TimeChorusAxial centuries · c. 800–200 BCE

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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.

Sources and method

Where this atlas takes a coordinate, a date or an original text from somebody else's work, this is the account of it — the same four paragraphs the data's own basis fields carry, gathered where a reader can read them in one go.

Chinese coordinates. Most Chinese places in this atlas are located from Tan Qixiang's Zhongguo lishi dituji (谭其骧《中国历史地图集》), by way of the sibling project 经纬春秋 (chunqiu.timechorus.com), whose rows name the plate or the walled-city site each point rests on; those rows are credited under Credits and licences. Two places — Qufu and Luoyi (Luoyang) — carry a coordinate basis reading "CHGIS / Tan Qixiang". That is the name of a tier in this project's coordinate hierarchy rather than a record of which authority was consulted: both points came in with the project's first seed and neither has been checked against the China Historical Geographic Information System or against Tan Qixiang's plates by anyone working on this atlas. We say so here instead of choosing one. Nothing in this atlas has been imported from CHGIS, whose licence permits academic use of portions of the data with a mandatory citation and forbids redistributing its datasets or whole data layers; should either point prove to be CHGIS's, this credit applies: CHGIS Version 6. (c) Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Institute for Chinese Historical Geography at Fudan University, Dec 2016. Other Chinese places are located from Pleiades where so stated, or left unlocated — an unlocated place keeps its events in the chronicle and stays off the map.

Persian dates (the Achaemenid convention). Persian kings dated events by their own regnal years, and the Hebrew and Greek sources often say only "the seventh year of Artaxerxes". This atlas converts such dates with Parker and Dubberstein's Babylonian Chronology (1942), which fixes each reign from thousands of dated Babylonian business documents and chronicles. Years are counted as the Babylonian scribes counted them: from the month Nisanu in spring, with the months before a new king's first Nisanu counted as his "accession year". A regnal year therefore straddles two of our years, and ranges usually show both. Where a source does not say which of two kings of the same name it means — as Ezra and Nehemiah never say which Artaxerxes — the range holds both readings open. Greek dates by Athenian archons and Olympiads are converted by the standard rule and marked where they rest on a late writer such as Diodorus.

Indian coordinates. The gazetteer this project names for South Asia is Schwartzberg's Historical Atlas of South Asia, published online by the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library. Its plates of the Buddha's world confirm where the atlas places the cities the Pali texts name, but maps printed at that scale cannot give a precise point, so a handful of Indian places are placed at the modern archaeological site recorded by Wikidata, each checked against the atlas plate and marked with a certainty no higher than "medium" — and "low" for Nalanda, whose point is a later monastery at the same locality. Places neither source locates are left off the map; their events still appear in the chronicle.

Old Persian texts. Eleven quoted Old Persian transcriptions in this atlas (Behistun, Persepolis, Naqsh-i Rustam, the Suez stela) come from ARIo (Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online, Oracc), H. Heitmann-Gordon's lemmatised digitisation after R. Schmitt, Die altpersischen Inschriften der Achaimeniden: Editio minor (2009). Old Persian texts: ARIo (Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online, Oracc; H. Heitmann-Gordon after R. Schmitt 2009), CC BY-SA 3.0. Attribution owed: ARIo / MOCCI, LMU Munich; Heitmann-Gordon; Schmitt 2009 — as SRC_ARIO's own licence_note already records in full.

Credits and licences

Five of the works quoted or relied on here are published under licences that require attribution, current as of 2026-09-21. The credit is owed wherever the material appears, so it is given here in full. Where the line under a quotation on this site names a different work — the translator — the entry says so.

Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo), Oracc: lemmatised edition after Schmitt 2009 CC BY-SA 3.0

Supplies 11 Old Persian transliterations (Behistun, Persepolis, Naqsh-i Rustam, the Suez stela). On the site these lines are signed "Tolman, Ancient Persian Lexicon and the Texts of the Achaemenidan Inscriptions" — that is the translator; the original script above it is this edition's.

ARIo / MOCCI, LMU Munich; Heitmann-Gordon; Schmitt 2009.

Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) / Corpus Avesticum: digital edition and manuscript transcriptions of the Yasna CC BY 4.0

Supplies 2 Avestan stanzas of the Gathas (Yasna 30.2, 30.3). On the site these lines are signed "Mills, Sacred Books of the East vol. 31: The Zend-Avesta part III (Yasna)" — that is the translator; the original script above it is this edition's.

Corpus Avesticum - The Multimedia Yasna (MUYA), SOAS University of London, funded by the European Research Council; principal investigator Almut Hintze; the Yasna 28-30 edition and the TEI transcriptions by Benedikt Peschl.

Herodotus, tr. Godley (Loeb) CC BY-SA 4.0

Supplies seven quoted passages of Herodotus — the Greek original and the English translation of each: 1.74.2, 3.38.4, 3.80.6, 3.89.3, 5.37.2, 6.21.2 and 7.10ε. On the site these passages are signed "Herodotus, tr. Godley (Loeb)" — that is the printed translation underneath. What is quoted here is the Perseus Digital Library's digital edition of it: the Greek text perseus-grc2 and the English text perseus-eng2, whose own title page reads "Modernized by Perseus". Godley's Loeb of 1920–1925 is itself public domain; the Perseus edition quoted here is what this licence covers.

Herodotus, Histories, edited and translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1920–1925), in the digital edition of the Perseus Digital Library: Greek text tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-grc2, English text tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng2, the English modernised by Steven Ott and reviewed by John Marincola. Sponsor: Perseus Project, Tufts University; principal Gregory Crane; prepared under the supervision of Lisa Cerrato, William Merrill, Elli Mylonas and David Smith. Tufts University holds the overall copyright to the Perseus Digital Library. Published at github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, whose text carries the disclaimer of warranties. Used here as excerpts: the TEI markup and the Perseus editorial notes and gazetteer annotations interleaved with the text are removed, and the words are otherwise unchanged.

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places CC BY 3.0

Supplies the coordinate basis of 35 of this atlas's 56 places — every located place except the Indian and Chinese ones. Each of those rows carries its Pleiades id, so any point can be checked against the gazetteer record it was taken from.

Pleiades, pleiades.stoa.org — a joint project of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; senior editors Roger Bagnall and Richard Talbert, managing editor Tom Elliott, with the associate editors, reviewers and individual contributors named at pleiades.stoa.org/credits, who hold copyright in the content together with the participating institutions. Copyright © Ancient World Mapping Center and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by), creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, whose text carries the disclaimer of warranties. Individual place points are used, each recorded in this atlas against its Pleiades id and reachable at pleiades.stoa.org/places/<id>; no Pleiades dataset or extract is redistributed.

经纬春秋 (chunqiu) — a sourced database of the Chinese Spring and Autumn period CC BY 4.0

Supplies the coordinates of six Chinese places: the capitals of Zheng, Qi, Jin, Chu and Wu, and Kuaiji. On the site each of these six points is shown with the authority underneath it — Tan Qixiang's Zhongguo lishi dituji for five of them, a modern-site identification for Kuaiji — because that is what the coordinate rests on. chunqiu is where this atlas read them, and the licence is chunqiu's; each of the six coordinate bases names the chunqiu row, the file and the commit as well as the authority.

经纬春秋 · chunqiu.timechorus.com — a sourced database of Chunqiu-era (Chinese Spring and Autumn period, 8th–5th c. BCE) historical figures. Data from its data/csv tables, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; its code is separately licensed. Six place points were taken, row by row with each source row's own identifier, from data/csv/places.csv at commit 6beb833294fa535b874e3d640fa80fa7101cfce1, read on 2026-09-20. Changes made: the coordinate values and their certainty grades are carried over unchanged; the basis text is restated in English and the authority underneath each point named. What chunqiu licenses is its own editorial work — its collation, chronology, coordinate determination and layered annotation — not the classical texts underneath it, which are in the public domain.

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Code is shared under the MIT licence; data under CC BY 4.0. If you use the data, please credit "TimeChorus · timechorus.com". The works this atlas quotes and locates from carry their own terms — see Credits and licences above.

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Corrections and disagreements are welcome — write to xkxuqian@outlook.com and include a citation.