Map of Power
Cities of lawgiving, capitals of empire, sites of revolution and liberation — from Babylon to Philadelphia, from Xianyang to New Delhi. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
Ancient Order: Codes and Empires
Enlightenment and Revolution
Modern Rights and Liberation
The coastline data is shared with "History of Technology" (Natural Earth, longitude -130° to 145°, latitude 10° to 72°), covering Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, Europe, China, India, and North America; place coordinates use standard identifications of the figures’ main places of activity. A few places (such as South Africa) lie outside this range and are not on the map, though the figures still appear in the cards and graph.
Places on this map
Babylon
Hammurabi’s capital. He carved over two hundred laws on a black stone stele and set it up in a temple for all to see, so power for the first time answered to a set of written, public, checkable rules — the most ancient seed of the rule of law was born in this famed Mesopotamian city.
Connected figures: Hammurabi
Athens
Where Solon legislated, and the cradle of democracy. He abolished debt-slavery and re-divided citizens’ rights by property, laying the ground for Athens’s later democracy — then left for ten years so the new laws could run without interference.
Connected figures: Solon
Xianyang
The Qin capital. Here Shang Yang led his reforms — "moving a pole to establish trust," rewarding farming and war, instituting commanderies; a century on, Qin Shi Huang swept away the six states from here to found China’s first centralized empire, "same script, same axle-width," setting the frame of two thousand years of imperial rule.
Connected figures: Shang Yang · Qin Shi Huang
Rome
Capital of the Roman Empire. Here Augustus, in the name of "princeps," gathered real power to himself while keeping the shell of the Republic, founding the principate that brought two centuries of the Pax Romana — the concentration of power, quietly accomplished under the signboard of "the Republic."
Connected figures: Augustus
Constantinople
Capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Here Justinian ordered the tangled Roman law of a thousand years compiled into a Corpus of Civil Law, saving Rome’s legal wisdom from vanishing with the empire and making it the common source of the later continental legal tradition.
Connected figures: Justinian I
Pataliputra
Capital of the ancient Indian Maurya dynasty. From here Ashoka all but unified South Asia, yet after the brutal Kalinga war converted to Buddhism, laid down the sword, and ruled by "the Law," carving edicts of benevolence and non-violence on pillars across the land — his wheel of Dhamma stands at the center of India’s flag to this day.
Connected figures: Ashoka
Florence
Machiavelli’s home. Here he wrote The Prince, for the first time stripping politics of morality and religion to discuss coolly how a prince seizes and holds power — the birth of "realpolitik," though he himself stayed loyal to the republic and died in poverty.
Connected figures: Machiavelli
London
Capital of an England that lived through civil war and revolution. Here Hobbes wrote Leviathan, for the first time grounding the state’s legitimacy in "the consent of the people"; Locke, the reverse, put forward natural rights and limited government, kindling the American and French revolutions to come.
Paris
The center of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Here Montesquieu proposed the separation of powers and Rousseau cried "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"; when the revolution broke out, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s Code both went from this city out into the world.
Connected figures: Montesquieu · Rousseau · Robespierre · Napoleon
Berlin
Capital of Prussia and the German Empire. As "Iron Chancellor," Bismarck unified the fragmented German states into a mighty empire through three wars, and was the first to build social insurance — the most typical representative of "forging order by force."
Connected figures: Bismarck
Philadelphia
The founding place of the United States. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence Jefferson drafted was adopted here, writing "all men are created equal" as a nation’s creed; Washington twice voluntarily surrendered power, setting the young republic its precedent of "power limited and peacefully rotated."
Connected figures: Jefferson · Washington
Washington
The U.S. capital. Lincoln restated at Gettysburg that a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" shall endure; nearly a century later, Martin Luther King said "I have a dream" before the Lincoln Memorial, pushing the promise "all men are created equal" once more toward reality.
Connected figures: Lincoln · Martin Luther King Jr.
Nanjing
Seat of the provisional government of the Republic of China. After the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated here as provisional president, overthrowing the imperial system that had ruled China for over two thousand years — from Qin Shi Huang’s first emperor to the last emperor’s abdication, two millennia of imperial rule close here.
Connected figures: Sun Yat-sen
New Delhi
One stage of Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian independence movement. He resisted the British Empire with non-violent non-cooperation, proving the weapon of the weakest can be "the refusal to obey itself"; his thought deeply shaped civil-rights and peace movements the world over.
Connected figures: Gandhi