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
Sources and method, and the credits and licences they carry →
About & method
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.
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.
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". 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.