Exhibit The chart the atlas cites
Adams's Synchronological Chart, 1881
The World atlas places the book's story on Sebastian C. Adams's chronology: Creation at 4004 BC, the Flood at 2348, the dispersion at 2247, Abraham's call at 1921. Those are Adams's printed placements on Ussher's reckoning, not dates written in Genesis. Here is the chart itself, sheet by sheet, so the placements can be read where he printed them.
The images are the David Rumsey Map Collection's scan of the 1881 edition, served from its own image service and cut only where the collection cut them: its ten page sheets plus the title and text pages. Nothing has been redrawn. Where a year is quoted below, it was read off the sheet and is given as printed.
- Full title
- Adams' Synchronological Chart of Universal History
- Author
- Sebastian C. Adams
- Edition
- 1881 · Colby & Co., New York
- Span
- 4004 BC – 1881 AD, as the chart states it
- Physical size
- 70 × 690 cm (about 23 feet long)
- Scan
- Composite 80,890 × 8,618 px; ten sheets of about 7,900 × 8,500 px
- Collection record
- David Rumsey Map Collection, list no. 6000.013
- Licence
- CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, as the collection publishes its images
Images: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford University Libraries. This exhibit is non-commercial and is shared under the same licence. The sheets shown here are reduced copies (up to 4,000 px wide); each sheet links to the collection's full-resolution record.
The sheets
Choose a sheet to open it in the reader below. Time runs left to right across every sheet; Sheet 1 begins at Creation and Sheet 10 ends in 1881.
Sheet
Drag to move · arrow keys scroll · + / − zoom · 0 fits the width · pinch on a touchscreen · Esc closes. A sharper copy loads in the background once a sheet is open.
What the chart prints at the book's milestones
The World atlas's story axis uses five of Adams's placements. Each is located below on the sheet where it is printed, with the words read off the sheet.
Sheet by sheet, in words
For readers without the images: the printed markers at each sheet's left and right edges, transcribed from the scan. Adams's chart carries its year figures inside the streams rather than on a ruled scale, so these are the nearest printed labels, not a calibrated range.