Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/625

 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

O conclude this Outline, we give here a Table of Leading Events from the year 800 B.C. to 1920 A.D. With it we give five time diagrams covering the period from 1000 B.C. onward, which present the trend of events in a graphic form.

It is well that the reader should keep in mind an idea of the true proportions of historical to geological time. The scale of these five diagrams is such that by it the time diagram on page 196, vol. i, would be about 8½ times as long, that is to say about 4 feet; that on page 97, showing the length of time since the first true men, about 55 feet long; that on page 60, showing the interval since the Eoliths, 555 feet; and that on page 14, representing the whole of geological time, would be somewhere between 12 and, at the longest and most probable estimate, 260 miles! Let the reader therefore take one of these chronological tables we give, and imagine it extended upon a long strip of paper to a distance of 55 feet. He would have to get up and walk about that distance to note the date of the painting of the Altamira caves, and he would have to go ten times that distance by the side of the same narrow strip to reach the earlier Neanderthalers. A mile or so from home, but probably much further away, the strip might be recording the last of the dinosaurs. And this on a scale which represents the time from Columbus to ourselves by three inches of space!

Chronology only begins to be precise enough to specify the exact year of any event after the establishment of the eras of the First Olympiad and the building of Rome.

About the year 1000 B.C. the Aryan peoples were establishing themselves in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and the Balkans, and they were established in North India, Cnossos was already destroyed and the spacious times of Egypt, of Thothmes III, Amenophis III, and Rameses II were three or four centuries away. Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynasty were ruling in the Nile Valley. 605