Load Preceding Nodes in a View Block Sorted by Date in Relation to the Current Node
&lt;?php

$curnode = menu_get_object();
if (!$curnode) return '';

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();

$query-&gt;entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
  -&gt;entityCondition('bundle', 'article')
  -&gt;propertyCondition('created', $curnode-&gt;created, '&lt;=')
  -&gt;propertyOrderBy('created', 'DESC')
  -&gt;range(0, 10); //CHANGE RANGE FOR YOUR LIMITS

$result = $query-&gt;execute();

$items = array();
if (isset($result['node'])) {
  $nodes_nids = array_keys($result['node']);
  $nodes = entity_load('node', $nodes_nids);
  foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    $items[] = l($node-&gt;title, 'node/' . $node-&gt;nid);
  }
}

return theme('item_list', array('items' =&gt; $items));

?&gt;