Chapter 12 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 11. The great timeline
All the landmarks of the book gathered in a single order, with the source of each, and the way to build your own timeline from them.
A page to copy out
Each chapter of this book has given its landmarks separately. This page gathers them in a single order, from oldest to most recent, with the period each one belongs to and the document that makes it possible to establish it. This is the page to photocopy, to copy onto a board, or to take up in order to build a timeline of your own.
The official history syllabus published in 2026 says what this tool is for, and its sentence covers exactly the three uses of this table: the timeline helps the pupil to visualise long time, to organise events in relation to one another and to memorise historical facts and periods by understanding how they follow on from one another.
One point about use before reading. This table does not try to be complete, and it could not be: a complete timeline of human history does not exist. It gathers the dated landmarks this book uses, and it adds none; a few facts cited in the chapters that carry no date of their own therefore do not appear in it. Each one is there because it has an open, free and verifiable source, whose address appears in the sources chapter, at the end of the volume.
| Date | The fact | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Around 400,000 BCE | The domestication of fire, earlier than the oldest known traces of our species | Prehistory | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| Around 300,000 BCE | The oldest traces of Homo sapiens, in present-day Morocco | Prehistory | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| Between 21,500 and 21,000 years before present, that is before 1950, or about 19,550 to 19,050 BCE | The occupations of the cave of Lascaux, according to the dating programme carried out between 2018 and 2021 | Prehistory | Ministère de la Culture |
| Around 10,000 to 9,000 BCE | The beginning of the Neolithic in the Near East | Prehistory | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| Around 4,000 BCE | The invention of the wheel | Prehistory | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| Second half of the fourth millennium BCE | BOUNDARY: the beginning of Antiquity with the birth of writing, which the next row dates | Periodisation boundary | French official history syllabus, 2026, and Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| Between 3,500 and 3,300 BCE | The invention of cuneiform writing, in Lower Mesopotamia, which gives the boundary above its substance | Antiquity | Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| 323 BCE | The end of the Greek sequence kept by the syllabus, at the conquests of Alexander the Great | Antiquity | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 395 | BOUNDARY: the division of the Roman Empire between East and West | Periodisation boundary | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 476 | BOUNDARY: the deposition of the last emperor of the West | Periodisation boundary | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 525 and 532 | The proposal and then the introduction of the Christian era, the starting point of the year count used today | Middle Ages | Institut de mécanique céleste, Observatoire de Paris |
| Eleventh to thirteenth century | The phase of the Middle Ages the syllabus keeps for studying daily life | Middle Ages | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 1453 | BOUNDARY: the taking of Constantinople, of which a contemporary account is preserved and digitised | Periodisation boundary | French official syllabus and Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| 1492 | BOUNDARY: the first voyage of Christopher Columbus; the same year, the oldest known terrestrial globe | Periodisation boundary | French official syllabus and Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| 1582 | The Gregorian reform of the calendar: ten days suppressed in October | Modern Times | Institut de mécanique céleste, Observatoire de Paris |
| 1752 | Great Britain applies the reform of the calendar | Modern Times | Institut de mécanique céleste, Observatoire de Paris |
| 26 August 1789 | BOUNDARY: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, still published among the law in force | Periodisation boundary | Légifrance, French public service for the dissemination of law |
| 1815 | BOUNDARY: the second date kept for the end of Modern Times | Periodisation boundary | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 1848 to 1852, then 1870 to 1914 | The settling in by stages of a republican regime in France | Contemporary Era | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 1900 | Secular year that is NOT a leap year, under the Gregorian rule | Contemporary Era | Institut de mécanique céleste, Observatoire de Paris |
| 1914 to 1918 | The First World War | Contemporary Era | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 1939 to 1945 | The Second World War | Contemporary Era | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| Since 1945 | A period the syllabus treats in one piece, for want of distance to divide it | Contemporary Era | French official history syllabus, 2026 |
| 2000 | Secular leap year, its number being a multiple of 400 | Contemporary Era | Institut de mécanique céleste, Observatoire de Paris |
Seven rows of this table carry the word BOUNDARY at the front, and yet they represent only FOUR boundaries: the one that opens Antiquity has a single date, the three others have two each, written on their own rows. These are the only rows that serve to separate two periods; all the others are ordinary landmarks, placed inside a period. The distinction is the one from the chapter on reading a timeline: every boundary is a landmark, but the reverse is false, and confusing the two amounts to believing that an era changed at every notable fact.
