  Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be
leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we
apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the
hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their
articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic
extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each
edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and
gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study
demonstrates not only the existence of skewness with local figures, mainly
recognized only in their own cultures, but also the existence of global
historical figures appearing in a large number of editions. By determining the
birth time and place of these persons, we perform an analysis of the evolution
of such figures through 35 centuries of human history for each language, thus
recovering interactions and entanglement of cultures over time. We also obtain
the distributions of historical figures over world countries, highlighting
geographical aspects of cross-cultural links. Considering historical figures
who appear in multiple editions as interactions between cultures, we construct
a network of cultures and identify the most influential cultures according to
this network.
