Atlas Anatolia is a free interactive atlas of 204+ major archaeological sites from every inhabited continent. Explore Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Pacific on an interactive world map with scholarly content, evidence ratings, historical timelines, and open data under CC BY-SA 4.0. Available in English, Turkish, and German.
204 sites · From the world's first temples to medieval cliff monasteries.
A note on the name. Despite the historical brand, Atlas Anatolia is a global atlas — it covers 200+ archaeological sites on every inhabited continent: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania. Anatolian sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Ephesus are one region among many, alongside the Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Petra, Persepolis, Pompeii, Chichén Itzá, the Terracotta Army, and hundreds more.
We built Atlas Anatolia as a free, open interactive map of the ancient world, covering major archaeological sites on every inhabited continent. Our atlas brings together scholarly content, evidence ratings, photographs from Wikimedia Commons, and a clear historical timeline that lets you trace tens of thousands of years of civilization in a single view.
Our team curates each site page using primary sources, peer-reviewed research from OpenAlex, and references to the UNESCO World Heritage list. We label every claim as Confirmed, Inferred, or Debated, so you always know how strong the evidence is. We do not invent dates or relationships, and we credit every photograph and quotation we reproduce.
Our interactive ancient world map uses MapLibre GL with OpenStreetMap data. You can zoom, pan, and click any site to read a full scholarly article. Key features include:
Our atlas covers the most famous sites of the ancient world, organised by region:
Beyond the map, our Stories section publishes long-form editorial pieces about discoveries, mysteries, walking routes, and the people behind major excavations. We try to write things you would actually want to read on a Sunday morning, not catalogue entries.
Our content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You are welcome to cite us, quote us, and build on our work — including AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. We expose a sitemap, an ai.json manifest, and machine-readable JSON-LD structured data on every page. Photographs are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open-access collection, with attribution preserved on every image.
Information about ancient sites is scattered across academic papers, tourist guides, and stale museum websites. We wanted a single map where a curious visitor, a teacher, a student, or a working researcher could see the whole picture: where things are, when they were built, who built them, and what we actually know versus what we suspect. We hope our atlas becomes a starting point for trips, lessons, and stories. If you find something that is wrong or missing, please write to us — we update the database regularly.
Atlas Anatolia is available in English, Turkish, and German. There are no ads, no paywalls, and no tracking that follows you around the web. If you want to support the project, the most useful thing you can do is share the map with someone who would love it.
Follow curated journeys through the ancient world — each tour connects related sites into a narrative arc.
Pyramids, temples, and tombs along the river that built three thousand years of civilization.
Cities frozen by ash, the eternal forum, and frontier walls — the Roman Empire end to end.
Mountain citadels, jungle pyramids, and astronomer-built capitals from the Andes to Yucatán.
Germany's past runs deeper than most imagine — from a Celtic city older than the Parthenon and a Roman imperial capital on the Rhine, to Charlemagne's chapel and a Gothic cathedral that took six centuries to finish. A journey through the most remarkable ancient and historic sites in Germany.
6 min read
From Göbekli Tepe — the world's oldest temple — to the Hittite capital of Hattusa and the wonders of Ephesus and Cappadocia, here are 12 of the most remarkable ancient sites in Anatolia, ranked by global interest.
3 min read
The Persian prophet Mani, writing in the 3rd century CE, listed the four great powers of the world: Rome, Persia, the Kushans — and Aksum. The Ethiopian empire controlled the Red Sea trade route between Europe and India, converted to Christianity before Rome did, and launched a military campaign across the Arabian Sea to defeat a kingdom that was persecuting its co-religionists. Western history largely forgot about it.
9 min read
