The Big Map of Who Lived When Shows Which Cultural Figures Walked the Earth at the Same Time: From 1200 to Present

We could call the time in which we live the “Infor­ma­tion Age.” Or we could describe it more vivid­ly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Mar­tin Scors­ese and Steven Spiel­berg, Oprah Win­frey and Martha Stew­art, Bey­on­cé and Bob Dylan. What­ev­er you think of the work of any of these fig­ures in par­tic­u­lar, you can hard­ly deny the impact they’ve had on our cul­ture. Were we liv­ing a cen­tu­ry ago, we might have said the same of Hen­ry Ford and John D. Rock­e­feller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzger­ald (though he had­n’t quite pub­lished The Great Gats­by yet), Pablo Picas­so and Char­lie Chap­lin, Marie Curie and Sig­mund Freud.

Were we liv­ing in the year 1225, our lives would’ve over­lapped with those of Leonar­do Fibonac­ci, Fran­cis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grand­son Kublai Khan.

All this is laid out visu­al­ly in The Big Map of Who Lived When, cre­at­ed ear­li­er this year by a Red­dit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobs writes, the map reveals sur­pris­ing instances of con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous­ness, such as that cur­rent U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden “for about a year was alive at the same time as Niko­la Tes­la (1854–1943), the Ser­bian-Amer­i­can inven­tor who devel­oped the alter­nat­ing cur­rent (AC) sys­tem that is used for dis­trib­ut­ing elec­tric­i­ty.”

For “anoth­er, more recent (and more baf­fling) over­lap: The life of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coin­cid­ed ever so slight­ly with that of Eminem.” Going far­ther into the past, how many of us were ful­ly aware that “Christo­pher Colum­bus (1451–1506), Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1452–1519), and Mar­tin Luther (1483–1546) were con­tem­po­raries of each oth­er”? Or that “the lives of Oliv­er Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) synced almost per­fect­ly with each oth­er, despite the one being the dog­mat­i­cal­ly Puri­tan fig­ure­head of the Eng­lish Civ­il War, and the oth­er the father of mod­ern, ratio­nal­ist phi­los­o­phy by giv­ing doubt to a cen­tral role in the pur­suit of truth”?

The Big Map of Who Lived When uses a col­or-cod­ing sys­tem to divide the fig­ures whose lifes­pans it charts into eight cat­e­gories, includ­ing artists (Leonar­do da Vin­ci, Rube Gold­berg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Dar­win), “busi­ness & indus­try” (includ­ing famed pirates from Hen­ry Mor­gan to Black­beard), and “lead­ers & bad­dies” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It all reminds us that we’d give any­thing for a chance to meet some of them, or to stay out of the path of oth­ers. Of course, the indi­vid­u­als we think of as hav­ing defined a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal era weren’t always regard­ed that way by every­one else who lived at the same time: some­thing it would­n’t hurt to bear in mind when con­sid­er­ing our own place in his­to­ry.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

180,000 Years of Reli­gion Chart­ed on a “His­tom­ap” in 1943

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

The His­to­ry of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.