Why history feels compressed
Ask most people to place Cleopatra on a timeline and they will put her closer to the pyramids than to us. She is not. She lived nearer to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid, and it is not close.
This is not ignorance. It is a documented effect with a name: telescoping, or the telescoping effect. The further back an event is, the more it collapses toward everything else back there. Recent time is stored with detail and structure, and distant time is stored as a single category called “long ago”. Two things three thousand years apart both land in it.
How long is a generation?
Roughly 25 years, counting from birth to the birth of a child, which is the figure used throughout this site. It is a convention rather than a constant, and it moves with time and place, but it is useful because it converts an abstract number into people.
Two thousand years is about eighty generations. Eighty people, standing in a line, each one holding their own parent’s hand. That is the whole distance between now and Rome. It is a much shorter line than the number suggests.
How to read a proportional timeline
The timelines here are drawn to scale, which is the point and also the difficulty. A human life is a sliver on a five-thousand-year axis. That sliver is not a rendering failure; it is the argument. Most historical timelines stretch the recent end because it has more events in it, and stretching it is exactly what produces the intuition this site exists to correct.