Time Line for Humanities

Before the
Common Era (BCE) =

Before Christ
(BC)

c. BC 15,000
– 10,000

Old Stone Age

Cave art at
Lascaux and Altamira

c. BC 7000

Native Americans
may have migrated

from northern Asia

c. BC 5,000

New Stone Age

Pottery invented.

First large-scale architecture

Bronze tools

c. BC 3500 –
2350

Sumerian Period in
Mesopotamia.

Reign of Gilgamesh
(2700)

Pictographic writing.

Construction of first ziggurats.

Cult of Mother Goddess

c. BC 3200

Egyptian
civilization established

Hieroglyphic writing (BC 3100)

Great Sphinx & Gaza Pyramids (2650-2514)

c. BC 2000

c. BC
1900-1600

Babylonian period

Epic of Gilgamesh (earliest version)

Law Code of Hammurabi ( BC 1792-1750)

c. BC 1500

Hinduism develops
in India with polytheism

The Vedas

The Upanishads

c. 1400-1300

Egypt

Amenhotep IV
establishes monotheism

Tutankhamen
reestablishes polytheism

c. BC 1300-1200

Moses leads exodus
from Egypt

Egypt Architecture at Luxur, Karnak, Abu Simbel (1298-1232)

BC 1200-100

Judaism develops
monotheism in Middle East

Old Testament

c. BC 1200

Presumed period of
Trojan War

c. BC 1027–256

Golden age of
Chinese philosophy

Lao-tzu, 6th cent.

Confucius
(557-479)

c. BC 900-700

Age of Homer and
Greek mythology

Large free-standing sculpture evolves (c. 650)

The Odyssey

The Iliad

600-500

Buddhism in India

Siddhartha Gautama
(564-483)

Festivals of
Dionysus in Athens

Sappho (early 6th
century)

Aeschylus
(525-456)

Pythagoras
discovers numerical relationships of music (c. 550)

Heraclitus teaches
theory of “impermanence.”

500-400

Golden Age of
Athens

Red-figure style
of vase painting

Sophocles
(496-406)

Euripides
(485-406)

Socrates (469-399)

Plato (c. 427-347)

Herodotus (440) History of the Persian Wars

400-300

Alexander the Great

Aristotle (c.
384-322)

Common Era
(C.E.)

Or Anno
Domini*

(A.D. )  *Latin for
“Year of the Lord”

01-100 AD

Jesus Christ. (c. 0-33)

Christianity develops in Palestine, expands as far as Rome

New Testament

c. 400 AD

Fall of Rome to
the Goths

St. Augustine
(354-430)

500-700 AD

Mohammed (571-632)

Islam develops in
Middle East

Qur’an

700-800 AD

Moors occupy Spain

The Alhambra

900-1000 AD

Tale of
Genji, Japan, earliest

known novel

Lady Marasaki
Shikibu (978-

1031)

1000-1100 AD

Norman conquest of England in 1066

Bayeux Tapestry

Al-Ghazzali, Musim
(1058-1111)

1100-1200 AD

Japanese feudal
period, rise of Samurai

Angkor Wat,
Cambodia

Moses Maimonides
(1135-1244)

1200-1300 AD

High Middle Ages
in Western Europe

Notre Dame
Cathedral

St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)

Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321)

1300-1400 AD

Renaissance begins to emerge

Geoffrey Chaucer
(1340-1400)

1400-1500 AD

High Renaissance
starts in Italy

Leonardo da Vinci
(1451-1519)

Michelangelo
(1475-1564)

Raphael
(1483-1520)

1492, Columbus

1500-1600 AD

1517, Martin
Luther’s reform proposals in Germany

Sophonisba
Anguisola (c. 1532-

1626)

1519, conquest of
Mexico by Cortes 1533-1603

Cervantes
(1547-1616)

Reign of Elizabeth
I, England

William
Shakespeare (1564-1616)

1600-1700 AD

Blue Mosque,
Istanbul

Artemisia
Gentileschi (1597-1651)

Dutch masters

Rembrandt
(1606-1669)

1620, Pilgrim
landing in New World

1640, Puritans
close London theaters

John Milton
(1608-1674)

1643-1715, Reign
of Louis XIV, France

1650-1725, Baroque
period,

Moliere
(1622-1673)

Taj Mahal, India
(1630-1648)

Jean Racine
(1639-1699)

Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727)

J.S. Bach
(1685-1750)

1700-1800 AD

Age of scientific
enlightenment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)

1775, American
Revolution

1776, Declaration
of Independence

Adam Smith
(1723-1790)

Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)

1789, French
Revolution

1800-1900 AD

1804, Napoleon
crowns himself Emperor

1827, First known
photograph taken

Guiseppe Verdi
(1813-1901)

1837-1901, Reign
of Queen Victoria, England

1845, Annexation
of Texas from Mexico

1846, Mexican War

1859, Darwin’s Origin of
Species

1861-1865,
American Civil War

1865, Assassination
of Lincoln

1878, Edison
invents phonograph

1898,
Spanish-American War.

Note: Spain renounced all claim to
Cuba and ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the U.S., marking
the U.S.’s emergence as a world power.

Karl Marx
(1818-1883)

Henrik Ibsen
(1821-1906)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Claude Monet
(1840-1926)

* Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

German philosopher
who wrote The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music and Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. He identified two responses to live events: Apollonian
responses were dominated by reason and analysis and control. Dionysian
responses were dominated by emotion and intuition and freedom. I like this
comparison and I feel I view life from a more Apollonian viewpoint. I would
like to do more reading on FN’s critique of secularism (“God is
dead” theology] and his notion of the “Superman.”

Mary Cassatt
(1845-1926)

Vincent van Gogh
(1853-1890)

Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)

Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)

Scott Joplin
(1868-1917)

1900-2000 AD

1903, First
airplane flight by Wright brothers

Mahatma Gandhi,
India (1869-1948)

1905,Theory of
Relativity

Albert Einstein
(1879-1955)

1913, 69th
Regiment Armory Show

1913, Rite of
Spring opening night riot

1914-1918, World
War I

1917, Russian
Revolution

1920, women get
the vote in U.S.

1920s, Jazz Age

1921, Harlem
Renaissance

1929, Stock Market
crash, Great

Depression

1937, Nationalist
rebels in Spain call on Nazis to bomb the town of Guernica during the Spanish
Civil War.

1941-1945, World
War II

1942, United
Nations formed

1945, USA drops
atomic bomb on Hiroshima , Japan

1948, UN
establishes state of Israel

1948,
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

1968,
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

1989, Berlin Wall
taken down

Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Georgia O’Keeffe
(1887-1986)

Martha Graham
(1894-1991)

F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

George Gershwin
(1898-1937)

Paul Robeson
(1898-1976)

Humphrey Bogart
(1899-1957)

Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)

Duke Ellington
(1899-1974)

John Steinbeck
(1902-1968)

Richard Rodgers
(1902-1979)

Orson Welles
(1915-1985)

Anne Frank
(1929-1945)

Martin Luther
King, Jr. (1929-

1968)

2001-

September 11,
2001, destruction of the

World Trade Center