When was this made? Date real museum pieces — from Egyptian amulets to Mughal paintings — on a timeline from 3000 BC to 1950.
How to play
- Look at the museum piece: its style, material and craft are your clues.
- Drag the timeline (or use ← →) to your guess, from 3000 BC to 1950, then lock it.
- Closer guesses score more, up to 1000 points. Errors are measured relative to the era, so ancient pieces are just as fair.
- Stuck? A culture hint tells you where it was made, for half the points.
- Daily: 5 pieces, the same for everyone each UTC day — no piece repeats for over a year.
- Endless: pick a gallery (Ancient world, Indian subcontinent, Islamic world, Europe…) and play until your error budget runs out.
FAQ
When does the daily puzzle reset?
Every day at 00:00 UTC.
Where do the pieces come from?
From the Open Access collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art, both released under CC0 (public domain). Dates are each museum's own catalogue dates; the midpoint of the range is scored, and ranges wider than 8% of a piece's age are left out.
Why is the timeline not evenly spaced?
It is stretched so that recent centuries get more room. Being 50 years off in 1850 costs about as much as being several centuries off in 1500 BC.