no warranty · an illustration · not a teaching resource
This is not an educational resource and not something to cite. It is an illustration — a way to put nine world regions side by side and see what was happening at the same time. It claims nothing more.
No warranty. The data is simplified and assembled from widely available surveys. Errors are likely and they are mine.
Dates disagree. The timeline holds a single chronology across the whole world (conventional Middle Chronology for Egypt), so individual years may differ from other sources including Wikipedia — by a century or more in the earlier Bronze Age. That is a choice, not a mistake: without it the regions could not be compared at all.
Start and end dates are imposed. When a polity begins and ends is always a decision rather than a fact. Transitional periods overlap and collapse is usually slow.
Population figures are order-of-magnitude estimates that can be off by a factor of two. Read them as a size class, not a number.
People are anchored to the start of a reign or period of activity, not to birth. For earlier periods the names and dates themselves are disputed.
The map is not a map. The blobs show schematic reach, not borders. The base is drawn in the Equal Earth projection, which keeps area proportions true — so Africa and South America are not shrunk against the north the way Mercator shrinks them. The price is stretched shapes near the poles and curved meridians.
Wikipedia links point to hand-picked articles. I do not vouch for their content.
For anything that matters — schoolwork, teaching, publication — use scholarly literature. This page is a signpost and a picture, not a source.
Luko Karavan · lukokaravan.com · global ancient timeline, 2026 edition
