Continuity

Threads

• Mesopotamia

  2334–539 BC · 7 polities · 3 edges

  The land between the rivers, where the territorial empire was invented and then rebuilt about once a millennium on the same two hundred miles of alluvium. Akkad, Ur, Babylon and Assyria each claimed the last one's titles; the argument over which of them was an empire at all is older than most of the states in this collection.

• The Caliphates

  622–1517 · 8 polities · 9 edges

  One office, and the polities that existed to claim it. The line from Medina to Damascus to Baghdad is the one usually meant by the word, and it spent its whole length contracting while the claim stayed universal — but from the tenth century it was not the only claimant, and a rival caliphate in Cairo and a restored Umayyad one in Cordoba are here on the same terms. Succession runs inside the line and stops at its edge: a polity that says the office was usurped is not its heir, and no edge joins them.

• Egypt and Syria

  868–1517 · 11 polities · 11 edges

  Egypt's grain and the Syrian coast, and the long argument over whether they were one country. The provinces that left the caliphate earliest because they were richest, the Turkish atabegs who reunited them against an invasion from Europe, and the four Frankish states that held the shore for a hundred and ninety-two years and were removed from it in twenty-three.

• The Jazira

  890–1409 · 5 polities · 2 edges

  The country between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and Aleppo at the end of the road west — held in turn by Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen dynasties who mostly did not inherit from each other. Succession here is thin on purpose: the Jazira's transfers of power ran through Baghdad and then through Isfahan, and its two unattached polities each have an edge that leaves the region because the Seljuk sultanate is what stood between one and the next.

• Iran before Islam

  678 BC – AD 651 · 13 polities · 19 edges

  Twelve centuries before the Arab conquests. Four empires held roughly the same plateau and each claimed, in different terms, to be continuing the last — Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian — and around them are the powers that took pieces of it and claimed nothing: a Greek kingdom on the Oxus, and the steppe confederation that broke the Sasanian frontier from the one direction the Roman wars make invisible.

• The Iranian Intermezzo

  651–1349 · 14 polities · 23 edges

  The Persianate dynasties between the fading of direct Abbasid rule and the Mongol arrival — Khurasan, Transoxiana and the Iranian plateau. Dense with succession: slave-generals taking their masters' provinces, vassals swallowing overlords, governors inheriting the empire that appointed them.

• Iran after the Mongols

  1314–1925 · 11 polities · 12 edges

  Six centuries between the Ilkhanate and the twentieth century: the provincial officers who kept the pieces of a Mongol state working, the Turkmen confederations that fought over the pastures, the dynasty that made Iran Shi'i, and what followed it — an Afghan occupation, a conqueror who took Delhi, a regent who refused the title of shah, and a century spent between two European empires.

• The Caucasus

  302 BC – AD 1859 · 10 polities · 2 edges

  The isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian: a corridor every empire on either side wanted, none could cheaply hold, and all of them marched through — where local houses survived by being expensive to take and useful to leave alone.

• South Arabia

  800 BC – AD 1962 · 9 polities · 4 edges

  Yemen and the incense country: highland kingdoms that grew rich carrying frankincense north, and the confessional states that later held the same mountains. Ground where a caravan route, a monsoon port and a terrace wall each supported a polity, and where the imperial armies that came for them — Aksumite, Ayyubid, Ottoman — could take the coast and not the highlands.

• Oman

  750–1861 · 3 polities · 1 edge

  The Ibadi imamate behind the Hajar mountains, and the two dynasties that grew out of it and went to sea. Oman is the one part of Arabia where an elected imamate was the normal form of the state for a thousand years, and the only one whose rulers ended up governing an African coast.

• The Najd, the Hijaz and the Gulf

  425–1925 · 6 polities · 2 edges

  The interior and the two coasts it kept reaching. Central Arabia produced no lasting state of its own until the eighteenth century, but it produced the men who took the others: a Kindite kingship made in Yemen, a Qarmatian state on the Gulf that carried the Black Stone away, sharifs holding Mecca for nine hundred years under whoever was paying, and finally a movement out of the Najd that took the lot.

• The Eastern Mediterranean after Alexander

  323 BC – AD 636 · 10 polities · 1 edge

  Between Alexander's death and the Arab conquests: the Successor kingdoms and the smaller monarchies that grew in their gaps, a Jewish state that made itself and was unmade, and the Arab powers that held the desert between Rome and Iran. Seven of the ten end against Rome, which is most of what the region has to say.

• Rome and Byzantium

  27 BC – AD 1453 · 4 polities · 5 edges

  The Roman empire, the eastern half that outlived it by a thousand years, and the two governments that held or claimed Constantinople in the fifty-seven years the Fourth Crusade took it away. One continuous object that this site is obliged to cut into four records, and every page here says so.

• Anatolia

  1071–1922 · 7 polities · 7 edges

  The peninsula after Manzikert, which took four hundred years to stop being contested. A Seljuk branch organised the plateau and was broken by the Mongols; the marches it could no longer hold filled with Turkmen principalities; Greek and Armenian states survived on the coasts and in the mountains, one of them outlasting Constantinople itself. The polity that eventually took all of it began as the smallest of the principalities and is the reason the rest are usually left out.

