Timeline of Great books: 4,000 Years of Human Thought

Explore a chronological timeline of the world’s most influential public domain books, spanning more than four thousand years of literature, philosophy, science, religion, politics, and human thought.

Rather than organizing books by genre, language, or nationality, this Great Books Timeline presents them in historical order, allowing readers to follow the development of ideas across civilizations and centuries. From ancient epics and sacred texts to scientific breakthroughs, philosophical works, political writings, and classic novels, each book appears within the broader story of human intellectual history.

This collection includes hundreds of public domain books that shaped cultures, inspired movements, challenged beliefs, and transformed the way people understand the world. By exploring books chronologically, readers can see how knowledge evolved, how authors influenced one another, and how major historical events gave rise to new ideas and literary traditions.

Travel through the ancient world with the earliest surviving myths and epics. Discover the rise of classical philosophy in Greece, the religious and cultural foundations of Asia and the Middle East, the scholarship of the medieval period, the humanism of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the emergence of modern literature.

Whether you are studying intellectual history, searching for classic literature, exploring philosophy, or looking for the most influential books ever written, this timeline provides a unique way to experience humanity’s shared cultural heritage through the works that defined it.

What You’ll Find

• Ancient epics and myths
• Classical philosophy
• Religious and sacred texts
• Historical chronicles
• Scientific discoveries
• Political and economic works
• Renaissance literature
• Enlightenment writings
• Classic novels and poetry
• Influential books from around the world

Begin exploring the timeline and discover how thousands of years of books, ideas, and discoveries connect across human history.

100 Remarkable Books in History

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh — Anonymous
2. The Egyptian Book of the Dead — Anonymous
3. The Iliad — Homer
4. The Odyssey — Homer
5. Works and Days — Hesiod
6. Histories — Herodotus
7. History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
8. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
9. Republic — Plato
10. Symposium — Plato
11. Apology — Plato
12. Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
13. Politics — Aristotle
14. Poetics — Aristotle
15. Analects — Confucius
16. Tao Te Ching — Laozi
17. Art of War — Sun Tzu
18. Mencius — Mencius
19. Mahabharata — Anonymous
20. Ramayana — Valmiki
21. Metamorphoses — Ovid
22. Aeneid — Virgil
23. Parallel Lives — Plutarch
24. Satyricon — Petronius
25. The Golden Ass — Apuleius
26. Confessions — Augustine
27. City of God — Augustine
28. Beowulf — Anonymous
29. The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu
30. The Song of Roland — Anonymous
31. Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
32. Decameron — Giovanni Boccaccio
33. Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer
34. Le Morte d’Arthur — Thomas Malory
35. The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
36. In Praise of Folly — Erasmus
37. Utopia — Thomas More
38. Gargantua and Pantagruel — François Rabelais
39. Essays — Michel de Montaigne
40. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
41. King James Bible — Various Authors
42. Hamlet — William Shakespeare
43. Macbeth — William Shakespeare
44. King Lear — William Shakespeare
45. Othello — William Shakespeare
46. Paradise Lost — John Milton
47. Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
48. Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
49. Candide — Voltaire
50. The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
51. Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
52. Critique of Pure Reason — Immanuel Kant
53. Faust — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
54. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
55. Emma — Jane Austen
56. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
57. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
58. The Last of the Mohicans — James Fenimore Cooper
59. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame — Victor Hugo
60. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
61. The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas
62. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville
63. Walden — Henry David Thoreau
64. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
65. On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin
66. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
67. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
68. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
69. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
71. The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
72. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
73. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
74. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
75. Flatland — Edwin A. Abbott
76. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
77. Dracula — Bram Stoker
78. The Time Machine — H. G. Wells
79. The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells
80. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
81. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum
82. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois
83. The Call of the Wild — Jack London
84. White Fang — Jack London
85. The Jungle — Upton Sinclair
86. Anne of Green Gables — Lucy Maud Montgomery
87. A Room with a View — E. M. Forster
88. Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
89. The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran
90. The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
91. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
92. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
93. The Trial — Franz Kafka
94. The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
95. Ulysses — James Joyce
96. The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
97. The Waste Land — T. S. Eliot
98. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
99. Of Human Bondage — W. Somerset Maugham
100. The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien