Period· The columns of time
Antiquity
801 BCE → 500
The stretch of the past where reading begins to rival digging. Between the eighth century before our era and the fifth after it, several states kept records dense enough that we can follow their harvests, their lawsuits and their quarrels.
What the evidence shows
These 1,300 years are the ones in which Mediterranean, Persian, Indian and Chinese administrations produced and preserved documents in quantity. What separates the band from the one before it is therefore documentary rather than historical: not that more happened, but that more of it was written down by people whose job was to write it down, and kept by institutions with an interest in keeping it. It is here that a timeline can start naming individuals, and here that it must start asking who kept the record, and why.
Bounds and conventions
A European frame, and an old one. Its closing date, the fall of the western Roman Empire, meant nothing in China, in Mesoamerica or across most of Africa, where the same centuries are cut differently, and for other reasons. The name is kept for the only reason that still holds: readers know it. What it dates is one region's calendar, not the world's.
800 BCE to 500 CE. A Mediterranean and south-west Asian periodisation.