In the poetically titled new book Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton Architectural Press), authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton plot what time has looked like (in the West anyway), from early tables on Christianity and world history to Mark Twain's life-sized time line of the British monarchy -- mocked up, apparently, in his own driveway. It's, in one sense, a fascinating cultural tale, as infographics shifted away from an almost exclusive focus on the Bible to more civic concerns, like art and the national debt. It's also a story about design as destiny -- how pictures have managed to construct the way we think about the past, present, and future. Here, we've compiled a handful of time lines from the book that rough out a brief, if by no means comprehensive, history of the time line itself.

The time line, as every school kid in America knows it (dates distributed along a single axis), is a recent invention -- shy of 250 years old. Before that, everyone relied on tables. To this we owe Eusebius, a fourth-century Christian Roman scholar, who developed a matrix system for organizing and comparing a maddening array of histories (Jewish, pagan, Christian) in a single document. His Chronicle looks like a spreadsheet, with nations arranged in a row along the top and dates stacked in a column on the side.

Early Western scholars took pains to gin up bland information with striking visuals -- a tactic deployed centuries hence in everything from advertising to economics. Here, Lorenz Faust's genealogical tree lists Saxon rulers on the joints of a hand.

The 18th-century polymath Joseph Priestley popularized what we now think of as time lines. A New Chart of History (1769) maps the fates of 78 kingdoms and empires over 3,000 years in stunningly simple graphic language. Note the massive green island across the center, which, in a single gesture, highlights the dominance of the Roman Empire over history more compellingly than the reams of tables Eusebius produced. Priestley -- who was a scientist, a theologian, and, curiously, the inventor of carbonated water -- helped readers "see history in action," as the authors write. William Playfair, the founder of graphic statistics, credited Priestley as the precursor to his own work. Nevertheless, Priestley was criticized for oversimplifying complex issues.

Edward Quin's An Historical Atlas (1828) captures political territories at different moments in history, here during the Israelites' exodus (left) and the reign of Alexander the Great (right). In a clever visual stunt, the clouds part to reveal which areas of the world were known to the West at the time.

In the most famous infographic of the 19th century, French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard paints a brutally honest portrait of Napoleon's failed 1812 invasion of Russia. Starting at the Poland-Russia border, the wide red band shows the size of Napoleon's army at each engagement as he marches east to Moscow; the black band marks his retreat in the dead of winter, his troops reduced to a sliver. The skinny line at the bottom proves how insanely cold it was.

Infographics organizing everything from apocalyptic fantasies to Florence Nightingale's data on Crimean-War deaths proliferated in the 19th century. Here, Francis Walker charts one of America's newest pastimes, the national debt (1874).

Mark Twain was a big ol' history nerd, who invented (and patented) a board game in which players progressed for correctly placing historical events in time -- a sort of Trivial Pursuit for dates. To sharpen his own daughters' recall, he taught them to make life-sized time lines in the family driveway by setting stakes in the ground as stand-ins for historical milestones. So "when I think of the Commonwealth," he wrote in 1899, "I see a shady little group of these small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George III, I see him stretching up the hill, part of him occupied by a flight of stone steps..." Leave to it Twain to make the British monarchy fun.

Twentieth-century artists had fun with time lines, too. An early drawing by the painter and poet Francis Picabia (1919).

The cover of the exhibition catalog for the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) was meant to show cubism as a flashpoint the history of modern art, which it did -- note the copious arrows pointing to CUBISM on the right -- but as a concise graphic, it was a work of art in its own right.

Katie Lewis's 201 Days (2007) charts feelings in 3D. Pins representing sensory events are strung together according to a system the artist made up. So in essence, she created something completely subjective that masquerades as scientific fact.