Definition of Chronological Axis

The idea of ​​axis refers to a line and, for its part, chronology refers to the temporal succession of something. The term chronological axis is, in a nutshell, a timeline. It is a term widely used by historians, since to order historical events in a time frame it is convenient to establish a chronology.

A tool at the service of understanding the past

A chronological axis is normally represented with a line. In it you can determine divisions. Thus, a. C and d. C is the traditional division to indicate that a event it happened before or after the birth of Christ.

The fundamental idea of ​​any chronological axis is to segment the story in an orderly and linear way. Sometimes these axes refer to relatively short periods (for example, the 20th century) and sometimes they refer to very long periods, such as prehistory or ancient times. Middle Ages. These timelines are governed by a general principle: equal distances, equal amounts of time.

To understand a historical event, it is essential to locate it at a specific time

The years are grouped into lustrums (5 years), decades (10 years), centuries (100 years) or millennia (1000 years or ten centuries). These numerical references reflected in a chronological axis serve to refer to history itself, since the previous period refers to another category, the prehistory. Prehistory is understood to be the period that goes from the emergence of the human being to the appearance of the writing and includes two general stages: the paleolithic and the neolithic.

The use of a chronological axis as a way of ordering time can be used in various disciplines, such as history, archeology or paleontology. On the other hand, the chronology is the discipline auxiliary of history who studies the temporal order of historical events.

Each civilization has its own chronology and for this reason The Greeks managed time taking as a reference the Olympics that were held every four years and the Ancient Egyptian civilization that lasted 3,000 years was normally based on the dates of the reigns of the pharaohs.

A simple illustrative example

Imagine a line that is intended to show the two millennia of history from the birth of Christ to the present. In this line a series of annotations would be made: year 0 would represent the beginning of the axis chronological, in the middle of the line we would write the year 1000 and at the end of it we would indicate the year 2000. This general representation includes several stages: Ancient History, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age and the Contemporary Age. Each of these periods could serve to establish a new chronological axis.

Photo: Fotolia - Aristokrat44