Interactive
Source timeline
Not when the myths happened — when anybody wrote them down. Put any traditions on one real-year axis and see how far the surviving evidence sits from the world it describes.
The gap, tradition by tradition
Norse mythology
The material is set in pre-christian scandinavia: c. 500–1000 ce. The earliest surviving work on this axis is Skaldic verse: Ragnarsdrápa, Haustlöng (9th century) — 150 years before the end of the period it describes. The latest is Flateyjarbók (1387–94).
Some of this writing is contemporary with the religion it records, which puts it in a different evidential class from anything written down after a tradition ended.
Every dated line on this axis (9)
- 9th century — Skaldic verse: Ragnarsdrápa, HaustlöngThe oldest datable Norse mythological material, and the hardest to read.
- c. 1000 CE — Iceland adopts Christianity at the Althing (an event, not a text)
- c. 900–1100 — The Eddic poems are composedIndividual poems are dated by language and metre, and the dates are argued over.
- c. 1200 — Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum
- c. 1220 — Snorri Sturluson, Prose EddaWritten 220 years after the conversion, by a Christian, as a handbook for poets.
- c. 1230 — Heimskringla
- c. 1270 — Codex Regius — the only manuscript of most Eddic poems
- 13th–14th century — The Icelandic family sagas
- 1387–94 — Flateyjarbók
Egyptian mythology
The material is set in dynastic egypt: c. 3100 bce – 4th century ce. The earliest surviving work on this axis is the Pyramid Texts (c. 2350–2100 BCE) — 2,700 years before the end of the period it describes. The latest is Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris (c. 100 CE).
Some of this writing is contemporary with the religion it records, which puts it in a different evidential class from anything written down after a tradition ended.
Every dated line on this axis (10)
- c. 2350–2100 BCE — the Pyramid TextsThe oldest religious writing of any length from anywhere.
- c. 2100–1800 BCE — the Coffin Texts
- from c. 1550 BCE — the Book of Coming Forth by Day (Book of the Dead)
- from c. 1300 BCE — the Book of the Heavenly Cow
- c. 1160 BCE — the Contendings of Horus and Seth (P. Chester Beatty I)
- c. 700 BCE — the Shabaka Stone (the Memphite Theology)Claims to copy a worm-eaten older original; whether it does is disputed.
- c. 237–57 BCE — the Edfu and Dendera temple inscriptions
- c. 100 CE — Plutarch, On Isis and OsirisA Greek writing for Greeks — the only continuous narrative of the Osiris myth.
- 394 CE — The last dated hieroglyphic inscription is cut at Philae (an event, not a text)
- c. 537 CE — The temple of Isis at Philae is closed (an event, not a text)
A monthly letter about the evidence, not just the stories
Which source says what, how late it is, and who was arguing with whom when they wrote it. One email a month, and an unsubscribe link on every one.
What the two bands mean
Each tradition gets one lane with two bars in it. The pale terracotta bar is the period the stories are set in — the heroic age, dynastic Egypt, pre-Christian Scandinavia. The lapis bar underneath is the span of the writing that actually survives, with a dot for each dated work. The whole tool is a way of looking at the distance between those two bars, and the distance varies so wildly between traditions that most single-tradition reading gives a completely false impression of it.
Egypt is the extreme case in one direction: the Pyramid Texts were cut inside the civilisation they belong to, more than four thousand years ago, and Egyptian religious writing then continues for three millennia. Norse material is the extreme case in the other: Iceland converted around the year 1000, and the Prose Edda was written about 1220 by a Christian politician compiling a handbook for poets. Two hundred and twenty years, one author, one surviving manuscript tradition. Both facts are true, both are visible in a second on the chart, and neither is what a summary of “Norse mythology” usually tells you.
How to read a figure’s own dates
Search a name and the tool matches the works cited on that figure’s page against the dated lines on the axis, then reports the earliest, the latest and the span between them. That number answers a question people ask constantly without realising it is answerable: “how old is this god?” almost always means “how old is the oldest thing I could read about them?”, and those are different by centuries.
Two honesty rules are built into that matching. First, a citation that cannot be placed on any axis is reported as unplaced, by name, rather than dropped — across the whole corpus 722 of 1124 citations are datable here, covering 307 of the 340 figures, and knowing which ones fall outside is part of using the result properly. Second, where a work belongs to another tradition’s axis the result says so: a great many Greek figures are cited from Ovid and Virgil, who are Roman and are dated on the Roman line, and several Egyptian ones from Herodotus and Plutarch, who were Greeks writing about somebody else’s gods. Being told which figures reach you mainly through a foreign observer is not a footnote — it is frequently the most important thing on the page.
What this chart is not
It is not a claim about when a story was invented. A myth first written down in 1220 can be far older than its manuscript, and arguing about exactly how much older is most of what specialists in early Scandinavian literature do. The dates here are dates of attestation, which is the only thing that can be established rather than reconstructed. Nor is it a ranking: lateness is not falsity, and the Icelandic sagas are not worth less than the Pyramid Texts for being three thousand years younger. What lateness changes is what a text can be evidence for, and the honest handling of that is argued out page by page across the encyclopedia and set out in full on the methodology page.
Where the dating itself is contested — and it is, for the Eddic poems, for the date of Enuma Elish, for the Shabaka Stone’s claim to copy an older original — the note under the row says so rather than the chart quietly picking a winner. To see how the figures themselves connect instead, use the relationship explorer.