---
title: "Historical Timeline Maker with BCE Dates | Past Crumbs"
description: "Make a timeline of events with BCE and CE dates, notes and era bands. It scales itself, saves in your browser, prints neatly and exports SVG or PNG."
url: https://pastcrumbs.me/historical-timeline-maker/
---

Drawer V · Timelines

# Historical timeline maker, BCE to CE

Add events with a date, a title and a note, BCE or CE. The timeline spaces them to scale, keeps itself in your browser, and prints or downloads as SVG or PNG. Nothing is uploaded.

## Events

1. 24 February 1582 The bull Inter gravissimas
2. 15 October 1582 Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland switch
3. 20 December 1582 France switches
4. 1 March 1700 Denmark, Norway and Protestant German states
5. 14 September 1752 Great Britain and its colonies switch
6. 1 March 1753 Sweden switches
7. 1 January 1873 Japan adopts the Gregorian calendar
8. 14 February 1918 Russia switches
9. 1 March 1923 Greece switches

## How to make your timeline

Give each event a year and, if you know them, a month and day. Choose BCE for dates before the Common Era: there is no year 0, so 1 BCE is followed directly by 1 CE, and the scale counts it that way. Events sort themselves into date order and the axis picks round years for its marks, or months when everything falls within a few years. Labels that would overlap are moved down, with a dotted line back to their date.

Era bands mark a stretch of years, such as a reign or a war, as a bar in the margin. Pencil buttons edit an event, and the bin removes it. Your timeline is saved in this browser as you work; it is never uploaded, so use the SVG download to move it to another device. SVG stays sharp at any size and opens in most drawing programs; PNG is a picture for slides and documents.

Fetching a printable template as well?

Many free teaching resources and timeline templates ask for an email address before the download. A temporary inbox from [CleanTempMail](https://cleantempmail.com/) receives the link with no sign-up and empties itself after three days, so the newsletters that follow never reach your own inbox.

## Questions

**Can I print it on one page?**

Print shows only the timeline, scaled to the page width. A long timeline runs on to further pages; for a poster, download the SVG and print it at any size.

**How far back can I go?**

Up to 999,999 BCE, and forward to 9999 CE. Very long spans get marks every thousand years or more.

**Where is my timeline kept?**

In this browser's local storage, on this device only. Clearing the site's data, or Clear all, removes it.

## Sources

- Jean Meeus, *Astronomical Algorithms*, 2nd edition (Willmann-Bell, 1998), chapter 7: historians count from 1 BC straight to AD 1, while astronomers call 1 BC the year 0. The timeline uses the astronomers' count to space BCE dates correctly.
- The example's dates come from the switch table of the [Julian–Gregorian converter](https://pastcrumbs.me/julian-gregorian-converter/), with its sources: Claus Tøndering's Calendar FAQ, the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 and the National Diet Library of Japan.