Walk through ancient Rome, Athens and Babylon in 3D, in your browser

Most pictures of ancient Rome show one building at a time: the Colosseum, the Forum or the Pantheon on its own. I wanted to see them together and walk from one to the next, so I made Ancient Cities. It's twelve cities of the past, built in 3D, that you walk through like a video game with nothing to win.

How it works

1. Spin the globe on the home page. Every city has a pin.
2. Click a city, then Enter. The page opens on a slow view of the city while it loads.
3. Press Start walking. W, A, S and D move you, the mouse looks around, Shift with a direction runs at three times the speed, and Space jumps. Esc pauses.

You walk as an invisible time traveller. The people around you go about their day: they cross the squares, stand talking in small groups and kneel at their work, each dressed for their city. Look at someone and a line at the bottom of the screen says who they are, from an Athenian woman in a wool dress to a Buddhist monk in Chang'an.

It runs in the browser on a computer with a keyboard and a mouse. On a phone you can spin the globe and read about each city, but walking needs a computer.

The twelve cities

1. Mohenjo-daro, 2500 BC: the Great Bath on its raised mound, brick houses around courtyards, wells and covered drains.
2. Thebes, 1250 BC: Karnak's hall of 134 columns, and the gateways and obelisks of Ramesses II beside the Nile.
3. Babylon, 575 BC: the blue glazed Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way and a stepped tower you can climb.
4. Persepolis, 450 BC: the royal terrace, its double stairways and its halls of tall columns topped with pairs of bulls.
5. Athens, 432 BC: the Parthenon the year it was finished, and the agora below with its long columned halls.
6. Alexandria, 35 BC: the lighthouse of Pharos, a harbour full of ships and the colonnaded Canopic Way, in Cleopatra's time.
7. Petra, 100 AD: the winding gorge of the Siq, the Treasury, and the tombs and theatre cut into the sandstone.
8. Rome, 125 AD: the Colosseum, the Forum paved in basalt, and the Pantheon, newly built under Hadrian.
9. Chang'an, 750 AD: the Tang capital's great avenue, its walled wards, the East Market and the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda.
10. Chichen Itza, 1000 AD: the pyramid of Kukulcán on its white plastered plaza, the Great Ball Court and the Temple of the Warriors.
11. Thanjavur, 1010 AD: the Chola temple the year it was finished, its granite tower 66 m high, with the temple tank and the rice fields.
12. Angkor, 1200 AD: Angkor Wat's lotus towers above the moat, and the stone faces of the Bayon.

Things to try

1. In Athens, take the ramp up the Acropolis and walk around the Parthenon.
2. In Rome, go through the Colosseum's arches into the arena.
3. In Babylon, climb the stairs of the stepped tower and look over the city to the Euphrates.
4. In Petra, follow the Siq until the Treasury comes into view.
5. In Chang'an, walk the willow-lined avenue to the gate tower at its end.

What's real and what's guessed

Each city starts from what archaeologists know: the size of the Colosseum, the number of columns in Karnak's hall, the grid of walled wards in Chang'an. Distances are shortened so a city fits a walk of a few minutes, and the houses, clothes, colours and crowds are reconstructions. Every city's page says what was compressed or guessed, and where historians still disagree, such as whose faces look out from the towers of the Bayon.

Ancient Cities is free, with no account and nothing to install: ancient-cities.tukka.dev.