Two Clocks: How the Map Handles Time
The map positions every figure by traditional Jewish chronology — the count of years from Creation, called Anno Mundi (AM), as systematized in Seder Olam Rabbah. This is the only dating system that has a year for every link in the chain: academic scholarship offers no accepted dates for Moshe, Yehoshua, or the early prophets, while tradition dates the entire chain.
Where the two clocks agree
The two systems are anchored together at the destruction of the Second Temple: 3830 AM = 70 CE. From roughly the late Second Temple period onward, traditional and academic dating substantially coincide — Rabbi Akiva sits in the same place on either clock. That is why the map's axis shows CE dates alongside AM in this range.
Where they diverge: the ~166-year seam
Counting backward from the destruction, the two systems part ways across the Persian period. Traditional chronology (Seder Olam) allots Persian rule over Judea roughly 34–52 years and dates the building of the Second Temple to c. 3408 AM (≈ 352 BCE); academic chronology, built on Greek and Persian sources and astronomical records, gives the Persian era about 207 years and dates the Second Temple's completion to 516 BCE. The difference — about 166 years — is one of the most discussed problems in Jewish chronography, with proposed resolutions ranging from schematic counting in Seder Olam to challenges to the conventional Persian king list.
The map does not pick a winner. It positions by AM (the only complete scale), shows CE labels only below the seam where the clocks agree, and marks the divergence itself as a visible band — because the disagreement is part of what we know, and how we know it.
Reading the axis above the seam
Above the seam a single civil label would silently pick a side, so each pre-seam century tick carries two compact sub-labels instead:
X BCE (SO) — the tradition's own civil equivalent: a pure Seder Olam conversion (BCE = 3761 − AM). It states which civil year the traditional count itself points to — nothing more.
≈Y BCE (adj.) — the same relative chronology re-anchored to the one event academic dating fixes independently in this range: the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE ↔ 3338 AM, so BCE ≈ 3924 − AM). This is not an academic dating — for most early figures scholarship offers no date at all. It is a re-anchored estimate that grows more approximate the deeper back it reaches, which is why it always wears the ≈. Both sub-labels disappear in Traditional mode, which shows the AM scale alone.