About Terra Saga
A timeline of the Earth's history, from the planet's formation to the year 2000 — built around one question: what happened at the same time, elsewhere?
What this is
Most timelines tell one thread at a time: Rome, then the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance. That makes history tidy and slightly untrue. While Rome fell, the Maya cities flourished, Aksum minted coins and China reunified. Terra Saga is built to show that simultaneity — you drag the timeline, and the whole planet moves with it.
The globe changes with the time you stand in: continents drift, ice grows and retreats, forests come and go, cities and empires appear. Everything exists in two registers — one for children from about eight, one for adults — in Norwegian and English. Right now 466 events are published.
A volunteer project
Terra Saga is an independent project, built and edited in spare time, unaffiliated with any institution or publisher. It is free, without advertising, without tracking and without accounts — and the goal is for it to stay that way: a good, free learning tool for children and adults of any age.
The maintainer is not named here yet; that will change shortly. A history project should be able to say who stands behind it, and it will.
Supporting the project
If Terra Saga is useful to you, the most valuable support right now is knowledge: corrections via the button on any event page, suggestions for missing events, and sources we can check. That is what makes the database better.
A way to donate is being set up and will appear here. Donations will go to keeping the project free, open and growing — nothing else is promised, because nothing else is planned.
Where the content comes from
The text is written for Terra Saga, drawing on standard scholarship and reference works. The most significant events carry source references; the rest are being filled in, and help with that is warmly welcome. The base map is Natural Earth via world-atlas, which is public domain.
Treat Terra Saga as a starting point for finding your way, not as a source you cite. Duration and dating uncertainty are kept apart, and borders before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 are drawn deliberately soft — pre-modern polities had zones of influence, not surveyed lines. See the editorial policy (Norwegian) for the full rules.
Contact
General enquiries: contact@terrasaga.org. Corrections and suggestions travel fastest through the forms — they arrive with the event id and the published text, which saves a round of back and forth.