How to draw a bar timeline

I have the type of following data:

Begin   End                        Event
 2003  2007                      Event 1
 1991  2016                      Event 2
 2008  2016                      Event 3
 1986  2015                      Event 4
 2013  2013                      Event 5
 1994  1999                      Event 6
 2002  2002                      Event 7

My goal is to make a timeline of these events, i.e. to draw a series of distinct straight and horizontal bars from date 1 to date 2 with the names of the events on them.

I am currently trying my luck with the barh function from matplotlib.

I don't think there's a need for a special function here. Using plt.barh is directly giving you the desired plot.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

begin = np.array([2003,1991,2008,1986,2013,1994,2002])
end =   np.array([2007,2016,2016,2015,2013,1999,2002])
event = ["Event {}".format(i) for i in range(len(begin))]

plt.barh(range(len(begin)),  end-begin, left=begin)

plt.yticks(range(len(begin)), event)
plt.show()

Note that Event 4 and 6 seem missing, because start and end are identical. If you want to interprete end as being the end of the year, you may add 1 to it,

plt.barh(range(len(begin)),  end-begin+1, left=begin)