Knowledge Graph of the Ancient World

The Atlas Anatolia Knowledge Graph is an interactive, force-directed map of the ancient world that visualises how 201 archaeological sites and 19 editorial stories connect to one another through 62 relationships. Every point in the network is a node: circular nodes are archaeological sites, colour-coded by the continent where they stand, while ringed nodes are long-form stories from our editorial collection. The lines between them are edges, representing two kinds of links — related-site connections that join places sharing a civilization, era, or history, and editorial mentions that tie a story to the sites it discusses.

The graph spans every inhabited continent. Sites in Africa are shown in amber, Asia in teal, Europe in indigo, North America in green, South America in purple, and Oceania in rose. Larger and brighter nodes mark the most significant and most-visited monuments — places such as the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, Petra, Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Angkor Wat, and the Pyramids of Giza — while smaller nodes reveal the dense web of lesser-known temples, cities, fortresses, and sanctuaries that surround them. Featured sites carry an additional outer ring.

The layout is generated by a physics simulation: connected nodes attract one another and unconnected nodes drift apart, so clusters of closely related places emerge naturally — the cities of a single civilization, the sites woven together by one story, or the monuments of a shared era. Sites also gravitate toward an approximate geographic position for their continent, giving the whole network a loose world-map shape.

To explore, click any node to open a detailed card with its image, a short summary, and a link to the full site or story page. Hovering a node highlights its direct connections and dims the rest, making it easy to trace how one place relates to the wider ancient world. You can drag nodes to rearrange the network, scroll to zoom, drag the background to pan, and filter the graph by name using the search box. The Knowledge Graph turns the atlas from a list of places into a living web of historical relationships across more than ten thousand years of human civilization.