Over the past few weeks, I’ve been delving into the literature of Ancient Greece with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as Herodotus’ Histories, and I quickly realised how bewildering it can be to make sense of the wide array of Greek Gods, the geography of that era and how Homer and Herodotus fit within the context of Greek writers and innovators.
N.B. Greek is a term we’ve inherited from the Romans; the people of Ancient Greece referred to themselves as Hellenes from Hellas, which geographically was a much bigger and more diverse place than the Greece we know today.
To help me make sense of it all, I found a couple of online visualisation tools and created two timelines, one of key historical Greek figures (using HSTRY) and another of key dates and births of key figures (using myHistro). Have a look at the links below:
It’s fair to say that the HSTRY timeline is more visually appealing, but the myHistro timeline is a more powerful visualisation tool, combining Google maps with an interactive timeline (but sadly the ability to upload images is no longer supported).
I also created this chart in Plotly:
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