Ways through

Pathways

A pathway is a route through the site that follows one question across thousands of years and several subjects. Ride a line from end to end, or get off where something catches your eye. Where two lines share a stop, they meet.

10,000 years ago5,0003,0002,0001,000Writing, invented four timesA clay tablet recording barleyAsking the ancestorsReading the Rosetta StoneLife on the frontierSaints and raidersHunters by a lakeThe town that built the pyramidsThe gift of the riverMust FarmReading the Rosetta Stone

Line 1 · 6 stops

How writing began and spread

How did people start writing things down, and what did they write first?

Six stops, from the first marks on clay to a monk’s gospel book, across 4,000 years and three continents.

  1. 3400 BC to 200 BCWriting, invented four times
  2. About 3100 to 2900 BCA clay tablet recording barley
  3. About 1254 to 1041 BCAsking the ancestors
  4. 196 BC, and 1799 to 1822Reading the Rosetta Stone
  5. About AD 85 to 400Life on the frontier
  6. AD 635 to 875Saints and raiders

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Line 2 · 5 stops

Living by water

Why did so many people, in so many times, choose to live beside rivers and lakes?

Five stops, from a hunters’ camp by a lake to the Nile, where water meant food, travel and, sometimes, survival of the evidence itself.

  1. About 11,000 years agoHunters by a lake
  2. About 2550 BC to 2470 BCThe town that built the pyramids
  3. About 2000 BCThe gift of the river
  4. Around the ninth century BCMust Farm
  5. 196 BC, found 1799Reading the Rosetta Stone

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