Time is like a highway where everything goes in the same direction. The events occurred across time are typically depicted on an horizontal line, a Timeline, with segments indicating the time periods on a scale relevant to the discussed theme. The most common use for timelines is for show historic facts, news, biographies, fine grained or long lasting events (e.g.: from subatomic particles behavior to geological ages of Earth).
Dipity timeline viewer
Sometimes we need to show multiple aspects or visions of a topic on various tracks of that Time road. Then a simple line is not enough and a parallel set of lines is required.
Schofields & Sims world history timeline
Plus, consider to show the timeline on the vertical axis.
Mozilla web browser timeline
Also, the amount of events to be displayed may be not dispersed on a regular basis, more when contrasting areas of time with almost no info against other plentiful of it. A way to overcome these inequalities is make timelines with non-linear shapes, for example using spirals, triangles or arcs.
Agard's biblical timeline
Finally, you can see an interesting site about history of Timelines here.
