The alphabet spreads across the Mediterranean
Phoenician traders simplified writing into a small set of consonant signs; Greeks later added vowels, producing the ancestor of most scripts used today.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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Spatial timeline — scroll horizontally
The Library of Alexandria
The Ptolemies built an institution with one aim: collect every scroll in the known world, copy it, and fund scholars to work beside it.
Papermaking crosses into the Islamic world
After the Battle of Talas, papermaking — traditionally via captured Chinese craftsmen, more likely by gradual diffusion — reached Samarkand, then Baghdad, where mills soon supplied an empire's bureaucracy.
Baghdad's House of Wisdom drives a translation century
Under the Abbasids, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic and pushed the sciences far beyond their sources.
Timbuktu's Sankore circle copies and writes
At Saharan trade crossroads, Timbuktu's mosques and the Sankore circle sustained a book trade and scholarship in law, astronomy and medicine; hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive.
Gutenberg's movable-type press
Combining metal movable type, oil-based ink and a screw press, Gutenberg printed the 42-line Bible; within decades presses spread across Europe.
Bacon programs the scientific project
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum proposed knowledge as a collective, cumulative enterprise: observation, experiment, tables of instances, organized institutions.
The World Wide Web opens to everyone
Tim Berners-Lee's CERN project — URLs, HTTP, HTML — was released royalty-free; by 1993 Mosaic made it visual, and the web took over the internet.
Attention, transformers, and the language models
Google's 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) defined the transformer; GPT-3 (2020) showed scale worked; ChatGPT (2022) put a conversational model in front of a hundred million people in two months.
Chronology
The alphabet spreads across the Mediterranean
Phoenician traders simplified writing into a small set of consonant signs; Greeks later added vowels, producing the ancestor of most scripts used today.
The Library of Alexandria
The Ptolemies built an institution with one aim: collect every scroll in the known world, copy it, and fund scholars to work beside it.
Papermaking crosses into the Islamic world
After the Battle of Talas, papermaking — traditionally via captured Chinese craftsmen, more likely by gradual diffusion — reached Samarkand, then Baghdad, where mills soon supplied an empire's bureaucracy.
Baghdad's House of Wisdom drives a translation century
Under the Abbasids, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic and pushed the sciences far beyond their sources.
Timbuktu's Sankore circle copies and writes
At Saharan trade crossroads, Timbuktu's mosques and the Sankore circle sustained a book trade and scholarship in law, astronomy and medicine; hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive.
Gutenberg's movable-type press
Combining metal movable type, oil-based ink and a screw press, Gutenberg printed the 42-line Bible; within decades presses spread across Europe.
Bacon programs the scientific project
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum proposed knowledge as a collective, cumulative enterprise: observation, experiment, tables of instances, organized institutions.
The World Wide Web opens to everyone
Tim Berners-Lee's CERN project — URLs, HTTP, HTML — was released royalty-free; by 1993 Mosaic made it visual, and the web took over the internet.
Attention, transformers, and the language models
Google's 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) defined the transformer; GPT-3 (2020) showed scale worked; ChatGPT (2022) put a conversational model in front of a hundred million people in two months.