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Six ages of the world

The canvas has no chapters, and neither does history. These six bands are the ones the timeline paints on its minimap — a place to put the cursor down, each with everything that falls inside it. Between them they cover 9000 BCE to 2026 CE, and 1,183 dated moments.

  1. 9000 BCE – 3000 BCE

    Prehistory, 9000–3000 BCE

    Six millennia, and almost no bars.

    251 records 23 moments

    The canvas begins here because this is where the atlas begins — and for most of these six thousand years it has almost nothing to draw. What survives is physical: the earliest enclosures, rock art and settlement sites, standing open-ended because nobody knows when they stopped being used. The emptiness is not a gap in this timeline. It is the shape of the record.

  2. 3000 BCE – 1200 BCE

    The Bronze Age, 3000–1200 BCE

    The first states worth drawing a border around.

    384 records 58 moments

    River valleys, the first cities, and the first polities the atlas can place: Egypt, Sumer and Akkad, the Indus, Shang China, Minoan and Mycenaean Greece. Their bars are attestation windows a century wide, because that is the resolution the historical border snapshots have. Landmarks here are the ones still standing.

  3. 1200 BCE – 500 CE

    Antiquity, 1200 BCE – 500 CE

    Rome and Han China, finally in the same view.

    779 records 236 moments

    The band where the timeline starts doing the thing a map cannot: putting the Roman Republic, the Achaemenids, Maurya India and Han China side by side and letting you read across them. Conflicts here carry real dates and belligerents, so the war lane fills in while the polity lanes are still drawn in century steps.

  4. 500 CE – 1500 CE

    The Middle Ages, 500–1500 CE

    A thousand years, and the busiest stretch of the canvas.

    2,410 records 297 moments

    Successor kingdoms, caliphates, steppe empires, the Mali and Songhai of West Africa, Song and Ming China, the Khmer and Srivijaya. This is the widest part of the atlas, so it is the densest part of the timeline: lanes stack two rows deep and the quota per record kind is doing real work to keep landmarks and figures visible between the empires.

  5. 1500 CE – 1800 CE

    The early modern world, 1500–1800

    Three centuries in which the map stops being regional.

    1,632 records 182 moments

    Oceans crossed, continents claimed, and the first conflicts whose bars run across more than one region lane at once. Trade routes are at their densest here, and the figures lane starts carrying people whose dates are known to the year rather than to the century.

  6. 1800 CE – 2026 CE

    The modern era, 1800–2026

    Two centuries that need most of the zoom range.

    1,809 records 384 moments

    Industrialisation, the world wars, decolonisation and the states that came out of them. At the default zoom this band is a sliver; zoom in and it holds more dated events than the four thousand years before it, which is exactly the distortion a timeline is for showing.