Adams Synchronological Chart or Map of History: I Have Some Strong Opinions About It!

Matt Baker argues that Sebastian C. Adams’s 1871 world-history chart should no longer be sold as a modern educational reference. Although more than 150 years old, Adams’ Synchronological Chart of History remains widely available through Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and bookstores. Baker considers it an impressive historical artwork but believes its outdated chronology, omissions, and racial assumptions make it unsuitable for teaching world history.

Historical timelines help readers understand both chronology and geography. By placing civilizations and events alongside one another, timelines reveal which societies existed simultaneously, how historical developments overlapped, and how political power changed across regions.

Baker is himself a creator and collector of historical timelines. He produces timelines covering world history and owns numerous vintage examples. His interest extends beyond historical accuracy to the visual design and artistic qualities of these charts.

Joseph Priestley published one of the earliest attempts to represent world history on a single chart in 1769. The English scholar created A New Chart of History, which he dedicated to his friend Benjamin Franklin.

Priestley’s chart represented time horizontally and geography vertically. Its chronological divisions marked 100-year periods, while its geographical arrangement placed the Americas at the top, followed by Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Priestley’s supposedly universal history largely excluded precolonial America and sub-Saharan Africa. His American section focused on the period following European colonization, while his African section concentrated on North Africa. These limitations illustrate how the geographical priorities of eighteenth-century European historians shaped their understanding of world history.

Priestley organized historical importance around a succession of rulers beginning with biblical kings and ending with British monarchs. His chart opened with Saul, David, and Solomon and concluded with the kings of England and Great Britain. Baker identifies this as a distinctly eighteenth-century English interpretation of history, connecting biblical antiquity to European global dominance.

Friedrich Strauss introduced a different visual approach to world history in 1804. His chart, presented in English as Universal History Illustrated, carried the subtitle The Stream of Time Made Visible.

Strauss represented civilizations as rivers that expanded, contracted, divided, and merged. Unlike Priestley’s horizontal chronology, Strauss arranged time vertically, flowing from the top of the page toward the bottom. The width and movement of the streams communicated changes in the political and historical importance of civilizations.

Strauss’s river diagram illustrated the succession of major empires through the merging and separation of civilizations. Multiple ancient societies flowed into the Persian Empire, which subsequently became part of Alexander’s empire. Following Alexander’s conquests, the streams separated before eventually converging again under the Roman Empire.

Strauss traced the eastern Roman imperial tradition into the Ottoman Empire. The eastern Roman stream continued until its absorption into the Ottoman Turkish stream, which extended toward the chart’s endpoint and the territories identified with modern Turkey and Greece.

Strauss’s 1804 diagram provided the principal visual inspiration for Adams’s later chart. Baker explains that Adams effectively rotated the river-style chronology sideways, considerably increased its length, and incorporated far more historical detail.

Sebastian C. Adams, rather than Edward Hull, created the original synchronological chart. Baker emphasizes this distinction because modern reproductions frequently credit the work to Hull, whose actual contributions came through a subsequent British edition.

Sebastian C. Adams was born in Ohio and spent part of his life in Oregon. His varied career included employment as a county clerk, church minister, schoolteacher, business owner, and state senator.

Adams published his synchronological chart in 1871 while in his mid-forties. Its original title was Adams’ Synchronological Chart or Map of History. The earliest version was distributed as a scroll, although subsequent editions commonly adopted a recognizable illustrated cover.

Adams created an exceptionally large historical timeline measuring approximately two feet high and more than twenty feet long. Baker considers its scale remarkable and says he knows of no comparable timeline publication of such dimensions, either before or after Adams. He demonstrates its size by unfolding his own copy along a sidewalk.

The chart’s chronology begins with the biblical creation of Adam and Eve approximately 6,000 years ago. Rather than using modern archaeological or scientific dating, Adams organized the beginning of human history around a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.

Adams adopted Archbishop James Ussher’s biblical chronology, which placed creation in 4004 BCE. Ussher, an Anglican archbishop, published his chronology in the seventeenth century, with Baker identifying 1654 as its date. The resulting biblical framework establishes the starting point for Adams’s historical timeline.

