Two carved wooden Shinto deities, male and female, from Heian Japan
Male and Female Shinto Deities, 10th century
Marked Heian-kyō (Kyoto)

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Heian Japan

From the capital Heian-kyō, now Kyoto, an elegant court ruled Japan. Women writers there, using a new phonetic script, wrote some of the world’s first great novels and diaries.

Place
Heian-kyō (Kyoto) · Byōdō-inAsia
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IA new capital
  2. IIKana, a new script
  3. IIIThe Tale of Genji
  4. IVThe Pillow Book
  5. VPoetry contests
  6. VIThe samurai rise

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Murasaki Shikibu
  • Sei Shōnagon
  • Fujiwara no Michinaga

Objects

  • Illustrated Genji scrolls
  • The Phoenix Hall

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

AD 794 to 1185. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?