• The Frankish World

  800–1806 · 2 polities · 1 edge

  The one western kingdom that did claim to have replaced the empire, and the thing it turned into. A Frankish king was crowned emperor in Rome in 800 and the title outlived his dynasty, his kingdom and the division of his inheritance by a thousand years.

• Eastern Europe

  895–1795 · 5 polities · 3 edges

  The Latin Christian kingdoms wedged between German-speaking Central Europe and the steppe: crowned from Rome rather than Constantinople, spending centuries absorbing whatever rode out of the east — Mongols, Tatars, Ottomans — on ground the rest of Latin Christendom was content to let them hold alone.

• Rus' and Muscovy

  878–1917 · 4 polities · 1 edge

  The river road from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the principalities built along it: a federation of trading cities converted from Constantinople, shattered by the Mongols, and reassembled — over two centuries as a tribute-collecting vassal — by the one city among them that outlasted its own masters.

• The Islamic West

  757–1659 · 14 polities · 10 edges

  The Maghreb and al-Andalus — the provinces that left the caliphate earliest and stayed gone, and the Berber empires that later ruled both shores of the strait.

• The Nile and the Horn

  850 BC – AD 1974 · 5 polities · 1 edge

  Two Christian worlds either side of the Red Sea's southern end — Kush, Makuria and Alodia on the middle Nile, Aksum and its successor in the Ethiopian highlands — which outlasted the empires that converted them and were reached by Islam last.

• West Africa

  700–1901 · 5 polities · 2 edges

  The Sahel and the forest below it: states that lived on the crossing charge for gold going north and salt coming south, from Ghana on the upper Senegal to Asante on the Volta, over a thousand years of the same trade changing hands.

• The Turkic Steppe

  209 BC – AD 1218 · 5 polities · 3 edges

  The grassland from Manchuria to the Danube, and the confederations that governed it by being able to leave. A khaganate on the Orkhon could put more cavalry in the field than any settled state and could not hold a city; the ones that lasted longest were the ones that learned to tax a trade route instead.

• The Mongol World

  1206–1876 · 17 polities · 17 edges

  The largest contiguous land empire ever assembled, the four successor khanates it broke into within two generations, and the Chinggisid houses still ruling on the strength of that descent three centuries later.

• China

  221 BC – AD 1912 · 16 polities · 12 edges

  The longest continuous imperial tradition anywhere, and the argument about whether it is one state seen many times or many states using one name. Every dynasty here inherited a bureaucracy, a script and a claim to a mandate that could be lost — including the ones that arrived from the steppe and governed two populations under two administrations.

• Japan

  540–1868 · 7 polities · 5 edges

  The one imperial house never replaced, only sidelined: a single continuous throne standing behind six changes of who actually governed in its name, from the shoguns of Kamakura to the shoguns of Edo.

• Korea

  2332 BC – AD 1904 · 11 polities · 9 edges

  The peninsula's own long argument over how many kingdoms it took to become one: a founding state old enough to be legendary, three rival kingdoms and the confederacy that never quite joined them, a northern successor state historians nearly forgot, and, eventually, the one dynasty that outlasted every rival before it by five hundred years.

• The Indian Sultanates

  1206–1857 · 8 polities · 11 edges

  Turkic and Afghan rule in northern India, founded by a Ghurid slave-general and outlasting every polity that produced it.

• Sumatra and the Peninsula

  671–1903 · 6 polities · 4 edges

  The strait, and the states that lived on it: a thousand years of one passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea changing hands, from Srivijaya to the sultanates that inherited its position and its sea peoples.

• Java and Bali

  669–1755 · 11 polities · 10 edges

  One island's rice, and the seven hundred years of kingdoms that lived on it — an unbroken sequence from the Brantas valley to the division of Mataram, plus the western kingdom that was never part of it and the Balinese court that inherited what Java gave up.

Regions without a thread

These are complete, not unfinished. Their polities have pages and stand in the rankings like any other; no sourced succession edge yet joins two of them, which for most of history is the ordinary case.

• Ancient Egypt

  8 polities

• Hatti and the Highlands

  2 polities

• Elam

  2 polities

• The Post-Roman West

  4 polities

• Italy and the Sea Republics

  3 polities

• The Balkans

  3 polities

• The Zimbabwe Plateau and the Swahili Coast

  2 polities

• Tibet and the Himalaya

  1 polity

• Classical India

  8 polities

• Mainland Southeast Asia

  5 polities

• The Eastern Archipelago

  5 polities

What led away from what

The polities with the most sourced edges leading away from them, in this corpus. This is not a ranking and is not on the rankings page. It measures how densely this site has read around a polity, not how much that polity spawned: a polity leads because its successors have pages here, and one with no edges at all is not a polity that produced nothing — it is one nothing sourced has yet been entered for.

1. Abbasid Caliphate12 out · 3 in
2. Roman Empire8 out · 7 in
3. Great Seljuk Empire8 out · 6 in
4. Byzantine Empire7 out · 7 in
5. Fatimid Caliphate7 out · 5 in
6. Golden Horde7 out · 1 in
7. Seleucid Empire7 out · 1 in
8. Achaemenid Empire5 out · 5 in
9. Delhi Sultanate5 out · 2 in
10. Sasanian Empire4 out · 11 in
11. Mongol Empire4 out · 5 in
12. Almohad Caliphate4 out · 2 in