Baker does not consider Genesis a factual account of human origins but recognizes its importance as ancient literature. He distinguishes the chart’s usefulness for understanding biblical narratives from its reliability as a record of actual history.

Baker argues that even readers who accept a literal six-thousand-year biblical chronology should not use Adams’s chart as a general historical reference. His criticism does not depend exclusively on disagreement over creationism. The chart also contains substantial omissions, distorted representations of civilizations, and chronological errors independent of its biblical foundations.

The first 1,656 years of Adams’s timeline primarily depict the genealogy of Adam’s descendants. Baker regards this section as one of the chart’s more successful features because it makes the long lifespans and overlapping generations described in Genesis easier to understand.

The chart illustrates that Adam supposedly lived long enough to witness the birth of Lamech, Noah’s father. According to the genealogical ages presented in Genesis, Adam survived through numerous generations of descendants. Baker notes that this relationship is difficult to recognize from the biblical text without calculating the ages.

Methuselah’s death coincides with the year of Noah’s Flood in the chronology used by the chart. This creates the possibility, which Baker explicitly leaves uncertain, that Methuselah died during the Flood itself.

The biblical genealogical timeline continues for approximately 900 years after the initial 1,656-year period. Its overlapping lifespans indicate that Shem, one of Noah’s sons, was supposedly still alive when Abraham and Isaac were born.

Adams begins his wider account of civilizations around 2300 BCE with the Tower of Babel. In the biblical narrative, Babel explains the division of humanity into different language groups. Adams uses this event as the point from which separate civilizations emerge.

Five initial civilizations branch from the Tower of Babel in Adams’s chart: Canaan, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and China. These five streams establish the chart’s early historical framework, leaving numerous other contemporary societies unrepresented.

Adams’s geographical coverage concentrates initially on the Middle East, Greece, and Rome before shifting overwhelmingly toward Europe. Although presented as a history of the entire world, the chart devotes comparatively little attention to civilizations outside these regions.

Baker partly attributes the chart’s geographical limitations to the historical knowledge available in Victorian times. Nineteenth-century Western historians had access to substantially less archaeological and historical information about many regions than researchers possess today.

The expansion of historical knowledge makes Adams’s original chart unsuitable as a contemporary reference. Baker distinguishes between history itself, which does not change, and historians’ understanding of that history, which develops as new evidence becomes available. He argues that continuing to rely on a nineteenth-century reconstruction ignores more than 150 years of subsequent discoveries.

The Norte Chico civilization of South America is missing from Adams’s early historical chronology. Baker identifies its substantial urban settlements as evidence that complex societies developed in the Americas during periods when Adams depicted only a handful of civilizations elsewhere.

North America’s Poverty Point culture is another significant omission. Its inhabitants created complex settlements and monumental earthworks, demonstrating substantial social organization beyond the civilizations included in Adams’s early streams.

The omission of the Kerma culture of Nubia creates a misleading impression that early African civilization existed only in Egypt. Baker identifies Kerma’s large settlements as evidence of an important civilization south of Egypt that the chart fails to represent.

The Indus Valley Civilization is absent despite being one of the major civilizations of the early Bronze Age. Baker finds this particularly striking because Adams includes China among his original civilizations while excluding the already-established urban societies of the Indian subcontinent.

India receives almost no historical representation until approximately 1500 CE. Baker points out that the chart effectively introduces Indian history through Babur’s establishment of the Mughal Empire, overlooking thousands of years of earlier developments.

The Maurya and Gupta empires are both omitted from the chart. Their absence excludes two major periods of Indian political, intellectual, and cultural development.

The Buddha is not included in Adams’s historical chronology. Baker treats this as a particularly conspicuous omission, given Buddhism’s historical importance across Asia.

The Olmec and Maya civilizations of Mesoamerica are missing. Their exclusion contributes to the impression that the Americas had little significant history before European involvement.

The Aksumite Empire of Ethiopia is another major civilization omitted from the supposedly universal chronology. Its absence reinforces the chart’s limited treatment of African history beyond Egypt.

