Every myth is a date in some culture's calendar. Every prediction is a date in ours. Here they run together — the ends that were told, and the ends that were set.
c. 7th century BCE
event
A scribe in the Library of Ashurbanipal copies Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh onto clay at Nineveh. Twenty-five centuries later it will be the first apocalypse text read aloud in modern Europe.
c. 6th c. BCE (traditional dating; varies)
event
In the Gathas, Zoroaster reworks the ancient combat myth: instead of a battle in the past that created the world, a battle in the future that will renovate it. The grammatical shift that makes apocalypse a promise.
c. 95 CE
event
From the island of Patmos, John writes an apocalypse coded against Rome: the beast with seven heads, Babylon on seven hills, the number 666. It will become the defining end-of-the-world text of the West.
5th century CE
event
The Taoist scripture assembles the end of the world cycle — plague, collapse, the messiah Li Hong, the marked chosen — into the archive of Chinese apocalyptic doctrine. The figure itself is older, and the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184–205 CE) had already shown how fast the promise becomes a banner.
610–632 CE
myth
The final hour — the sun folded up, the graves overturned, the scales set — is proclaimed without a date and expected always. The hadith will soon furnish the end with its full architecture: Dajjal, Mahdi, Isa, Gog and Magog.
1014
event
With the Danes at England's throat, Archbishop Wulfstan of York tells the kingdom that the world is in haste and the end approaches — the apocalypse as state address, the corruption of the realm as the sign of the close.
11th century CE
event
The Wheel of Time tantra, composed in India under the shadow of the invasions its prophecy pictures, is carried to Tibet and translated (traditionally 1027). Its Shambhala war — the hidden kingdom's final victory over the mleccha hordes — becomes Tibetan Buddhism's end-of-dharma prophecy.
1052 CE
event
By the Japanese reckoning, 1052 marks the start of the Latter Day of the Law — the end of the world as a dated condition of decline. Genshin's Ojōyōshū had prepared the faithful three decades earlier; Honen and Shinran built the Pure Land schools on the premise a century later.
1498
event
Fifteen woodcuts of the Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen among them — published in Latin and German at once, the first major book designed entirely by one artist, and the image of the Christian end that has never been replaced.
17th century CE
event
Korea's secret prophecy of dynastic collapse and renewal — the Jeong king, the ten refuges, the end-time human — spreads underground, banned by the state and believed anyway, powering new religions for the next three centuries.
1844
prediction
William Miller's followers await the Second Coming on 22 October 1844. The date passes; the movement does not collapse — it reinterprets, and the pattern of the modern manufactured apocalypse is set.
1856–57
event
Nongqawuse hears the ancestors at the Gxarha River; the command spreads to kill the cattle and burn the grain. In February 1857 the promised day passes, the dead do not rise, and the famine kills tens of thousands — the one dated apocalypse in history that kept its date.
3 December 1872
event
At the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, George Smith translates the flood narrative before an audience that understands, mid-sentence, that Genesis has an older cousin. The Telegraph funds his return to Nineveh.
1914
prediction
Charles Taze Russell's followers expect the end of the world. Afterward the date is retained and reinterpreted as an invisible transition — the pattern that 2012 would repeat.
10 December 1992
event
The Hopi carry the prophecy of the three purified worlds and the coming Purification to the UN General Assembly — three worlds ended in corruption, the fourth faces its cleansing, and the faithful who keep the instructions will see the fifth.
1997
prediction
Thirty-nine members of a UFO millenarian group die by suicide in California, expecting to leave the Earth behind as it is "recycled." The apocalypse as exit ticket, with a body count.
1999
event
Adams and Laughlin publish the secular end's scripture: the habitable epoch, the degenerate era, the black-hole era, the dark era — the heat death told as a schedule as elaborate as any mythology's, with no remnant clause.
2003
event
Caldwell, Kamionkowski and Weinberg name the Big Rip — the accelerating expansion of the universe taken to its limit, tearing galaxies, stars, atoms, and finally space itself apart. The end as geometry, named five years after the acceleration was discovered.
21 December 2012
prediction
The Maya Long Count completes a 5,125-year b'ak'tun. The Maya mark renewal; a global industry sells the end. When nothing happens, believers renegotiate the date into an invisible shift — the genre's most successful failure.
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