attic red-figure stamnos by the Siren Painter, from Vulci. British Museum (1843,1103.31). Photo: Jastrow. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Engraving from Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios: The City and Country of the Trojans (New York, 1880), plate 144. Public domain, via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons.. Sources, and the chapter on where history touches the legend, on the legend page.

Stories

Atlantis — image credits: Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (1664–65). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Vatican Library, Reg. lat. 1308, fols. 21v–22r. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Museum of Prehistoric Thera / National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Public domain (reproduction of a Bronze Age wall painting), via Wikimedia Commons.; NASA, ISS067-E-153820 (crop). Public domain.. Sources on the story page.

Routes, day counts and figures are best-effort reconstructions, not settled fact. If you spot an error, send word — corrections are gratefully received.