In our history of art, THE ANTIQUITY chapter includes:
- the “dark ages”
- history of ancient Greece (Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic period)
- history of the Etruscans and ancient Rome till the end of the 2nd century,
- history of Persian art

The ancient Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia are not here, which requires a brief explanation.
The only criterion here is not the chronology but the fact that cultures of the Antiquity were not a continuation of earlier phases of cultural development of the same people inhabiting the same areas. They were produced by invaders who had destroyed or displaced autochthonous people and who, borrowing a lot, created their own completely different cultures.
In hermetic Egypt, the Ptolemaic temple of Philae, built around 350 BC (considerably later than the Parthenon in Athens) displays no essential differences when compared to the canonical temple of the New Kingdom period. The archaic Doric Order church does not have anything to do with Mycenaean or Knossos architecture.
Within the acceptable simplification, it is possible to say that even if rulers of Egypt and lower Mesopotamia were changing, local cultures would continue and be respected by their conquerors. Otherwise they would not be able to control effectively the conquered peoples. That very continuity caused local cultures, developing during the European antiquity period, to stand for a continuation (usually decadent) of great cultures of the Bronze Age; those had been developing on these lands for many centuries before.
In the north part of the Italian Peninsula, as well as on the lands of today's Greece new peoples appeared. They were probably primitive enough that they needed a couple of “dark centuries”—to destroy the autochthonous cultures first and then create their own long-lasting works of art and civilization. However, these dark centuries (even though their poor documentation is taken into  consideration) certainly do not belong to the era of great civilizations as those had already gone into decline everywhere by that time. They rather form part of a poorly documented period of incubation of new cultures.
The detailed time framework of the Antiquity for individual regions is displayed on each specific site. In general, however, it is determined by the following dates: 1200 BC (the destruction of Troy) and 300 AD—the time of an almost simultaneous erection of the last important buildings of the Roman Empire, such as Diocletian's palace in Split, Croatia and the basilica of Maxentius in Rome; and of the first Christian temples in Echmiadzin (officially Vagharshapat; Armenia), Palestine, Syria and Rome.

< Kore of Auxerre, 640 BC