
Map of battles fought since 2500 B.C - ivank
http://battles.nodegoat.net/viewer.p/23/385/scenario/3/geo/fullscreen
======
halflings
The data being from Wikidata, another way to read the density of battles on
the map as the amount of historical information we have about every region of
the world (at least, the information available on Wikipedia)

Unfortunately, large parts of the history of countries like Morocco was lost,
and of what was written a very small portion is actually on Wikipedia. (in
contrast with Europe, the US, etc. who have more contributors)

~~~
ivanhoe
and even that data is highly unreliable, for instance if you zoom on post-war
Europe (after 1952) one of dots is antic Battle of Bedriacum (which happened
in year 56, but BC)

~~~
nodegoat
This is true. Especially for the data we got through dbpedia, even though we
tried to clean this somewhat. See our blog post on this:
[http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-
of...](http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of-violence)

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Maultasche
I noticed that there was a battle from the 20th century in the eastern Bay
Area, and was confused about what it could be. It turns out that it was the
Port Chicago disaster
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster)).

It was during wartime, and a lot of people died, but it really wasn't a
battle. It was an accident that involved a lot of munitions. The only opponent
in that "battle" was unsafe working conditions.

They don't have the explosion of the munitions ship in Halifax in 1916 listed
as a battle, which was a very similar situation, so I'd say there are some
issues with the source data.

It's a very interesting map though. They have a lot of stuff on there.

~~~
nodegoat
Thanks! There is indeed some noise and messy data as well as some questionable
categorisations, all taken from wikipedia/dbpedia/wikidata. See this blogpost
( [http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-
of...](http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of-violence)
) for a full description of how we got the data.

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tallanvor
The creator's definition of a "battle" is very different than how most people
would define them. A just one example: this site considers the 1980 siege at
the Iranian Embassy in London as a battle, which I doubt most people would
agree with.

~~~
elthran
And 2008 UEFA Cup Final Riots in Manchester. "Battles" in Europe post 1946 was
definitely the first thing I noticed that looked odd.

There also seems to be a surprising lack of battles across the eastern steppes
by the Mongols.

Definitely could use some more information of how they decided what a battle
is - or the data source at least

~~~
cglee
Right. It's ridiculous that the most violent and dominating empire in the
history of mankind is not included here.

~~~
CPLX
I thought the UK was rather well represented actually.

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aorth
I got a bit of a headache when I saw that B.C.E dates are displayed on the
slider like: 12-01--4. Four years before the Common Era, aka "-4"... hah! It
seems ISO 8601 actually tries to solve this problem:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Years)

~~~
gkya
I really like the Holocene Calendar. It adds ten thousand to any given anno
domini, and thus moves the start of the calendar to 12016 years ago from
today. For anything that happened before that, we're nearly guaranteed to not
have very certain dates, so it's very uncommon to need to use BHE (before
holocene era) with the holocene calendar. 4 B.C.E is 9997 HE, 753 B.C.E. is
9248 HE (Holocene era). For AD add 10.000, for BC subtract from 10.001, as it
has a year zero. And even the dates for the construction of Gobeklitepe can be
expressed in positive years.

~~~
Semiapies
I like the _idea_ of the Holocene Calendar, but there were already
archaeological sites known to be older than twelve thousand years when it was
devised. As archaeologists find older developed structures and dating methods
get more precise, negative HC dates get pretty likely.

~~~
gkya
Unless we didn't take the big bang as the first year, negative dates will
exist. From an archaeological stance, 12.000 or maybe 15.000 years would be
better, but 10.000 has an advantage: for anni domini we stay in the same
_millennium_ , i.e. 2016 becomes 12016, which is easier to parse at a glance
than 14016.

I really wonder which +12.000 yrs old sites you're referring to (no rhetoric
intended, I'm really curious).

~~~
Semiapies
Clovis culture sites, for one.

I'd pondered just making it CE + _twenty_ thousand years.

~~~
gkya
That's equally viable, just like any multiple of ten, but I think that ten
thousand is easier to parse, and that we won't find enough BHE events to use
twenty thousand. Though my guesses and thoughts are uninformed here, and I'm
mostly interested in middle-eastern and european antichity, not archaeology
and geology.

~~~
Semiapies
That's fair.

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impostervt
Fascinating map!

I just got done reading "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric
Cline. Fascinating look at civilization in ancient times. While I'd heard of
many of the empires/kingdoms mentioned, it was always hard to think of them as
"real" before I read this book. The book explores how the different cultures
of the times interacted, and how their downfall may have been brought about
because of their inter-reliance.

