The reading core

Polities

Everything the site has actually read a source for. Each has chapters, the cited facts and figures, a snapshot map and a rating computed from the figures.

Regions are a browsing convenience, not a claim that the polities inside one were a single civilisation — and not a ranking. A region carries a thread only where sourced edges actually join two of its polities.

A cited extent exists for 66 of 277. A peak population exists for 2. Coverage claims no completeness.

Searches names and regions

The Near East

Ancient Egypt

8 polities

Three thousand years of one country, kept together by a river that floods on schedule. Egypt is the state that other ancient states are measured against — the earliest with a bureaucracy, a surveyed tax base and a settled idea of what a king was for — and it broke apart and reassembled on roughly the same ground more than once.

Mesopotamia

7 polities
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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.

Hatti and the Highlands

2 polities

The powers of the high country north and east of the plain: a chariot empire on the Anatolian plateau that treated with Egypt as an equal, and a kingdom around Lake Van that outlasted the Assyrian army sent to end it. Both were written out of history until their own archives were dug up.

The Caliphates

8 polities
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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

11 polities
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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

5 polities
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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.

The Iranian Plateau and the Caucasus

Elam

2 polities

The oldest state on the Iranian side of the Zagros, and the one the rest of Iran was built on top of: Susa was an administrative capital for two thousand years before Cyrus, and the Achaemenids kept its language, its scribes and its clay.

Iran before Islam

13 polities
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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

14 polities
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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

11 polities
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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

10 polities
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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.

The Arabian Peninsula

South Arabia

9 polities
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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

3 polities
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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

6 polities
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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 Mediterranean

The Eastern Mediterranean after Alexander

10 polities
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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

4 polities
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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

7 polities
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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 Post-Roman West

4 polities

What the western provinces became when there was no longer anyone in Ravenna to send taxes to: Gothic, Vandal and Lombard kingdoms governing Roman populations with Roman law and their own armies, none of them claiming to have replaced the empire and all of them behaving as though they had.

The Frankish World

2 polities
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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.

Italy and the Sea Republics

3 polities

The peninsula that the empire was named after and never governed again, and the cities on it that grew rich carrying other people's wars. Venice and Genoa held quarters in every port that mattered from the Black Sea to Alexandria, fought each other for two centuries over the right to do it, and outlasted most of the kingdoms they supplied.

Africa and the Maghreb

The Islamic West

14 polities
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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

5 polities
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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

5 polities
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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 Zimbabwe Plateau and the Swahili Coast

2 polities

One inland stone capital and one island port, four hundred miles and a river apart, joined by a single commodity: the gold of the plateau, which left Africa through Sofala and Kilwa and paid for both of them.

Northern and Eastern Europe

The Balkans

3 polities

The states between the Danube and the Aegean that Constantinople converted and then had to live beside: powers in their own right for stretches of two or three generations, and the ground every empire on either side needed to hold and could not.

Eastern Europe

5 polities
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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

4 polities
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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 Steppe and East Asia

The Turkic Steppe

5 polities
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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.

Tibet and the Himalaya

1 polity

The plateau, which is high enough that the empires around it could not campaign on it and cold enough that it fed itself. For a century and a half Tibet took territory from Tang China and the caliphate at the same time, and then turned into something no other polity here became: a country governed by its monasteries.

The Mongol World

17 polities
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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

16 polities
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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

7 polities
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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

11 polities
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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.

South Asia

Classical India

8 polities

Maurya, Kushan and Gupta — the subcontinental empires that carried Buddhism out of India and set the terms of its classical culture.

The Indian Sultanates

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

Southeast Asia

Mainland Southeast Asia

5 polities

The rice states of the peninsula — the Irrawaddy, the Chao Phraya, the Mekong and the Red River — which built on a scale nothing in the islands matched and mostly ignored the sea route that made the islands rich, plus the coast between them that did not.

Sumatra and the Peninsula

6 polities
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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

11 polities
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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.

The Eastern Archipelago

5 polities

Sulawesi, Maluku, Borneo and Sulu: the far side of the sea route, where the cloves grew on five islands, the last open port was destroyed for being open, and Islam reached its eastern and northern limits.

Cut across the regions

Cut across the regions

How a polity raised an army, paid for itself, chose a ruler and justified him — coded against closed vocabularies, from a source that addressed the question. Picking a value gathers every polity carrying it, from any region.

Army raised by228 of 277 polities coded

Revenue from226 of 277 polities coded

Succession by134 of 277 polities coded

Right to rule from260 of 277 polities coded

Nothing selected. A value standing at 0 in a dashed outline is in the vocabulary and carried by nothing coded so far — which is a fact about the coding, not about history.

277 polities read · 39 regions

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