As a former history teacher, I’ve seen all kinds of timelines. This one is interesting in that the two interactive factors are time (of course) and geography. When you examine the Roman Empire, it starts to make sense. From Matthew Hurst’s Data Mining blog,
This visualization of world his to ry, with time and location as the major axes, is one of the simplest but best I’ve seen. By ren der ing empires in space and time, the relation ships between some of the major social and cultur al forces to shape the modern world are made clear and intuitive. With every his to ry book, or his tor i cal novel I read, I ask myself – why don’t they pro vide this map?
Graphic can be order from: http://goo.gl/MpOj4
Blog Entry: http://goo.gl/pWczG