On amazon, not an affiliate link:
[http://amzn.com/0691168385](http://amzn.com/0691168385)

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notahacker
It's a nice visualisation and use of a slider but does expose the limitations
of DBpedia as a source

The idea that a "battle" has been fought on British soil in the last 10 years
raised my eyebrows, but I'm reassured to learn it was actually an apolitical
riot involving a couple of hundred unarmed civilian football fans and no
casualties. That gets more emphasis than many military offensives to seize
cities during WWII or the English Civil War.

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freshyill
Man, this map is hard to use. It's extremely difficult to position the move
cursor so that it turns into the pointer to actually see something.

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RealityVoid
Perusing this map led me to read about the Dai Hong Incident[1] and at the end
of the wikipedia incident there is this nice little paragraph:

> The North Korean press (KCNA) released an uncommon statement, stressing the
> successful American-North Korean collaboration during the incident.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident)

~~~
ajmurmann
There is hope in the world.

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foxylion
Some of the dates are incorrectly interpreted.

For example "Armada of 1779" is interpreted as a battle in October 2011.

Especially when you look at battles between 2000 and 2015 you'll see some
which actually happened a few hundred years ago.

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stupejr
I could've told you from countless games of Risk that Europe was the place
where it all goes to shit and I didn't need oodles of data.

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nodegoat
All the data plus the categorisations came from dbpedia & wikidata. See this
blogpost ( [http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-
of...](http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of-violence)
) for a full description of how we got the data. You also find there the CSV
files that we generated and used for this visualisation.

The numbers reflect what has been entered into wikipedia and has been
harvested by dbpedia plus data that has been entered into wikidata. So, we
assume there will be a western/eurocentric overrepresentation in this dataset.

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robotkilla
This one is listed as 1963 but should be 1863:

[http://dbpedia.org/page/Morgan's_Raid](http://dbpedia.org/page/Morgan's_Raid)

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izzydata
Is there a way to limit this to battles that had at least 50+ people in them
and maybe 20 casualties? Most of the ones I looked at didn't even seem liked
an armed conflict.

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run4yourlives2
It's too bad the data is "off" because the map is quite stunning.

To call friendly fire incidents, riots and explosions and such "battles" seems
a little suspect. A "battle" should involve one or more belligerents of
significant force (i.e., > 100) in an organized campaign. Smaller battles are
routinely called "skirmishes" and shouldn't really even be recorded in this
sense. Unorganized violence is simply unrest or rioting. And accidents are
exactly that.

Also, I highly doubt China is a relative haven for peace given their history
and population. There's clearly a lack of data there (or rather, they don't
bother recording all of the other things that the creator has decided to add
as "battles").

I question the overall motives of this. It's almost as if the creator wants
the west to seem more violent than the rest of the planet. I don't think
that's the reality. We're all just as bad.

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sethrin
The map has a dot in the center of Alaska (64N 153W), which refers to a battle
on Kiska Island. The event linked to has the correct coordinates(51N 177E),
but the map has differing ones, and no apparent way to edit it. Similarly, the
battle at the top of the state appears to be misplaced.

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willvarfar
Wonder if there's any pattern when you cross-reference it with this map of the
world's religions?
[http://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/](http://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/)

~~~
Yetanfou
Compared to some other studies of religion-inspired battles, especially those
related to the islamic conquest of the middle east, northern Africa and parts
of Europe the map seems to be rather sparse. An example of such a study is the
one done by one Bill Warner which tells of '548 battles that Islam fought...
[which] doesn’t include battles [in] Africa, India, Afghanistan and other
locations' [1].

Given that the map includes football brawls as 'battles' and that this is only
one example of a specific group of battles, the only possible conclusion can
be that it needs to be fed with more data.

[1] [http://cspipublishing.com/statistical/charts/Islam-
BattlesDa...](http://cspipublishing.com/statistical/charts/Islam-
BattlesDate.pdf)

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mucker
As many others have noted: 1.) The dataset implies that Europe is the most
contentious area when it is more likely we just have the best historical
records in Wikipedia 2.) The data set is dirty 3.) Because of (1) these are
only going to be battles that Europe has found significant. The former Aztec
Empire for example is evidently either the most peaceful in History or we just
don't know a lot about all the tribes it has massacred in the format that
Wikipedia likes.

At the very least he "every" in the title should be dropped. I'd suggest
"Historically Significant Battles from a Western Perspective on Wikipedia"

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mcjiggerlog
Do you have any information written up on how you render so many points via
the google maps API? I have built a similar tool[1] and struggled with
performance and had to limit the amount of data points displayed at any one
time.

Also, have you looked at Freebase[2]? This is what I used as the data source
for mountains.io. They appear to have a decent amount of data for battles[3].

