In which five periods can you divide history?

Answer 1

Any five you like: it's largely down to perspective, and periods are just a method of dividing still longer spans into slighly more managable chunks distinguished from one another according to some more-or-less subjective set of criteria. European periodisation of the past two millennia is pretty meaningless in China, where more people lived throughout. Europe at the end of its own Middle Ages bore little political, social or economic resemblance to the continent at the start of the period; the same applies to a far greater extent to the modern age.