The following chronology is designed to give an overview of European prehistory and history and to be used in conjunction with the text, that is, with an emphasis on the formation and movements of peoples as well as developments that affected all European peoples. There are many more important dates found in the time lines in the entries themselves. Sources of information about the past change as we look ever farther back in time. A watershed in sources of information is the point at which cultures adopt writing and begin to record earlier oral traditions about themselves and to keep written records—often in the form of annals recording the notable events of each year. We have divided this chronology into two parts based on the predominant source of data available, one beginning 1.7 million years before the present, when different hominid species began entering Europe, and the other taking up the story in the eighth century B. C.E., when, with the end of the Greek Dark Ages, Greeks began writing about themselves and their world, first in mythological tales and poetic epics, then in histories, travelogues, and other accounts. The first part of the chronology, based in large part on archaeological evidence, mostly covers broad cultural trends rather than history—historical events and specific peoples—because little of such matters can be deduced from archaeological artifacts. All prehistoric dates are circa, with cultural overlapping occurring from one age to the other; start dates indicate the first appearance of a culture or cultural characteristic anywhere in Europe and end dates indicate the latest survival of the same. The rate of change in this first part is slow, measured in millions and then thousands of years. In the second part, the rate speeds up greatly as the time scale shifts to specific centuries and years.
World History
