A closed vocabulary of six

Endings

Every polity here records how it stopped, typed from a closed list of six rather than described in prose, so that it can be counted. 403 of 419 carry one.

The vocabulary was fixed before most of this corpus existed, which is what makes the tally worth reading: it was not shaped to fit the answer. As it stands, 225 polities here were ended by an outside power and 178 stopped some other way — an even split, which is itself the finding.

That second half divides again: 55 dwindled into a formality, 50 came apart over an inheritance, 33 were taken by the men they had hired to protect them, 29 kept the institution but not the family holding it and 11 have no ending scholarship agrees on.

conquest

225 polities

An outside power took it and it did not continue. The plainest case, and the largest single group.

Show the remaining 213

fragmentation

50 polities

Nobody defeated it. Its parts stopped taking instructions — usually over an inheritance.

Show the remaining 38

dynastic replacement

29 polities

The institution survived and the family holding it did not.

Show the remaining 17

gradual absorption

55 polities

Reduced to a client, then to a formality, then to nothing, over decades.

Show the remaining 43

internal usurpation

33 polities

Ended by its own servants: a minister, a guard regiment, a purchased army.

Show the remaining 21

still contested

11 polities

Scholarship does not agree that it ended, or when.

What the vocabulary cannot do

It types the last act, not the process. The Karakhanids are recorded as conquest because the Khwarazmshah removed their last rulers in 1212, after a century in which they had been reduced to a title held under somebody else’s protection. Their chapter says so. A vocabulary fine enough to catch that would be prose, and prose cannot be counted.

An empty by is also doing work. Where a polity was ended by something real that this site has not read a source for — the Kyrgyz who broke the Uyghurs, the Rus who took Atil — the field is left empty and the agent is named in the chapter, rather than given an identifier that resolves to nothing.