Baker argues that some omissions cannot be explained solely by the limitations of nineteenth-century historical knowledge. He considers the near-total absence of India until the Mughal period especially revealing, suggesting that the chart’s selection of historical subjects reflects cultural priorities as well as gaps in available information.

Baker characterizes Adams’s chart as racist because its representation of history reflects Victorian racial hierarchies. His argument rests on both the marginalization of non-European civilizations and the explicit racial classifications and imagery incorporated into the work.

Baker uses a Victorian racial-classification map to explain the hierarchy underlying nineteenth-century European ideas about civilization. The map divides populations into categories labeled civilized, half-civilized, barbarian, and savage. These terms represent the prejudices of the period, not scientifically valid distinctions between peoples.

The Victorian classification identified selected regions as civilized while treating major Asian societies as only half-civilized. Baker describes the Ottoman Empire, India, and China as falling within this intermediate category, despite their extensive political and cultural histories.

The same racial framework categorized much of Africa and the Eurasian steppe as barbarian. This ranking reflected nineteenth-century European prejudice rather than an objective measurement of historical achievement.

The lowest category, labeled savage, was commonly assigned to Indigenous peoples. Baker identifies Native Americans and Indigenous populations of the Amazon, Australia, and Siberia among those subjected to this classification.

The chart’s visual treatment of China minimizes the historical importance of the Tang dynasty. Baker contrasts the comparatively small representation of the Tang dynasty with the prominent depiction of the Roman Empire, arguing that the visual proportions reinforce an exaggerated European-centered account of history.

Genghis Khan receives disproportionately little prominence despite establishing the foundations of history’s largest contiguous land empire. Baker argues that the chart makes the Mongol ruler appear comparatively minor despite his enormous historical impact.

Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, is completely absent. Baker describes him as the richest man in history and considers his omission another indication of the chart’s neglect of major African rulers and civilizations.

The chart reproduces the discredited nineteenth-century idea that humanity can be divided neatly into five races. Baker identifies this classification as an obsolete racial theory that continued to shape Victorian depictions of world populations.

The chart’s illustrations of non-European populations rely on exaggerated racial stereotypes. Baker particularly criticizes its portrayal of Africans and compares it with a separate racist illustration suggesting that Black people were biologically closer to apes than White people. He explicitly rejects this supposed hierarchy as false.

Baker considers the chart’s treatment of non-European societies a problem of both omission and distorted presentation. Some civilizations disappear entirely, while others appear too small or historically insignificant relative to European empires. The accompanying racial illustrations further reinforce the underlying bias.

The chart also contains serious factual and chronological mistakes about civilizations it does include. Baker identifies ancient Egypt as a particularly revealing example, arguing that Adams relied on obsolete historical sources, guesswork, or interpretations produced before major archaeological discoveries.

Adams incorrectly identifies Busiris as Egypt’s first ruler around 2100 BCE. Baker explains that Busiris was a figure from Greek mythology, associated with a story in which he was killed by Heracles, rather than a historical pharaoh.

Narmer is identified by Baker as the first ruler of a unified Egypt, approximately 1,000 years earlier than Adams’s supposed first pharaoh. This discrepancy demonstrates the scale of the chart’s chronological inaccuracies.

The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza is represented inconsistently. One location on Adams’s chart labels the pyramid’s construction date as uncertain, while another associates its construction with Cheops.

Cheops and Khufu are two names for the same Egyptian pharaoh. Baker explains that Khufu constructed the Great Pyramid around 2600 BCE, considerably earlier than the positions assigned to the relevant Egyptian rulers and monuments on Adams’s chart.

Adams places Ramesses the Great before Khufu, reversing their historical order. Khufu belonged to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, while Ramesses II ruled during the much later New Kingdom.

The chart also conflates Ramesses the Great with Sesostris. Baker identifies Sesostris as probably referring to Senusret III, a ruler of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. Combining these figures further confuses three distinct periods of Egyptian history.

Baker’s Egyptian examples show that the chart is unreliable even within its preferred historical regions. The errors involve misidentified rulers, misplaced monuments, reversed chronologies, and the conflation of figures from different dynasties. Consequently, its extensive coverage of Egypt does not guarantee accuracy.

