ArVaViT/history-globe

History Globe: Bible places, people and journeys

The places of the Bible on the map: where each one was, how sure that is, which verses name it, and its name in 21 languages. With them come the people of the Bible, dated events and battles, journeys stop by stop, and what ancient writers outside the Bible say about the places.

This is the open data behind History Globe, a free 3D atlas of biblical history. Every place links to the globe.

table	rows	what
places	1,288	a place: point, kind, identification, certainty, gazetteer ids, names in 21 languages
place_verses	8,617	a verse that names a place
place_sites	2,244	the proposed locations of the 670 places with more than one
people	2,994	a person the Bible names
events	329	a dated event, from 3200 BC to AD 1291
battles	57	a battle or siege: place, year, sides, outcome
tours	54	a journey: Abraham, the Exodus, the life of David, Elijah, the exile, the life of Jesus, Paul's journeys and more
tour_stops	473	a stop of a journey, in order, with its passage
ancient_writers	773	what Eusebius, Josephus, Strabo, Herodotus and others say about a place, with a link to the text

Quick start

from datasets import load_dataset

places = load_dataset("ArVaViT/history-globe", "places", split="train")

import pandas as pd

base = "hf://datasets/ArVaViT/history-globe/data"
places = pd.read_csv(f"{base}/places.csv")
verses = pd.read_csv(f"{base}/place_verses.csv")

# The places named in Acts 16
acts16 = verses[verses.ref.str.startswith("Acts.16.")].merge(places, left_on="place_id", right_on="id")
print(acts16.drop_duplicates("id")[["name", "lat", "lon", "url"]].to_string(index=False))

Always join on ids, not names: names repeat (two Jerichos are two places). place_id and same_as point to places.id; tours.people points to people.id.

Tables

places

column	meaning
id	History Globe id; stable, the same as in the API
name	English name
kind	settlement, region, mountain, river, valley, gate, … (35 kinds)
lat, lon	the point History Globe shows, WGS 84
identified_as	the modern site or description the point stands for: "Tell Abu Sus", "within 1 km of Bethel", "same place as Shittim"
same_as	when identified_as says "same place as …", the id of that place
certainty	how sure the location is, as the globe says it: settled, most likely, tentative or disputed (see below)
disputed	true when a second proposed site holds at least 10% of OpenBible.info's score (see below)
confidence	OpenBible.info's score for the identification, 0–1000, weighted towards recent scholarship
candidate_sites	how many proposed sites place_sites lists for the place (0 when one)
verse_count	how many verses name the place
duplicate	true for a second record OpenBible keeps for the same place under a repeated name
wikidata	the Wikidata item (Q…)
pleiades	the place in Pleiades, as a link
tipnr	STEPBible's TIPNR name for the place, in STEPBible's abbreviations (Abana@2Ki.5.12)
url	the place on historyglobe.app: its own page for the 1,231 places a verse names, the globe for the rest
name_bg … name_vi	the name in 20 more languages

place_verses

place_id, ref: a verse that names the place.

place_sites

For a place with more than one proposed location, up to six of them: place_id, rank (in OpenBible's order, 1 = the highest score), site, lat, lon, openbible_share (the site's share, in per cent, of the positive scores of the sites listed; rounded, so a place's shares may add up to 99–101; empty where OpenBible gives no score). Sites whose only point OpenBible took from OpenStreetMap or Google are left out.

people

id (STEPBible TIPNR unique name, e.g. Aaron@Exo.4.14-Heb), name, sex (m/f), verse_count, first_ref (the first verse TIPNR gives, in STEPBible's abbreviations), name_bg … name_vi. The names in other languages are empty for 864 people, most of them named in one or two verses.

events and battles

id, year, date (readable: "c. 1070 BC"), approximate, place_id (empty for an event without a place), ref (where the Bible tells it, if it does), the text in 21 languages (title_*; battles also sides_* and outcome_*), and sources (the works the date and facts rest on, separated by |).

tours and tour_stops

A tour: id, year, date, stops, people (TIPNR ids, space-separated), title_*.

