A five-minute video shows the history of culture over the past 2600 years.

If we are to be completely accurate, this video demonstrates the movement of key figures of world culture along the surface of planet Earth. A visual demonstration clearly shows us exactly where in the corners of the globe the maximum number of famous cultural figures was concentrated.

Maximilian Shich, a historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues created an incredibly detailed video showing the migration process of world art workers over the past 2600 years. An open database was used as a source of information. Freebase owned by google corporation.

From a huge list of famous cultural figures were selected 120,000 people. At the same time, the list included persons from the ancient Greek poet Solon (637 - 557 BC) to Jet Travolta (1992 - 2009), the son of actor John Travolta. It should be noted here that only those persons who have already left this world were taken into account, since the researchers had to fix the point where the person was born, as well as the place where he died.

The resulting video begins in 600 BC and ends in 2012. The places of birth of cultural figures are marked on the map with blue dots, and the places of their death - red. A blue-red arc-shaped straight line is drawn between the blue and the red dot, which shows where the person was born and where his life later ended.

As a result of their research, historians found a rather obvious at first glance thing: the more famous and important the city became on a global scale, the more cultural figures preferred to settle there until the end of their days.

It was also established that Rome ceded the title of cultural capital to Paris in about 1789, and Paris, in turn, handed over the baton to New York and Los Angeles. Thanks to the created video, you can spend hours studying how individual cultural figures moved from continent to continent, because each of 120,000 names is displayed in the video. True, this will have to watch the video in the maximum resolution, and every now and then put it on pause to understand the huge amount of data displayed on the screen.

These same historians have previously conducted similar studies. For example, they analyzed the years of life of more than 150,000 artists from different countries and concluded that the greatest number of artists of fine art and architecture ended their lives during the French Revolution.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/research-development/pyatiminutnoe-video-demonstriruet-istoriyu-kultury-za-poslednie-2600-let.html.