[1] [https://www.mountains.io/](https://www.mountains.io/)

[2] [https://www.freebase.com](https://www.freebase.com)

[3] [http://tinyurl.com/gr62x4u](http://tinyurl.com/gr62x4u)

~~~
sxv
One way of solving this issue is serving pre-rendered image tiles rather than
overlaying each data point separately: [http://blog.cartodb.com/the-
versatility-of-retreiving-and-re...](http://blog.cartodb.com/the-versatility-
of-retreiving-and-rendering-geospatial/)

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rdancer
The battle of Lipany is listed twice. So is the battle of Kolín. So is battle
on the Marchfield.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lipany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lipany)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolín](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolín)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Marchfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Marchfeld)

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jostmey
What surprised me was the number of battles fought in Europe. It appeared to
be the most violent place on the map. Is this because of a bias in the
collection of the data, or is this representative of Human history?

~~~
jcranmer
There is listed just one "battle" in the Americas for all of time through
1500, the Tikal-Calamakul wars. This is a poor representation even of the wars
we know occurred, let alone all the stuff we don't know happened due to the
lack of writing systems.

This data set appears to not be a particularly well-curated dataset, and it
looks to my (non-expert) eyes to have an intrinsically high bias towards high
detail of some key Western European conflicts even beyond the general bias
imparted by the fact that histories of Europe tend to be the most well-curated
and accessible if you're an English speaker.

~~~
dalke
I agree. Here's a list of battles which took place in New Mexico (where I used
to live) -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_fought_in_New_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_fought_in_New_Mexico)
. The 1540 Battle of Hawikku, which is in the time period you mentioned, is
missing, as are the other NM battles until the mid-1800s.

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dsmithatx
This is a really awesome tool. I took both sliders left until there was one
dot. I then slowly slid the right slider which made an animation of battles
fought. It really wakes you up to just how much fighting our world has seen.
The amount of issues from 1900 till 2016 is so much more than I ever realized.

Edit - after reading another comment I realized some of these might not be
much of a battle.

~~~
sillysaurus3
These are just the battles within recorded history, too.

In school, I remember being confused why the neanderthals died out. The
teachers kept saying it was because they were bad at using tools. Oh?

It wasn't till later that I realized they were probably brutally murdered.

~~~
sorokod
Axe is a tool ...

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51Cards
Might be a small data problem. This battle is showing up in downtown Toronto

[http://dbpedia.org/page/Battle_of_Hiep_Hoa](http://dbpedia.org/page/Battle_of_Hiep_Hoa)

I was surprised to see one there in the after 1946 category. Nice job overall
though. It's always incredible to see visualizations like this.

~~~
mrghn
Same with the below, which is showing up in Western Australia for some reason:

[http://dbpedia.org/page/Shell_House_massacre](http://dbpedia.org/page/Shell_House_massacre)

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edko
I wonder when was the last date in history, if ever, when there wasn't a
single war being fought anywhere on the Globe?

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ranit
Wikipedia lists 16 battles of Adrianople (Edirne, Turkey)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adrianople_(disambig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adrianople_\(disambiguation\))
but this map shows only three.

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restalis
I've heard a lot about the Middle East being a place of unrest for so long in
the history, yet looking on this map it seems pretty quiet (compared to
others)! This means that either too many quarrels in there went undocumented,
or things got exaggerated!

~~~
mjevans
You can pretty much throw out any certainty of events before the British
Empire invaded an area of the world. After that the recorded history will both
have the same bias and consistency. Before that history will have been
recorded (or not) and possibly lost by civilizations that did not win the game
of Civilization (infinite): Real Life.

What is recorded as happening in Europe, that dense painting of many 'small'
battles that consumed whole cities/towns/etc, can be assumed to have happened
generally /everywhere/ anyone would actually want to live.

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cookiemonsta
I don't think its too accurate. I put in a date range for the last couple of
decades, and it says there was a battle in northern England for the 2008
euros. Hardly what anyone would call a battle...

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tolien
Neat visualisation (look at France for the range 1914-18 and see the range of
the trenches) but I found it really difficult to focus on the dots with a
mouse pointer. Could they be made to scale with zoom level?

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awl130
excellent, but please please please just invert the colors on the slider (so
that the chosen range is a contrast to the background). it's an easy fix but
would have saved me 30 seconds of confusion.

~~~
nodegoat
Thanks for the feedback!

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ekianjo
Never mind the fact that data before 500 BC is highly unreliable because we
just don't have enough information about what happened in every corner of the
world back then.

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gkya
It wants to force me to use cookies, it shows a black screen with a message
telling me to allow its cookies. Why?

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scotty79
It's not very accurate. Spots in Australia are misplaced.

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LordKano
Violent conflict seems to follow our species where ever we go.

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rafstone
Africa, and Asia are missing quite a few data points...

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ommunist
You can see now - how peaceful is Russia.

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anjc
Cool idea

