Glimpses of the History of Design from the 3rd Millennium BCE to the 3rd Millennium CE

History wasn’t just a series of wars you know.

The earliest of the cross-cultural ‘time-capsules’

A few years ago I put together a cross-cultural ‘History of Design’ timeline covering art and architecture from prehistoric times to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The above table from this History of Design shows where the first of six cross-cultural ‘time capsules’ I have illustrated fits into the big picture.

1 — What the Third Millennium BCE looked like around the world

(Actually the paintings are more likely to show what the sites high-lighted in the table look like now.)

Americas & Pacific

The pre-Incan Temple of the Crossed Hands, in Kotosh, Peru, is the oldest archaeological structure in the Andes. Stone constructions suggest that complicated building work began here in the third Millennium BCE centuries before anywhere else in the Americas.

Europe