Cliopatria

• About the project
• Data description
• Visualising Cliopatria
• Releases
• Maintainer docs
  • Making a release

About the project

Cliopatria is a comprehensive open-source geospatial dataset of worldwide states, political groups, events, and rulers from 3400BCE to 2024CE. It is part of the Seshat Global History Databank project. Presently it comprises over 1800 political entities sampled at varying timesteps and spatial scales. Description of its initial format, construction, and source material may be found here. Released versions may be accessed here or on Zenodo.

The Seshat Global History Databank will soon feature Cliopatria. For now, you can see how it will be used on our test site:

• Seshat World Map
• Seshat Polity Pages (Roman Empire - Dominate)

While we strive to reflect the most current historical knowledge, we acknowledge that these maps reflect only one version of the territory held by past polities. Border uncertainties, as well as differing opinions on the names, territorial changes, and durations of polities, are common challenges facing historians. We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement. Following standard Seshat protocol, any reported errors will be addressed after expert historian review.

Please note that users and analysts of this map data are solely responsible for assessing its suitability for their specific purposes.

Data description

Cliopatria is distributed as a single data file, cliopatria.geojson (stored as a zip here due to GitHub's file size constraints). This file currently consists of approximately 15K records. Data for each entity (e.g., 'Roman Empire') is contained in one or more rows, depending on how the associated data about the entity changes. Each row reports the Name of the entity, its polygons (geometry, projection EPSG:4326), that geometry's Area (in KM² using equal-area projection EPSG:6933), and its Type (POLITY, LEADER, etc.).

Each row indicates a range of years between FromYear to ToYear to which the associated row data applies. Years are recorded as integers, negative for BCE, positive for CE. Data, including polygons, for any entity for any year (not just movie frame years) between 3400BCE and 2024CE can be obtained finding the row (if any) containing the Name of the entity where the year of interest is between the row’s FromYear and ToYear, inclusive.

Each row also records an associated Wikipedia page (phrase) describing the entity in those years; the latter URL can be composed by embedding the phrase in “http://en.wikipedia.org/<phrase>”. For certain polities in particular years, an associated Seshat polity id (SeshatID) may be provided; access to the structured data about that polity can be found via the URL “http://seshat-db.org/core/polity/<polity id>”.

Visualising Cliopatria

You can explore the Cliopatria dataset in an interactive Jupyter notebook. The notebooks folder contains a processing script to add colors to the dataset, alongside a notebook which loads the data in GeoPandas and includes an interactive Folium plot.

You can also explore Cliopatria on the Seshat website (see links above).

Releases

Whenever updates are made to cliopatria.geojson, a new release is made according to the following MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH versioning system:

1. MAJOR version when incompatible changes are made to the GeoJSON structure
2. MINOR version when large edits are made e.g. new polities have been added
3. PATCH version when smaller edits are made e.g. existing polgons and years have been adjusted

Past releases can be found on the right hand side of this page.

Maintainer docs

Information below is relevant to maintainers of the Cliopatria repo.

Making a release

If you wish to edit Cliopatria and make a new release, do the following:

1. Ensure you have cloned the repo to your local machine:

       git clone https://github.com/Seshat-Global-History-Databank/cliopatria
   

2. Unzip cliopatria.geojson.zip to get cliopatria.geojson and make the relevant modifications for the new release. If wish to check the new version, you can inspect it in the Jupyter interactive plot (see here).

3. Rezip the file and save it over cliopatria.geojson.zip.

4. Decide on a new version number based on the numbering system decided above.

5. Commit the zip file with an informative commit message and create a tag with the version number:

       git add cliopatria.geojson.zip
       git commit -m 'Update to vX.X.X'
       git tag vX.X.X
   

6. Push your updated zip file and the tag to GitHub:

       git push
       git push origin vX.X.X
   

7. On GitHub, click "Releases" (on the right of this page). Choose the tag you created and name the release the same i.e. vX.X.X. Enter any relevant info describing the changes in the release. The linked Zenodo will automatically get updated with the latest release.

After making a new release, you may wish to update the Seshat website with the latest version of Cliopatria. Contact a Seshat Admin who can follow these instructions.