History Globe Sources and licences
History Globe is built on the work of scholars and open-data projects. Their data is used under their licences, with our changes noted. Listing a source does not imply that its authors endorse History Globe.
Data
| What | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Places of the Bible, verses, identifications | OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding Data; points taken from OpenStreetMap or Google replaced with Wikidata coordinates or left out | CC BY 4.0, modified |
| States and borders | Cliopatria, Seshat Global History Databank (Chalstrey, Bennett et al.), v0.2.0, with our corrections | CC BY 4.0, modified |
| People and family links | STEP Bible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge; matched to places, links not in the text removed | CC BY 4.0, modified |
| Periods of places, ancient sites | Pleiades, ISAW, New York University | CC BY 3.0 |
| Coordinates; checks of names and years | Wikidata | CC0 |
| Roman roads | Itiner-e (de Soto, Pažout, Brughmans et al. 2025), clipped to the map and simplified | CC BY 4.0, modified |
| Jerusalem's walls (to compare sizes) | Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, 1864–65 (C. W. Wilson), placed by Wikidata points; the walls of Jesus' time and of the City of David reconstructed from Josephus and the excavations | public domain and CC0; our outlines CC0 |
| Coast, rivers, lakes | Natural Earth | public domain |
| Relief | Mapterhorn: Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; ASTER GDEM courtesy of METI and NASA (Israel 10 m model processed by 4cast LTD); Cyprus DTM 2019 © Department of Lands and Surveys, Republic of Cyprus (CC BY 4.0) | see the source |
The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30.
Texts of the Bible
The Russian Synodal translation (1876), the World English Bible and the King James Version, all in the public domain; the electronic texts are from eBible.org. Names and the existence of verses are checked against them; quotations in the tours and verse texts come from the Synodal translation and the King James Version.
Photographs
The 140 photographs of places come from Wikimedia Commons, and only those in the public domain or under CC0 or CC BY are used. The author, licence and a link to the file are given under each photograph; for a disputed place the caption says which proposed site it shows.
Software
The site uses MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause), React (MIT), Lucide (ISC) and Feather (MIT) icons, and the Golos Text and Literata typefaces (SIL Open Font License). Their licence texts: third-party.txt, lucide-icons.txt; MapLibre’s is shipped with its files.
Privacy
The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and needs no account. Your browser keeps only your interface settings. Terrain relief tiles are loaded from Mapterhorn’s servers, which keep IP addresses for 30 days. Links to Bible Gateway and Google Maps open only when you click them.
Data as of 3 October 2026