Mapping time: The surprising overlaps of history’s most influential minds
It’s wise to reserve judgment on important figures until they’re dead. Only when they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil do their legacies begin to slot into neat categories, assuming their full cultural significance.
Yet, those neat categories often obscure as much as they reveal. We look back on famous past lives through the prism of those mostly fictitious compartments — labeling one as a scientist, another as a pirate — as if they were as neatly separated from life’s complexities as they are from us by time.
This graph perforates that temporal prejudice. Called “The Big Map of Who Lived When,” it shows us which historical figures were contemporaries. The co-aliveness of some of these figures may boggle your mind.
The most satisfying way to use this map is to look for long lives with short overlaps. Like a picture of a great-grandparent holding their great-grandchild, there is something poetic about two lives lived so far apart yet intertwining for a brief period.
