An Astrolabe of Civilizations · 3100 BCE to 2000 CE
Five thousand years wound into a single turning sky. The deep past sits at the heart of it; the bright rim is this morning.
“All this, and we still met.”
Every arc of light was a people who farmed, argued, buried their dead, and gave names to the stars overhead. Here is how to find them. It is a clock, read from the inside out.
Click any people and five doors open: Wikipedia, an atlas set to their century, and three reviewed sources, one an academic library. Dates are the tidy approximations of scholars, and every one is argued over. These 331 are a chosen few, not a census of humankind.
More about this project, and where the dates come from ↓