After reading Lives of the Stoics by Holiday and Hanselman, I wanted a timeline chart to visualize who lived when.  In the book appendix, there is a timeline in tabulated form, but no chart.   It got me wondering how to make a timeline chart using Excel.  There does not seem to be something called that built into Excel, but the  Microsoft website has some templates to offer.  I only tried one, but realized it did not make use of a Chart. Instead, it made bars by formating the background color of spreadsheet cells.  I had taken such an approach to make a Gantt Chart schedule decades ago.   I used it only once, just too much work involved.

( Wikipedia on Gantt Charts here  )  

The timeline example here  uses one of the Bar Charts available in Excel.  The slides below give some step-by-step guidance in an example  which lists some rulers of Ancient Rome.   I am surprised MicroSoft does not offer a Chart type called Gantt (or timeline).  I am sure many others have had to figure out an approach  similar to the one here.

Here is the spreadsheet as converted from MicroSoft Excel to Google Sheets.