Its stops, in the order travelled: tour_id, stop, place_id, ref, note_*, and how the stop was reached:

• by: empty for on foot or not stated, sea for by ship, untold when the text does not say and no route is guessed;
• days_sailed, days_sailed_about, days_sailed_ref: the days at sea where the text gives them, true when it says "about", and the verse.

ancient_writers

place_id, author, work, passage, url (an online text of the passage), and a short summary of what it says, note_*.

Conventions

• Years are astronomical: 1 BC is 0, 586 BC is -585. The date column says it in words; dates before 1000 BC are approximate and marked "c.".
• References are OSIS with English book abbreviations and KJV verse numbers: Gen.12.6, Judg.3.15-Judg.3.25. A few events and battles cite 1–2 Maccabees (1Macc.7.39). The ids of people, people.first_ref and places.tipnr follow STEPBible's abbreviations instead (2Sa, Act).
• A point is the most likely location, not a certainty. A region (171 of them) is one point near its middle, not a boundary.
• 57 places have no verse. OpenBible.info tags no verse to them: some are named only outside the 66 books (Adasa, 1 Maccabees 7:40), some are sites of the biblical world (Eridu, Carthage), and some are a second record of a place whose verses are under another record (Ur, Magdala).
• Languages. English is the original. Russian names follow the Synodal Bible of 1876, checked against a verse that contains them where the place has one. The other languages are History Globe's own translations, and not every language has been read by a native speaker yet.

How sure is a location?

• certainty is what the globe tells a reader. disputed when scholars propose rival sites; otherwise OpenBible.info's confidence decides: 800 or above settled, 600 or above most likely, below that tentative.
• disputed is true when, of the proposed sites listed in place_sites, the second holds at least 10% of the positive score, or none is scored.
• identified_as names the site the point stands for; place_sites lists the rivals with their shares.

These scores and shares are OpenBible's assessment, not a scholarly consensus. On a place's page, History Globe says which identification it follows and why.

Sources and license

CC BY 4.0. Use it, change it, build on it, commercially too; keep the credit:

Data: History Globe by Vadym Arnaut (https://historyglobe.app), CC BY 4.0; places and verse tags from OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0); people from STEPBible TIPNR (CC BY 4.0); Pleiades ids from Pleiades (CC BY 3.0).

what	source	license
places, verse tags, identifications, their scores and proposed sites	OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding Data; points OpenBible took from OpenStreetMap or Google replaced with Wikidata coordinates or left out	CC BY 4.0, modified
people	STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge; matched to places	CC BY 4.0, modified
Wikidata items, some coordinates	Wikidata	CC0
Pleiades ids	Pleiades	CC BY 3.0
Russian names	the Synodal translation (1876)	public domain
quotations of the Bible in the notes	the public-domain editions listed on the sources page (KJV, Synodal, Luther 1912, Louis Segond 1910 and others)	public domain
events, battles, journeys, summaries of ancient writers, names and texts in the other languages	History Globe	CC BY 4.0

Not in this dataset: the place articles and the answered questions on historyglobe.app. They are CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: quote and link them, but do not put them into a dataset (what may be taken).

Updates and contact

This is a snapshot of 26 October 2026. The History Globe API serves the same places, verses, people, events, battles, journeys and ancient writers, kept current: JSON, no key (documentation). The certainty columns (identified_as, same_as, certainty, confidence, candidate_sites) and place_sites come from the data the globe itself draws, and are published here only.

Corrections are welcome in this dataset's Community tab or at historyglobe.vadym@gmail.com.

Citation

@misc{arnaut2026historyglobe,
  author = {Arnaut, Vadym},
  title  = {History Globe: Bible places, people and journeys},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://historyglobe.app},
  note   = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, https://huggingface.co/datasets/ArVaViT/history-globe}
}