Tag Archives: History

A brief timeline of History

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I was fascinated by this blog post about inculcating an interest in Geography and History by allowing children to create their own historical timelines and maps, giving them a good overview.   My kid is* already a History buff, with regular visits to the British Museum and a poster from the Pompeii exhibit on her door, so this idea was quite appealing.  Her bedroom has a 2m long wall which is currently free of posters, which seemed like a perfect spot.

But how to arrange this?  I wanted to represent the whole period from the Big Bang up to the present day, and clearly a linear representation would end up with human history the width of a single hair.  Maths is not my strong point, but after discussions with some friends, and plugging some formulas into Excel, I came up with the following equation.

Timeline equation

Explanation:

  • Timeline of length l
  • Start year of s (using negative numbers for years Before Common Era (or BC as we used to call it)
  • End year of e
  • Target year of t, i.e. the year you want to mark off on the line

This gives a position p for the distance from the end (typically the right) for the target year.  This gives a nice effect where dates towards the end year are more spaced out, but going back to the beginning of time gets more compressed. 

After experimenting I went with the root of the log as this shifted the emphasis more to the left, giving more space to record events in human history, especially recent history.  I can then, with millimetre precision over a 2.3m span, plot significant years as my daughter discovers a historical period.  

And here it is in a spreadsheet:
Clips from a spreadsheet showing the timeline calculation.You can see where I’ve put the starting date as -13.5bn years, and 2022 as the end point.  It’s quite simple to tweak this for any span of years, or for any size wall just by plugging in your numbers.

If you want to focus on the middle of a period, (e.g. Shakespeare’s productive period within the context of his life), just do two lines, one from the start of your timeline to the midpoint (position is from the right, as usual), and then the reverse.

Example

Here’s a quick example based on a 25cm line. You can see the time is heavily compressed towards the left, with the Big Bang, appearance of life on Earth, K-T extinction event and modern humans.

Hopefully this makes sense (and is of use!), but feel free to ask or comment below.

*Written 7 years ago and never finalised!

Of Brains and Men

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A short one from me, for once!  But I needed to get this out of my head, either for general discussion with you clever people, or later research / procrastination (delete as appropriate).

Watching Game of Thrones last night it struck me how many stories we keep track of, whether it be long form TV drama, soaps, movie franchises, comics, novels or games.  I’m in the middle of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, and will no doubt pick up the latest from George RR Martin whenever he finishes it.  Star Wars is 1/3 the way through a new trilogy, itself part of a wider set of stories in a universe where there are plenty of tales to tell.  I’m sure many of you are in a similar situation, whatever genre you’re into or medium you prefer.  You may also be a student of history, and have a deep understanding of the people and stories of a particular time.

Now for each of these fictional or historical universes, we understand those characters, their motivations and relationships, the rules that govern their worlds that don’t necessarily apply in ours.  They’re stored in our brains and we switch back into them each time we pick up a book or switch on the TV.

A certain amount of our brain’s capacity relates to these social rules and relationships.  Certainly, we see from Anthropology  that there seems to be a correlation here: Dunbar’s Number suggests that the average size of a social group for different species of primate relates to the volume of their neocortex.

So here’s my hypothesis: that as language evolved, and we recounted stories of our exploits, tales of our ancestors, our brain capacity grew, even if we lived in small groups.  Our stories became more fanciful, we invented fiction.  And now we see a huge proportion of our lives are based around these other worlds and relationships that are not our own.

This prompts a number of questions:

  • As a species are we continuing to expand our neocortex because of the diverse and complex stories we consume?
  • As individuals do we sacrifice real-world relationships for fictional ones, or does this help us expand our capacity?
  • Does the exposure to more points of view and a different set of rules help us to empathise  with others and adapt to situations outside our usual experience?

 

The lies of the land

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In a previous post I attempted to trace some of the Roman roads around Ilkley using the definitive source by Ivan D. Margary. Whilst the catalogue is exhaustive, there were lots of speculative points in the route where the description was lacking, or there was just not enough archaeological evidence to say where the route went.  In other areas, there are doubts about whether certain roads were planned and built by the Romans, or merely laid over existing Celtic pathways.

I was still thinking about this when I returned to the library, and was very pleased to find John Poulter’s “The Planning of Roman Road and Walls in Northern Britain“, and Charlotte Higgins’ “Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain“.  Higgin’s book appears to be more of a travelogue, walking the pathways, and describing the landscape and subsequent history around the route.  I will write more of that when I’ve finished Poulter’s book.

Poulter is a retired engineer and archaeologist, and takes a systems engineering approach to tracing the road layout.  He notes that often there is a very accurate long distance alignment setting out from point A in the direction of point B, which then diverts off for landmarks and other sites.  His theory was that adjustments to the route would come at certain points because the planners climbed to the top of a hill, then spotted a new landmark.  Or river crossing points.  When you start to look at this on the ground you can see that roads were often planned long before they were built, were planned and constructed at different times and from different directions, hence we get odd deviations at times.

He’s used this principle to good effect, using the long distance planning lines to identify promising archeological sites, as well as explaining why some previous claims for Roman roads don’t always stand up to scrutiny.