Lives · choose one to follow
Click a region on the map to see the people recorded there. Region shading is indicative, not a claim about borders.
Try a side-by-side:
Timeline
Map of a life
0 events without a place
Region shading and coastlines are drawn to orient the reader, not to assert borders.
Each point's coordinates carry their own basis and a certainty grade; open the place panel to see both. Points without a defensible basis are not placed on the map at all.
"Related" is applied strictly: where no source states that the person was at the place, the point is marked related and left out of the path. That means the sources do not say they were there — not that the sources say they were absent.
Faint circles are other places in the corpus. Click any point for its name, modern location and connected events.
Two lives side by side
Two paths on one map
Long dashes and round points = first person (the one whose page you came from); dotted line and square points = second person; a ring marks a point of contact. Paths connect only places where a source puts the person.
Relation graph
Chronicle
Library
About
Start here
TimeChorus covers roughly 800 to 200 BCE — the stretch in which a surprising number of the systems people still argue about were written down for the first time, in several places at once and largely out of contact.
You can enter in three ways: pick a person and follow their life across the timeline and the map; open the Chronicle, which lays every event out by year regardless of who it belongs to; or browse the Library of works and sources.
How to read it: every date is a range, never a single year pretending to precision it does not have, and every range carries the basis it rests on. Coloured tags on each event mark reliability — high is solid enough to build on, medium wants checking, low is a lead and no more. On the map, a filled point is somewhere a source puts the person; an open point is a place connected to them where no source says they were present.
If something looks wrong, please say so through the feedback link at the top. A specific correction with a citation is worth more than any amount of sharing.
What this is
An atlas of the axial centuries across Eurasia — China, Greece, India, Israel and Persia — holding people, places, works, quoted passages and the ideas those passages carry, on one timeline and one map.
Every row carries its source. The rules are short and they are enforced by a script that runs before anything is merged: no source, no row; no text, no idea; no basis, no coordinate; no licence, no verbatim quote.
How the data is made
Dates are ranges. Every event, life and composition window is stored as a range with a stated basis. A date known to the year is a range whose ends happen to coincide — it is never narrowed just to make a display look tidier.
Reliability is graded high, medium or low, and a claim of high reliability attached to a wide date range is rejected as self-contradictory rather than quietly published.
Historicity is separate from reliability. A person is marked attested, probable, traditional, legendary or anonymous. Marking someone traditional is not a verdict against them; it records what the surviving evidence can carry.
Quotations respect their licences. A translation is quoted verbatim only where the source it comes from permits it; where it does not, the passage is summarised in our own words and labelled as such.
Review status is honest. A row counts as reviewed only when a person has read the cited passage at its stated locator. Anything less stays a draft, and the site says so.
The base map is indicative: region shading orients the reader and is not a claim about borders.
Version and feedback
Preview build.
Code is shared under the MIT licence; data under CC BY 4.0. If you use the data, please credit "TimeChorus · timechorus.com".
If you would like to support this work, you can .
Corrections and disagreements are welcome through GitHub Issues; please include a citation. The data and the code are both in the open repository.