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Historical Eras, or classification of history, culture, and such into thematic groups involving time, so as to generate a history by period are intellectual constructs (categories) consisting of certain sets of common characteristics used by researchers, teachers, and academics when communicating about the past, it's characteristics and attributes, and the like. These are loosely defined terms in a general sense and the meaning of a term used by a sociologist may not agree with the definition as applied by a historical archelogist or historian or literature professor as differing disciplines generally look toward classification factors inside their own fields and characteristics understudy within those needs.

Still, whether one can precisely define a time window as 'High Middle Ages' or 'Early Middle Ages' the title evokes an image and expectations in the reader of certain sets of characteristics—the essential essence of such labeling—a communications tool from one mind to another.

Nonetheless, periods have a generally accepted meaning within all disciplines even though a given community of scholarship applies different criteria to their meaning of the same general term used in other disciplines; consequently squabbles about exact date ranges are mostly shrugged aside a s counter-productive— in large part this is an extension of the recoginition that one region develops at a different pace and under different influences and so at a different rate. A city or town will generally adopt a new practice as it hears about things first simply because it is in greater more frequent contact with a larger farther section of the world. Sometime later the idea or practice or characteristic spreads to the whole region, people, or continent.

See Prehistory, Prehistoric People, Stone Age, Paleolithic age, Mesolithic age, Neolithic age, Holocene epoch, Pleistocene epoch, Quaternary period (recently replaced by Neogene period)

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• Bronze Age
• Antiquity
  • Iron Age
  • Mesopotamia 6000 BC - 1100 BC
  • Indus Valley Civilisation 3300 BC - 1300 BC
  • Old Kingdom (Egypt, 3000 BC - 2000 BC)
  • Middle Kingdom (Egypt, 2000 BC - 1300 BC)
  • Shang Dynasty (China 1800 BC - 1200 BC
  • New Kingdom (Egypt, 1300 BC - 700 BC)
  • Zhou Dynasty (China 1200 BC - 500 BC)
  • (Ancient Greece, c:a 1000 BC-, see Timeline of Ancient Greece)
  • Ancient Rome 509 BC - 476)
  • Period of the Three Kingdoms (China, 220 - 280)
  • Dark Age (Europe, 4th century - 900)
• Middle Ages (Europe, 5th century - 15th century)
     In the strictest sense, the term 'Middle Ages' is a reference to Europe and western asia. Parallel existence by peoples elsewhere has lead to expansion of the term in the most general sense to convey similar epochs of the locality under discussion.
  • Early Middle Ages (Europe, 5th century - 10th century)
  • High Middle Ages (Europe, 10th century - 13th century)
  • Late Middle Ages (Europe, 14th century - 15th century)
• Non-European 'Middle History' Periods
  • Viking Age (Scandinavia, Europe, 793 - 1066)
  • Nara period (Japan, 709 - 795)
  • Period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (China, 907 - 960)
  • Sengoku period (Japan, 1478 - 1605)
• Early Modern (Europe, 14th century - 18th century)
  • The Renaissance (Europe, 14th century - 16th century)
  • Age of Discovery (or Exploration) (Europe, 15th century - 17th century)
  • Elizabethan period (United Kingdom, 1558 - 1603)
  • The Protestant Reformation (Europe, 16th century)
  • The Age of Enlightenment (Europe,18th century)
  • Tokugawa shogunate (Japan, 1603 - 1868)
• Modern (Europe, 18th century - 20th century)
  • Industrial Revolution (Europe, United States, elsewhere 18th and 19th centuries)
  • Napoleonic Era, 1799-1815
  • Victorian era (United Kingdom, 1837 - 1901)
  • Edwardian period (United Kingdom, 1901 - 1910)
  • Meiji era (Japan, 1868 - 1912)
  • World War I (Much of Earth, 1914 - 1918)
  • Interwar period (Earth, 1918 - 1939 or 1937)
  • World War II (Earth, 1937 or 1939 - 1945)
  • Cold War (Soviet Union and United States, as well their allied states, 1945-1989)
  • Information Age (1971-1991)
  • Space Age (after 1957)
  • Post-communist period (Russia and other former Soviet states, after 1991)

• List of time periods — including paleoecological, paleogeological, archeological, physical and cosmological groups, etcetera.
• For histories of certain time periods see Category:History by period.
• For histories of places see Category:History by region, Category:History by country, and Category:History by city.
• For histories of other topics, see Category:History by topic
• Category: History by period
• Category: History
• Category: History by region