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Interactive guide

Historical timelines of world history

A guided tour through the timelines that shaped our world, from the first Bronze Age city-states to the twenty-first century. Every era, empire and turning point below is a live link into Chronos — an interactive 3D globe you can scrub across 4,500 years of history.

Open the interactive globeJump to 2000 BC

Six eras at a glance

Chronos organises world history into six broad eras. Jump into any of them on the globe, or dig into the turning points below.

Bronze Age

2500 BC – 1200 BC

The first bureaucratic states rise along the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River. Writing appears in cuneiform, hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms; bronze metallurgy, the wheel and the plough reshape economies. The Late Bronze Age system collapses around 1177 BC amid the Sea Peoples and drought.

Turning points

  1. 2560 BCGreat Pyramid of Giza built
  2. 2334 BCSargon founds the Akkadian Empire
  3. 1792 BCCode of Hammurabi in Babylon
  4. 1600 BCShang Dynasty rises in China
  5. 1200 BCBronze Age collapse
Open the Bronze Age on the globe

Classical Antiquity

1200 BC – 476 AD

Greek city-states invent democracy and philosophy; Rome grows from a village to a Mediterranean empire. Persia, Macedon, the Mauryan and Han empires reshape Eurasia. Christianity spreads; the Western Roman Empire falls in 476.

Turning points

  1. 776 BCFirst Olympiad
  2. 509 BCRoman Republic founded
  3. 336 BCAlexander the Great begins his conquests
  4. 221 BCQin unifies China
  5. 27 BCAugustus, first Roman emperor
  6. 395 ADRoman Empire split East / West
  7. 476 ADFall of the Western Roman Empire
Open the Classical Antiquity on the globe

Middle Ages

477 – 1450

Byzantium preserves the Roman legacy while Islamic caliphates spread from Iberia to Central Asia. Feudal kingdoms take shape in Europe; the Mongol Empire becomes the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Black Death remakes European society.

Turning points

  1. 622Hijra — start of the Islamic calendar
  2. 800Charlemagne crowned emperor
  3. 1054East–West Schism
  4. 1066Norman Conquest of England
  5. 1206Genghis Khan founds the Mongol Empire
  6. 1215Magna Carta signed
  7. 1347Black Death reaches Europe
Open the Middle Ages on the globe

Early Modern

1451 – 1750

Gunpowder empires — Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Ming — dominate Eurasia. Europeans cross oceans and build colonial networks. The printing press, Reformation and Scientific Revolution rewrite the intellectual map.

Turning points

  1. 1453Fall of Constantinople
  2. 1492Columbus reaches the Americas
  3. 1517Luther's 95 Theses
  4. 1687Newton's Principia Mathematica
Open the Early Modern on the globe

Colonial Era

1751 – 1913

The Industrial Revolution turns Britain, then Europe and North America, into workshops of the world. Revolutions redraw the Atlantic; empires stretch across Africa and Asia; nation-states consolidate in Europe and Latin America.

Turning points

  1. 1776United States declares independence
  2. 1789French Revolution
  3. 1859Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
  4. 1869Suez Canal opens
Open the Colonial Era on the globe

Contemporary Era

1914 – 2026

Two world wars remake the international order; decolonisation reshapes Africa and Asia; the Cold War freezes then thaws. Space travel, the digital revolution and globalisation define the last half-century.

Turning points

  1. 1914World War I begins
  2. 1945World War II ends
  3. 1969Moon landing
  4. 1989Fall of the Berlin Wall / birth of the Web
  5. 1991Dissolution of the Soviet Union
Open the Contemporary Era on the globe

Why an interactive timeline?

Static timelines flatten geography. A dynasty on paper is a shape on a map; a war is a border shifting a thousand kilometres. Chronos renders every year on a 3D Earth so you can watch empires rise, collide and vanish in the same place modern nations sit today.

Border data from cShapes 2.0 (Schvitz et al., 2022) and Natural Earth. See licenses for full attributions.