longsince

How far apart things really were

Everything so far

3 juxtapositions, on one timeline.

Cleopatra69 BCConstantinople330Johann Wolfgang von Goethe174969 BC1749

Playing an old one still counts. Your guess joins its crowd.

  1. Constantinople is closer to Arlington National Cemetery than to Çatalhöyük. Play
  2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Emmanuel Swedenborg overlapped by 23 years. Play
  3. Cleopatra is closer to Apollo 11 than to the Great Pyramid. Play

How to read this timeline

The axis runs from the oldest date on the site to the most recent, and it is drawn to scale. A gap twice as wide really is twice as many years. That is the whole point, and it is why the recent end looks so crowded: almost everything anyone can name happened in the last sliver of it, and the millennia before that hold a handful of marks each.

Each mark sits at the year of the subject you were asked to place, not at the year of the two it was placed between. So the timeline shows where the answers were, which is a different picture from where the questions were.

Once there are enough of them to touch, the drawing stops showing one mark per item and starts showing how many fall in each stretch of history. A row of overlapping dots tells you nothing; the shape of the coverage tells you which parts of the past this has actually been about.