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