Timeline
The ends in order: from the first clay tablets to the dates that passed without event.
22 October 1844: the Day Passed
On 22 October 1844 the Millerites gather to meet the returning Christ. Nothing happens. The failure becomes the seed of durable denominations rather than the end of the belief.
Dürer publishes the Apocalypse woodcuts
In 1498 Albrecht Dürer publishes his Apocalypse, fifteen woodcuts of the Book of Revelation, fixing the visual image of the end of the world for centuries of European readers.
George Smith reads the Flood Tablet
On 3 December 1872 George Smith identifies a Babylonian flood on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, proving a deluge older than the Bible and stunning Victorian England.
Heaven's Gate
In March 1997 the Heaven's Gate group commits mass suicide in California, convinced that the comet Hale-Bopp hid a spaceship come to carry them to the "next level."
Japan's Mappō begins
In 1052 CE, by a widely held Japanese reckoning, the world entered Mappō, the final age of the Dharma, when no one can awaken by their own effort. The anxiety reshaped Japanese Buddhism and produced new, accessible paths of salvation.
Jehovah's Witnesses and the end of the times of the Gentiles
Charles Taze Russell's followers expect the end of the world order in 1914. The Great War is read back as confirmation, and the date is retained as an invisible transition rather than abandoned.
Phantom energy and cosmic doomsday
In 2003 a paper on "phantom" dark energy gives the Big Rip a name and a mechanism: if dark energy's density grows, space tears itself apart in finite time.
The Divine Incantations Scripture fixes Li Hong
In the 5th century CE the Lingbao scriptures set down the Chinese apocalypse of Li Hong, a messiah who appears at the close of a world cycle to save the seed people and renew the world, a pattern assembled independently of the Mediterranean.
The Five Ages of the Universe
In 1999 the astrophysicists Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin publish a schedule of the cosmos's end, a secular eschatology with ages as elaborate as any scripture and a terminal condition in place of a god.
The Flood Tablet is inscribed
In the 7th century BCE a scribe in the library of Ashurbanipal sets down the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, with the flood of Utnapishtim. The oldest complete end-of-the-world reset in world literature enters the record.
The Hopi message to the United Nations
On 10 December 1992 Hopi elders address the United Nations, carrying a prophecy of a purification that ends the fourth world, and asking the peoples of the world to choose the good red road.
The Jeonggamnok circulates in Korea
From roughly the 17th century a banned Korean prophecy, the Jeonggamnok, circulates in manuscript predicting the fall of the Yi dynasty and the rise of a true king, turning eschatology into a durable claim within politics.
The Kalachakra reaches Tibet
In the 11th century the Wheel of Time tantra, with its prophecy of the war of Shambhala, is transmitted to Tibet, carrying an end-of-the-world war that scholars read as history wearing prophetic clothes.
The Long Count reset — and the year nothing happened
On 21 December 2012 the Maya Long Count completed a b'ak'tun. The Maya marked renewal; a global industry sold the end. When nothing happened, believers renegotiated the date into an invisible shift, the genre's most successful failure.
The Qur'an announces the Hour
Revealed across the early 7th century, the Quran makes the certainty of the Hour and the Resurrection its recurring refrain, fixing the end-of-the-world shape for the youngest of the Abrahamic faiths.
The Revelation of John is written on Patmos
Around 95 CE a seer named John, exiled on the island of Patmos, sets down the vision later called the Book of Revelation. It becomes the most influential apocalypse in Western history and the template for the final-battle-then-new- creation sequence.
The Xhosa Cattle-Killing
From April 1856 a girl's vision commands the Xhosa to destroy their cattle and grain so the ancestors will sweep away the colonists and raise a new people. The date of February 1857 passes; the famine that follows kills tens of thousands.
Wulfstan preaches the Sermon of the Wolf
Around 1014 the English archbishop Wulfstan turns the end of the world into a state address, reading Viking raids and social disorder as the signs of the last age and calling the nation to repentance.
Zoroaster moves the cosmic battle to the future
Around the 6th century BCE the prophet Zoroaster reframed the cosmos as a story with an ending: a finite struggle between good and evil that concludes in a renovation of the world. It is the first religion known to place a future end at its centre.