Atlas
18 places, plotted from the coordinates in each dossier. Filter by era; select a pin to open its dossier.
Göbekli Tepe Troy The Pyramids of Giza Babylon Pompeii Persepolis The Acropolis of Athens Petra The Great Wall of China Roman Arches Jerusalem Before Rome Destroyed It The Colosseum Rome in AD 100 Constantinople Venice's Sinking City Notre-Dame de Paris London: 500 Years of Design Haussmann's Boulevards
Places on the atlas
- Göbekli Tepe Monumental stone architecture built by people with no pottery, no metal, no wheel, no writing — and, on the current evidence, no agriculture yet.
- Troy Nine cities stacked in one hill, and the layer that burned matches the poem closely enough to be uncomfortable.
- The Pyramids of Giza The pyramid you have seen photographs of is the skeleton. The finished monument was smooth, white, and visible for kilometres.
- Babylon The city with the blue gate and the gardens nobody can find — taken in one night, by an army that walked in through the river.
- Pompeii The only Roman city we can read street by street — because the thing that destroyed it also stopped it mid-sentence.
- Persepolis An empire that paid its workers in silver, recorded it on clay, and then lost the whole ceremonial capital in a single night of fire.
- The Acropolis of Athens The whitest building in the popular imagination was painted red, blue and gold — and it was funded with money that was not Athens’ to spend.
- Petra A desert people got rich on incense, then spent it engineering water — and carved the receipts into a canyon wall.
- The Great Wall of China It was never one wall, it was never finished, and in the end it was opened from the inside.
- Roman Arches Rome found a way to make gravity help — then repeated the trick until it became the infrastructure of an empire.
- Jerusalem Before Rome Destroyed It The largest building project in the Roman east was finished, and then destroyed, within a single lifetime.
- The Colosseum Not an arena that happened to hold a crowd — a machine for sorting fifty thousand Romans into their exact place in the social order.
- Rome in AD 100 A million people, nine aqueducts running on gradient alone, and a city whose real achievement was keeping every problem from failing at once.
- Constantinople For a thousand years the Theodosian Walls did not fall. What finally beat them was not a better army but a bigger gun.
- Venice's Sinking City Venice is not sinking the way a stone drops. It is losing the space between itself and the sea — and it is losing it from both directions at once.
- Notre-Dame de Paris Half-ruined, re-invented by a novelist, restored into something new, burned, rebuilt — and still called medieval.
- London: 500 Years of Design Fire, bombs and its own planners each rebuilt London — and each time the medieval map underneath survived them.
- Haussmann's Boulevards The most photographed streetscape on Earth was a demolition project, and the city it replaced was mostly medieval.