RewindMap for AI assistants and developers

RewindMap has a free, public MCP server and open data endpoints. AI assistants can ask which states existed in any year, look up an empire's border history, and search dated battles, eruptions and earthquakes. No account, no key, read-only.

MCP server

Endpoint: https://rewindmap.com/mcp (Model Context Protocol, Streamable HTTP transport, stateless, no authentication). Supports the 2026-07-28 protocol and legacy 2025-06-18/2025-03-26 clients.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http rewindmap https://rewindmap.com/mcp

Any other MCP client: add a remote HTTP server with that URL. Server card: /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json.

Tools

Tool	What it answers	Arguments
`world_at_year`	Which states, empires and cultures had borders in a given year, optionally within a region.	`year`, `bbox`?
`find_polity`	An empire's lifespan and every border snapshot, by name or Wikidata QID.	`query`
`search_events`	Dated battles, armed conflict, eruptions, earthquakes, meteorite falls and World Heritage sites. Results include the recorded date precision and source attribution.	`query`?, `layer`?, `from_year`?, `to_year`?, `from_date`?, `to_date`?, `bbox`?, `limit`?
`create_video_link`	A link that opens the short-video maker preloaded with a year range, region, title and up to 5 labels. The visitor presses Download video to record a watermarked clip on their device.	`from_year`, `to_year`, `bbox`?, `format`?, `seconds`?, `title`?, `labels`?, `layers`?

Years are ordinary years: -500 is 500 BC and there is no year 0. bbox is [west, south, east, north] in degrees. Every result links back to the map at that year.

For event searches, a date bound is an object such as {"year": 1453, "month": 5, "day": 29}. Omit day for month precision. Month and day searches only include events recorded at that precision; they do not assign invented dates to year-only records. Historical border snapshots remain year based, and coverage is incomplete.

Example questions

Which empires bordered the Byzantine Empire in 1000?
What battles were fought near Vienna, and when?
Which volcanoes erupted between 500 BC and AD 100?
When did the Ottoman Empire reach its largest extent?

In the browser (WebMCP)

On the map, browsers that support WebMCP get three tools for driving the view: set_year, fly_to and toggle_layer.

Data

events.json: every dated map event.
pleiades-places.geojson: optional ancient-place representative points from Pleiades (CC BY 3.0), independent of the year slider. See the source notes.
https://tiles.rewindmap.com/borders.pmtiles: historical borders as vector PMTiles (4,362 snapshots of 1,835 polities, OpenHistoricalMap, CC0).
https://tiles.rewindmap.com/snapshots.eras.json: 54 world border snapshots, historical-basemaps by André Ourednik, GPL-3.0. Source: https://tiles.rewindmap.com/snapshots.geojsonl.
https://tiles.rewindmap.com/cliopatria.eras.json: polity borders from Seshat Cliopatria, CC BY 4.0 (converted to tiles, relation rows omitted, astronomical years).
Both are split by year into PMTiles files. Each .eras.json lists {file, from, to}: file holds every feature shown in years from ≤ y < to (null means open-ended).
API catalog (RFC 9727), llms.txt, and markdown for map pages (/maps/…/) via Accept: text/markdown.

Licences and attribution for each layer are on Data & sources.