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.

Faces of the Atlas

  • Alexander the Great — image credits: 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.
  • Hannibal Barca — image credits: Illustration made for The Ember Atlas; Photo: Fratelli Alinari, c. 1900. Quirinal Palace, Rome. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Monnaies. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.; Bardo National Museum, Tunis. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.
  • Attila — image credits: 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). Public domain.; The Cleveland Museum of Art (1930.226). CC0.. Sources and image credits on the biography page.

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