About this timeline

The World History Timeline puts 2,012 states, empires, colonies and peoples on one zoomable chart, from 3200 BCE to 2025. Each row is a place, each bar is a polity or people, and colour shows the language family its people spoke.

How to read it

Time runs left to right. The world is split into 12 regions, top to bottom: Central and Southern Africa, North and West Africa, Europe, Middle East, South Asia, Central and North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, Mesoamerica and Caribbean, South America and Oceania. Each region is divided into smaller areas, and a successor state sits on the same line as the state it replaced where it can, so you can follow a place through time. Grey bands with widely spaced names are peoples and cultures without a state. Hatched bars are colonies. Soft edges mean the start or end date is uncertain.

Colours

Colours follow language families in 8 broad groups: Afroasiatic, Indo-European, Northern Eurasia, South and East Asia, Africa, Americas, Oceania and Other.

• Egyptian Ancient Egyptian, Coptic
• Semitic Akkadian, Amorite, Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Ge'ez, Amharic, Tigrinya
• Arabic Arabic-speaking states
• Berber Numidian, Tuareg, Amazigh dynasties
• Cushitic Somali, Oromo, Beja, Afar
• Chadic Hausa
• Anatolian Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, Lycian
• Greek Mycenaean, Classical, Hellenistic, Byzantine, modern Greek
• Latin and Romance Latin, Italic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian
• Celtic Gaulish, Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Breton
• Germanic Gothic, Frankish, English, German, Dutch, Norse
• Baltic Lithuanian, Latvian, Old Prussian
• Slavic Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian
• Iranian Median, Persian, Parthian, Scythian, Sogdian, Pashto, Kurdish
• Indo-Aryan Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Sinhala
• Other Indo-European Armenian, Albanian, Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian, Tocharian, Dacian
• Uralic Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sami, Samoyed
• Turkic Gokturk, Uyghur, Seljuk, Ottoman, Kazakh, Tatar
• Mongolic Mongol, Khitan, Oirat
• Tungusic Jurchen, Manchu, Evenki
• Koreanic Korean kingdoms
• Japonic Japanese, Ryukyuan
• Kartvelian Georgian
• Chinese Sinitic languages
• Tibeto-Burman Tibetan, Burmese, Newar, Pyu, Tangut
• Dravidian Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam
• Kra-Dai Thai, Lao, Shan, Zhuang
• Austroasiatic Khmer, Mon, Vietnamese, Munda
• Austronesian Malay, Javanese, Cham, Tagalog, Malagasy, Polynesian, Maori
• Niger-Congo Mande, Yoruba, Akan, Fula, Wolof, Igbo (non-Bantu)
• Bantu Kongo, Shona, Zulu, Swahili, Luba, Ganda
• Nilo-Saharan Kanuri, Songhai, Nubian, Luo, Maasai
• Khoisan Khoekhoe, San
• Eskimo-Aleut Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, Thule, Dorset (Paleo-Eskimo)
• North American families Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, Muskogean, Na-Dene, Caddoan, Salishan
• Uto-Aztecan Nahuatl, Hopi, Comanche, Shoshone
• Mayan Classic and Postclassic Maya, K'iche'
• Oto-Manguean Zapotec, Mixtec, Otomi
• Mixe-Zoque Olmec (probable), Epi-Olmec
• Chibchan Muisca, Tairona, Kuna
• Arawakan Taino, Arawak
• Cariban Kalinago, Carib
• Tupian Tupi, Guarani
• Quechuan Inca, Quechua
• Aymaran Aymara, Tiwanaku (probable)
• Aboriginal Australian Pama-Nyungan and other Australian families
• Papuan Trans-New Guinea and other Papuan families
• Isolates and ancient Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hattic, Kassite, Etruscan, Basque, Ainu
• Unknown or undeciphered Indus, Minoan, Moche, Nazca, Chavin, Jomon and other unattested languages

Dates and sources

Dates follow conventional scholarly estimates from standard reference works and the consensus of current scholarship. Where historians disagree, the timeline uses the most widely cited date and marks the bar as approximate. Before written records, bars describe archaeological cultures and broad populations, and their names are the ones archaeologists use.

Inspiration

The layout is inspired by the printed World History Timeline poster by SenseForMaps, which stacks regions as bands and colours civilisations by language. This site is an independent interactive work built on its own dataset.

Use the data

The full dataset is open at /data/timeline.json, and a plain text version for language models is at /llms-full.txt. Please link to https://entireworldhistorytimeline.com when you use it.

Who made it

The World History Timeline is made by Voidmode. Follow @voidmode on X for new features and corrections, and send any date or detail you think is wrong there.

How to cite

Voidmode, World History Timeline, https://entireworldhistorytimeline.com, accessed 8 November 2026.