All Prehistory and the Ancient World

Events from the deepest span this atlas records, before the classical world's own city-states and empires took the shape historians usually mean by that word: the invention of writing, the shift from foraging to farming, the collapse of the interlinked Bronze Age palace states, and a millennia-long African migration whose beginnings reach back into this same span even though its later phases run on for centuries afterward. Belongs here: an event whose primary dating sits before roughly 800 BCE, or a foundational, civilization-shaping process usually treated as belonging to this earliest period even where its own span is long and disputed. Does not belong here: a specific city-state or empire's political history once written record and dateable events become the ordinary case, grouped under The Classical World.