The 5-foot-long chart below has an ambitious goal: To record 4,000 years of history in a single graphic.
(Click here for a higher-res version that you can zoom in on.)
The width ostensibly shows the rise and fall of these groupings, though that metric seems far from fair -- China is given just a sliver of the chart at the right-hand side, and India even less. Even so, the chart is an interesting historical artifact, showing how Europeans and Americans conceived the history of the world in the early 20th Century.
Republished courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
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