Baker attributes many Egyptian inaccuracies to the state of archaeological research when Adams created the chart. Much of the evidence now used to reconstruct ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian history had not yet been discovered or properly interpreted in 1871.

Despite its historical problems, Baker recommends the original chart as a collectible artwork. Its unusual dimensions, elaborate arrangement, and nineteenth-century visual style make it valuable for understanding how earlier generations imagined world history.

The chart is particularly useful as evidence of Victorian historical thinking. Its treatment of civilizations, religious chronology, imperial successions, and racial categories reveals the intellectual assumptions of the period in which it was produced.

Most modern reproductions of the chart sell for less than $50. Baker considers this a relatively accessible price for an elaborate historical reproduction, provided buyers understand its limitations.

Baker prefers reproductions preserving the original Adams design. Because he values the chart as historical artwork rather than a reference, he recommends the edition retaining the original Adams’ Synchronological Chart cover and presentation.

The original chart is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. This allows publishers to reproduce and sell it without obtaining exclusive rights from the original creator or his successors.

A complete electronic reproduction of the original chart is available free through Wikipedia. Baker points to this version as an alternative to purchasing a physical copy.

Public-domain status helps explain the large number of different editions currently sold. Publishers have repeatedly reproduced Adams’s work, sometimes changing its introductory material, supplementary illustrations, title, or chronological endpoint.

A British publisher, Deacon’s, obtained permission to reproduce the chart and introduced significant modifications. Baker identifies this edition as an important source of the later confusion surrounding the chart’s authorship.

Deacon’s replaced part of the original introductory section with maps produced by Professor Edward Hull. These supplementary maps were separate contributions to the publication rather than part of Adams’s original historical timeline.

Deacon’s also added a geological diagram by Hull at the end of the chart. This expanded the publication beyond its original chronological coverage by incorporating an additional representation of Earth’s geological history.

The revised Deacon’s title prominently credited Edward Hull, unintentionally implying that he created the entire chart. Its wording described a synchronological chart of universal history with maps of major empires and a geological diagram drawn by Professor Hull. Baker argues that the phrasing obscured the distinction between Adams’s original timeline and Hull’s additions.

Modern sellers frequently misattribute Adams’s chart to Edward Hull. Baker explains that Hull created the supplementary maps and geological material, whereas Sebastian C. Adams designed the underlying synchronological history.

The incorrect attribution sometimes survives even in editions that no longer contain Hull’s contributions. Baker identifies this as an especially confusing consequence of the chart’s repeated republication under altered titles.

Some modern editions are marketed as The Timechart History of the World. These versions are readily available through major online retailers and physical bookstores, but Baker considers them less desirable than reproductions of the original Adams chart.

Modernized editions extend Adams’s timeline beyond its original endpoint of 1871. Publishers have added historical developments reaching into the present, giving the impression that the chart has been comprehensively updated.

Approximately 90% of the supposedly modernized chart remains unchanged from the Victorian original. Baker emphasizes that extending its final section does not correct the earlier omissions, racial assumptions, or chronological mistakes.

Some contemporary editions add a diagram of evolution before the original biblical chronology. Baker interprets this as an attempt to present two different perspectives on human origins while retaining the chart’s fundamentally unchanged account of subsequent history.

Adding an evolutionary diagram does not resolve the chart’s inaccurate treatment of world history. Even if the new introduction acknowledges scientific explanations of human origins, the historical chronology still excludes major civilizations and preserves outdated Victorian interpretations.

The continued sale of updated editions creates a risk that buyers will mistake a nineteenth-century artifact for a contemporary educational resource. Baker argues that new material at the beginning or end can conceal the fact that most of the chart has not incorporated modern archaeological and historical research.

The central distinction is between preserving an old chart and presenting it as accurate modern history. Baker supports collecting, reproducing, and appreciating the original as an artifact of historical cartography. His objection concerns its continued promotion as a reliable representation of world history without adequately accounting for its outdated content. Pasted text