About

How the timeline is made

Every event carries at least one named source, with a page number or a link, so you can check it yourself.

Tier 1 sources are scholarly books and articles, major reference works and official documents. Tier 2 sources, such as museum catalogues and reports by recognized organizations, are used alongside a tier 1 source, or alone for events after 1990 when two of them agree on the date. The full list is on the sources page.

Wikipedia, blogs, social media and AI-generated text are never cited.

Dates before 1500 BCE follow the middle chronology unless the event says otherwise.

Where acceptable sources disagree, the timeline does not choose between them. It shows each account with its own sources.

A detail that cannot be confirmed is marked as missing, and the event stays unpublished until the gap is filled.

The Arabic and English texts are each written from the sources, not translated from one another.

How suggestions are reviewed

Anyone can suggest an event or a correction through the suggestion form. Each suggestion waits in a private review queue, where it is read and checked against its sources. Missing parts, such as the other language or a page number, are completed where needed, and the suggestion is then approved, edited or rejected.

Approved events appear on the timeline after the next site update. No AI translation or autofill is used in the review.

Licence

The text and the dataset are published under CC BY-SA 4.0: you may reuse and adapt them, also commercially, as long as you credit the source and share your version under the same licence. The code is under the MIT licence.

The full dataset is at /data/events.json. A short credit can read “Iraq, a timeline, by Muntather Hassan, timeline.muntather.net”.

Privacy

The site has no third-party trackers. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies, and the fonts are served from this site.

The suggestion form stores what you write in it. Your IP address is kept only as a one-way hash, made with a random value that changes every day and is deleted shortly after the day ends, and the hash is used only to limit repeated submissions.

Your email, if you give it, is used only for follow-up questions about your suggestion. Your name is shown with an approved event only if you tick the box. The spam check on the form is Cloudflare Turnstile.

Contact

The suggestion form is the only way to reach the project, and no email address is shown here. What you write in its note field goes to the reviewer. For an event already on the timeline, use “Suggest a correction” on its page.