The eighteenth century saw the creation of the modern timeline, a diagrammatic representation of historical time that has since become ubiquitous. The present chapter identifies early examples of the genre and discusses their relationship to other forms of knowledge, analysing the artefacts themselves and the contemporary explanations published by their authors. It extends previous work on the influence of mechanical metaphors and models of cognition to focus here on the complementary influence of geography. Geography and chronology were presented as equal contributors to history from at least the sixteenth century, but what was new in the eighteenth was the proposition that chronology could itself become a kind of geography, offering the possibility of ‘cartographies of time’. The chapter traces the changing relationship between the two disciplines, set in their cultural context.