Timeline History

Sources & Attribution

This site is built almost entirely from other people's work. This page records whose, and under what terms.

Event data — Wikidata

All 167,955 events come from Wikidata: the event titles, the one-line descriptions, the coordinates, and the dates for all but 4,577 of them (see below). Wikidata content is released under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which places it in the public domain and imposes no attribution requirement.

We credit it anyway. A public-domain dedication removes the obligation, not the debt: this site would not exist without the people who entered those statements, and readers deserve to know where the claims come from and where to check them.

Dates read from Wikipedia infoboxes

4,577 events carry a date that Wikidata does not have. These are places Wikidata knows the location of but records no date for at all — no date of founding, no start time, no inception. Mohenjo-daro is the type case: forty properties, precise coordinates, and nothing at all about when it was built. For antiquity that is closer to the norm than the exception, and it is why so many years before 1000 BC were empty here.

For those events the date, and only the date, was read from the built, founded, established or completed parameter of the English Wikipedia infobox. The title and the description you read are still Wikidata's own. A date is a fact rather than a form of words, so no expression is being copied — but it is a different provenance from everything else on this page, and you are entitled to know which claims have it.

These dates are parsed out of text that people typed by hand, in inconsistent formats, so they are held to a lower confidence than Wikidata's structured ones. Where the source gives a range or says “about”, the site shows a decade, century or millennium rather than a year, and never a precision the source did not offer.

Wikipedia

Each event links to its English Wikipedia article where one exists, and to its Wikidata item otherwise. No Wikipedia article text is reproduced on this site. Wikipedia is used only as a link destination and as a key for matching items; the descriptions you see are Wikidata's own, not extracts from articles. Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 4.0 licence therefore does not attach to anything published here.

Map geometry — Natural Earth

Country outlines come from world-atlas, a TopoJSON build of Natural Earth. Natural Earth is in the public domain.

Note that the map shows present-day borders at every point on the timeline. Drawing historically accurate borders for 5,000 years is a far harder problem than this site solves, so the outlines are a backdrop for placing events, not a claim about who governed what.

Territories whose sovereignty is contested are hatched, using Natural Earth's disputed areas dataset rather than the country outlines — the country file folds Kashmir, Crimea and the Golan Heights into whichever neighbour it picked, and marking only the handful it happens to separate out would be an editorial position rather than a description. Around half the hatched areas are too small to see at world scale — Gibraltar, the Spratlys and Rockall are disputed precisely because they are tiny — so the layer carries all 79 but shows rather fewer. Hovering a hatched area gives Natural Earth's own wording, such as “Admin. by India; Claimed by Pakistan”. Who administers a territory and who claims it are both checkable facts; nothing there is worded by us.

Software

Corrections

Because the data is Wikidata's, factual corrections are best made at the source: edit the item on Wikidata and the correction reaches every project that uses it, not just this one. Each event page links directly to the item it came from.