Period· The columns of time

Antiquity

801 BCE → 500

Antiquity runs from the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, when administrations produced and kept documents in quantity.

Period running from the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, defined by the existence of administrations producing and preserving documents in quantity, which makes possible reconstructions founded on texts as much as on material remains.

What the evidence shows

These 1,300 years are those in which Mediterranean, Persian, Indian and Chinese administrations produce and preserve documents in number. Preservation obeys, however, two successive filters. The first is material: apart from clay tablets and stone inscriptions, almost nothing of antiquity survives in the original, papyrus rolls and then parchment codices degrading within a few centuries. The second is selective: the texts read today were copied by hand from generation to generation until printing, so that what survives is what successive copyists judged worth copying. What distinguishes this band from the preceding one is therefore documentary and not historical: written production increases, and institutions with an interest in it preserve more. It is also from this period that individuals can be named, and that the question of who kept the record arises.

Bounds and conventions

The frame is European and old. Its closing date, the end of the Western Roman Empire, has no equivalent in China, Mesoamerica or most of Africa, where the same centuries are divided on other criteria. The designation is retained for legibility: it dates the calendar of one region.

800 BCE to 500 CE. Mediterranean and Near Eastern periodisation.