About WhenLived

WhenLived shows when famous people lived, on one zoomable timeline running from 3000 BCE to today. Its question is a simple one: who was alive at the same time?

Where the information comes from

The selection of people and the short biographies were prepared with AI assistance. Birth and death years were compared with Wikidata, and differences were reviewed. Birth and death places and the links to Wikipedia come from Wikidata.

What to keep in mind

Mistakes are possible, and the biographies have not been checked line by line against sources. Use the Wikipedia link on each page to check anything important.

• Dates of very ancient people are often estimates, marked with "c." for circa.
• Characters of legend and epic are dated by the setting of their stories. Those dates are not historical facts.
• When traditions truly disagree, a person appears more than once, with the source of each dating named.
• Places before 1800 are given without a country, because modern borders would mislead.

Images

Portraits come from Wikimedia Commons and are public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Each page credits its image.