Curated plates. Timeline Plates are cited chronologies of ideas that still matter. Where scholars disagree on a date, we show the range and the disagreement. Living practice that cannot be dated appears as presence rather than being forced onto the line. Reference sets, never rankings.
Every plate is one page that works offline. No accounts, no tracking, and nothing leaves your browser once it has loaded. Whatever a plate cannot show is named on the plate itself. All CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Made the same way every time: read across language editions, give every entry a source, leave disagreements standing as disagreements, let the evidence set the time axis rather than the other way round, and publish what is missing beside the plate.
40 entries · 8 open questions · 8 named gaps · 12 disagreements, 2686 BCE to 2020. The argument over the world's oldest university is carried as content rather than settled: English hedges, Hindi asserts Nalanda, Arabic raises al-Zaytuna. The largest gap we name is exclusion — this method records when things were founded, not who was kept out.
29 entries, weighted toward the modern end — humoral and doshic systems, through vitalism, to modern biochemistry. The first edition was too hard to read, and that failure rewrote the method: densities worked out from the data, labels packed to fit, and living practice given its own strip.
Four thousand objects, four hundred signs, and the longest text is thirty-four characters. Edition 2 runs about 30 entries from Mehrgarh to transformer models, keeps the decipherment argument live in both directions, and lists nine open questions and nine named gaps.
The sound a fuel makes when asked to do more than it can. Two kinds of stored sunlight — one buried a hundred million years, one fermented last season — meeting inside one cylinder, and a hundred-year argument about it. WCAG 2.1 AA, and every entry is also published as plain running text.
Lascaux's flicker-animated deer, the camera obscura from Mozi to Ibn al-Haytham, wayang's 840 CE inscription, then the magic lantern through to Toy Story. Katha and living wayang appear as presence rather than dated points. Generative video sits on the horizon as a position we are taking, not a prediction.
Every plate is listed with its provenance in the commons and in the atlas node. Steward: M. Children's data is a hard stop — the child safeguarding policy says how, and childcare@lofl.world is who to write to.