| Period | Approximate duration | Share of the total duration |
|---|---|---|
| Prehistory | At least 300,000 years, counted from the oldest traces of our species; the period begins earlier, with the first humans | More than 98 in 100 |
| Antiquity | About 3,800 years | A little more than 1 in 100 |
| The Middle Ages | About 1,000 years | About 3 in 1,000 |
| Modern Times | About 320 years | About 1 in 1,000 |
| The Contemporary Era | More than 200 years, and it keeps growing | Less than 1 in 1,000 |
How to read the second table without being discouraged
The figures in the third column are surprising, and they have to be taken for what they are: a measure of DURATION, not a measure of importance. The Middle Ages occupies about three thousandths of the time elapsed since our species appeared, and it nonetheless occupies a whole chapter of this book, as Prehistory does.
This imbalance is not an injustice, it is a consequence of the sources. Tens of thousands of documents are available for the Middle Ages and not one text for the hundreds of thousands of years before writing. A book follows what it can establish, and not what lasted the longest.
Knowing this changes the reading of every timeline met from now on. On a drawn timeline the first segment is always crushed, the end is always stretched, and this distortion is almost never signalled. A reader who has the second table in mind corrects for it unaided.
Building your own timeline from these tables
Six moves. They take up the procedure from the chapter on reading a timeline, applied to this particular table.
- Choose the question your timeline answers
"Where do the five periods fall" and "how was our calendar made" give two different timelines from the same table. Write the question at the top of the sheet, and keep only the rows that answer it. - Decide on the scale, or give it up
If you keep a constant scale, everything after the invention of writing will fit into a few millimetres. If you break it, write the break on the timeline. If you give it up, keep the format of the table and add a duration column. - Place the boundary rows first
There are seven of them in the table, for four boundaries of the convention. They are what structures the page: they create the five compartments into which everything else comes to be filed. Mark them differently from the other landmarks, with a colour, a thicker line or a written word. - Add the landmarks, period by period
Take them in the order of the table. At each addition, check that the landmark does fall in the period announced by the third column, or that it is a boundary row, which is placed at the hinge of two compartments. It is the fastest check and it catches inversions. - Write the source of each landmark
A timeline without sources is decoration. The fourth column of the table gives the institution; the sources chapter, at the end of the volume, gives the exact address. A simple institution name under each landmark is enough to make the timeline verifiable. - Read it again looking for the blanks
Look at the large gaps in your timeline and ask, for each of them, whether it corresponds to a lack of sources or to a lack of work. Write the answer in a corner of the page: that is what tells an honest timeline apart from one that looks complete.
Two timelines to build, and they do not have the same shape
The timeline of the periods
- It carries only the four boundaries of the convention and the names of the five periods.
- It fits on a single line, and it can be learnt by heart.
- It is used to place any date heard elsewhere.
- It is drawn as five compartments, with no scale, with the durations written inside each compartment.
- It is the one to put on the wall, because it does not go out of date.
The timeline of a subject
- It carries the landmarks of a single question: the calendar, writing, dating methods.
- It crosses several periods, and that is what makes it interesting.
- It is used to show that a change spreads out, instead of falling on a date.
- It is built as a table, with a duration column between each landmark.
- It is the one to redo often, because it changes with the subject studied.
The last word of this book
The table in this chapter contains twenty-four rows, of which seven are boundary rows. That is little for three hundred thousand years, and it is enough to get your bearings. A frame does not need to be dense: it needs to be correct, ordered, and to say where it comes from.
What this book has tried to pass on fits into three habits. Placing, that is knowing which period a date falls in and how far it is from the others. Doubting the filing system, that is remembering that the boundaries were set by somebody, afterwards, for a reason that is open to argument. And asking for the source, that is never accepting a date without knowing by what means it was established.
The third is the most important, and it is the only one that still serves once the book is closed. A date without a source is an ornament. A date with its source is verifiable knowledge, which the reader can go and check for themselves, and correct if need be. The sources chapter, which closes this volume, gives all the addresses needed to do so.