Image credits & licenses

Every photograph and historical image is public domain or licensed under Creative Commons terms that permit commercial reuse with attribution (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA). Images were resized and converted to WebP; the Göbekli Tepe pillar was flipped horizontally to correct a mirrored upload. Two images labeled "fantasy illustration" are original artwork and do not depict real places.

Fragment A of the Antikythera mechanism, National Archaeological Museum, Athens	Logg Tandy	CC BY 4.0	Source page
A passage inside the Derinkuyu underground city, Cappadocia	Nevit Dilmen	CC BY-SA 3.0	Source page
A botanical page from the Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Library, Yale	Unknown author (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale)	Public domain	Source page
Excavated stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, Şanlıurfa	Teomancimit	CC BY-SA 3.0	Source page
Webb's First Deep Field: galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 (2022)	NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI	Public domain	Source page
Al-Khazneh (the Treasury) at Petra, lit by candles at night	Susanahajer	CC BY-SA 3.0	Source page
Modern replica of the vessel's copper cylinder and iron rod (not the original artifact)	Tympanus	Copyrighted free use	Source page
Europa photographed by NASA's Juno spacecraft, 2022	NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill	CC BY 2.0	Source page
The Crab Nebula and its central pulsar (Chandra X-ray + Hubble optical composite)	NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al.; NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al.	Public domain	Source page
19th-century engraving imagining the Library of Alexandria; no images of the original survive	O. Von Corven	Public domain	Source page
Athanasius Kircher's 1678 map of Atlantis from Mundus Subterraneus (south at top)	Athanasius Kircher	Public domain	Source page
Earth's city lights from satellite data	NASA GSFC / NOAA NGDC (Marc Imhoff, Christopher Elvidge)	Public domain	Source page
A carved pillar at Göbekli Tepe (flipped from the uploaded mirror image to its true orientation)	Zhengan	CC BY-SA 4.0	Source page
Ad Deir (the Monastery), Petra	Azurfrog	CC BY-SA 3.0	Source page
Antikythera mechanism fragment, National Archaeological Museum, Athens	Marsyas	CC BY 2.5	Source page
The rosettes foldout of the Voynich Manuscript	Unknown author (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale)	Public domain	Source page
Distant galaxies in a Hubble Space Telescope deep field	NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI	Public domain	Source page
Imaginative artwork of a lost ancient city	The Infinite Archive original artwork	Fantasy illustration, not a real place	Original
Imaginative artwork of an ancient gateway	The Infinite Archive original artwork	Fantasy illustration, not a real place	Original
Pages from a copy of the Rohonc Codex	Klaus.Schmeh	CC0	Source page
The Buddhist stupa mound above the excavated city of Mohenjo-daro, Sindh	Saqib Qayyum	CC BY-SA 3.0	Source page
The unreinforced Roman concrete dome of the Pantheon, Rome	Jean-Christophe BENOIST	CC BY 2.5	Source page
The Nebra sky disc, State Museum of Prehistory, Halle	Frank Vincentz	Public domain	Source page
Entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Spitsbergen	Einar Jørgen Haraldseid	CC BY-SA 2.0	Source page
Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire	garethwiscombe	CC BY 2.0	Source page
The Monkey geoglyph, Nazca Lines, Peru (aerial view)	Diego Delso	CC BY-SA 4.0	Source page
The fifteen restored moai of Ahu Tongariki, Rapa Nui	TravelingOtter	CC BY 2.0	Source page
Pit 1 of the Terracotta Army, Xi'an	xiquinhosilva	CC BY 2.0	Source page
The Great Pyramid of Khufu, Giza	Douwe C. van der Zee	CC BY-SA 4.0	Source page
The Lycurgus Cup lit from within, British Museum	Chappsnet	CC BY 4.0	Source page
Side A of the Phaistos Disc, Heraklion Archaeological Museum	Gleb Simonov	Public domain	Source page
Ink inscription in Linear A inside a Minoan cup (drawing by Arthur Evans)	Arthur Evans (1925)	Public domain	Source page
Ramesses III's naval battle against the Sea Peoples, Medinet Habu (epigraphic drawing)	Unknown artist	Public domain	Source page
Trees flattened by the Tunguska explosion, photographed by Leonid Kulik's 1927 expedition	Leonid Kulik expedition (1927)	Public domain	Source page
The original Big Ear printout with Jerry Ehman's "Wow!" annotation	Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO)	Public domain	Source page
Stone memorial at the Tisenjoch find site of Ötzi, 3,210 m	Tigerente	CC BY-SA 4.0	Source page
Angkor Wat at late afternoon, Siem Reap	Bjørn Christian Tørrissen	CC BY-SA 4.0	Source page
Isaiah chapter 53 in the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa), Israel Museum	Ardon Bar Hama (Israel Museum)	Public domain	Source page
The aircraft itself: Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 9M-MRO at Narita, 2009	Kentaro Iemoto from Tokyo, Japan	CC BY-SA 2.0	Source page
Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS, 30 November 2025	NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui; processing J. DePasquale (STScI)	Public domain	Source page
Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) in infrared and ultraviolet survey images	Infrared: IPAC/NASA Ultraviolet: STScI (NASA)	Public domain	Source page
Deep combined telescope image of ʻOumuamua (circled) among star trails	ESO/K. Meech et al.	CC BY 4.0	Source page