The Metropolitan Museum of Art's timeline of art history

I wish I could see examples of art from around the world at the same time period. I'd love to do a comparison of pottery styles and techniques in China and the Americas. There's often surprising commonalities, though the civilizations grew separately.

Further, I'd also love to see connections and influences between regions. How did Koran manuscripts influence those of the Bible, and vice versa? How did Chinese ceramic motifs influence those in Persian ceramics? What are the flows of currency in the ancient world?

You may find it interesting that artists in the timeline also are here in HN.... http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/

The content is great (caught a few errors such as an item from 4th century BC appearing in -8k-2k), the design too.

The UX could be a bit better: The hover states the title and the reference number. For most visitors, the reference number is meaningless. Instead, when filtering by period, the precise period could be shown and when filtering by region (e.g. Africa), the precise region (e.g. Egypt) could be shown.

Fascinating content. Not a great user experience. It would be really cool to have a better, more 'artistic' way of discovering this content.

Angular 1.x app, if anyone's interested.