The Seven Ages of History

Prehistory has no fixed starting point and no single ending date. It closes wherever a society first leaves written records, which happened in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, in Egypt around 3100 BCE, and far later still in Mesoamerica.

The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age World opens with the first cities and writing and closes with the Bronze Age Collapse, a wave of destructions across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 to 1150 BCE whose causes are still argued over. Hammurabi and the Old Babylonian Empire belong here.

Classical Antiquity runs from the rise of the Greek city state to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, the traditional marker historians increasingly treat as a gradual transformation rather than a single collapse. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, dies near this era's midpoint.

The Post-Classical and Medieval Period stretches nearly a thousand years, from Rome's fall to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and includes both the Mongol Empire's brief unification of Eurasia and, arriving in its wake along the same trade routes, the Black Death.

The Early Modern Period is dated here from 1453, though many historians prefer 1492, Columbus's first Atlantic crossing. It closes with the French Revolution in 1789.

The Late Modern Period runs from revolutionary France to the end of the Second World War in 1945, a century and a half some historians split at 1914 instead, treating the two world wars as a single distinct crisis era.

The Contemporary Period is the only era with no settled end, because it has not ended. It runs from 1945, or from 1989 to 1991 by some historians' count, to the present day.