One timeline of everything that was written down

Historyinline puts recorded history on a single zoomable line, from the first cuneiform tablets to today. Lanes are places; zoom in and regions split into states, then cities. Colour is the sphere of life an entry belongs to, size is how much it mattered, and every entry links to the people, works and events around it.

How to read it

• Scroll or pinch to zoom time. Drag to move through time and across places. Double-click to zoom into a spot.
• Lanes are geography. Far out you see seven regions. Closer, each region splits into states and civilisations; closer still, into cities. The grey bands name the polity that held each place at the time.
• Density follows zoom. Far out, only landmark entries appear; the counts in the margin say how many more are waiting. Choose More detail to lift the floor.
• Click any entry to read a summary and see its relations drawn across the timeline. Relations lead to entries; entries lead to the works themselves on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Arts & Culture and Project Gutenberg.
• Filter by region, domain and kind from the top bar, or click a domain in the legend. Every view is a link you can share.

Sources

Summaries are taken from the English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and structured facts — dates, places, relations, names in their own language — from Wikidata (CC0). Images come from Wikimedia Commons.

An entry is here if Wikidata knows when it happened, where, and which English Wikipedia article describes it, and if enough Wikipedias carry that article to suggest it mattered. What that raw material becomes — which lane a record belongs to, which sphere of life, how much weight it carries at each zoom — is editorial, and the rules are kept in the open on GitHub, where corrections are welcome.