Polities

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The Near East

Ancient Egypt

9polities3000–343 BCHas a thread

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.

3000–2686 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, Early Dynastic Period
The two centuries between the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the first building in cut stone: one kingship, working out for the first time what governing the whole Nile valley from a single palace actually required.
Chapters
7 chapters
Ended by
dynastic replacement
Reach
Reach No cited figure
2686–2181 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, Old Kingdom
Five centuries in which a state's entire surplus went into stone, and the period every later Egyptian regime treated as the way things ought to be.
Chapters
8 chapters
Ended by
fragmentation
Reach
400,000 km²
2181–2055 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, First Intermediate Period
A century and a quarter with no single king: the landed governors who had kept the Old Kingdom's nomes running went on running them after Memphis fell silent, and the kingship became a prize two rival lines, one at Herakleopolis and one at Thebes, spent generations fighting over.
Chapters
5 chapters
Ended by
conquest
Reach
Reach No cited figure
2055–1650 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, Middle Kingdom
Egypt reunified from Thebes after a century split in two, and rebuilt around a new capital, a new literary language, and a succession practice designed by a king who did not trust the one that had just gotten his predecessor killed.
Chapters
8 chapters
Ended by
fragmentation
Reach
Reach No cited figure
1650–1550 BC
The Hyksos
A dynasty of Levantine origin ruling the Nile Delta from Avaris, adopting the full pharaonic titulary while it lasted and remembered afterward, by the country it once ruled a third of, as an occupation to be avenged.
Chapters
6 chapters
Ended by
conquest
Reach
Reach No cited figure
1550–1077 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, New Kingdom
Egypt at its greatest territorial extent, holding Nubia and the Levant and corresponding with the other great powers as an equal.
Chapters
10 chapters
Ended by
fragmentation
Reach
1,000,000 km²
1077–728 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, Third Intermediate Period
Three and a half centuries in which Egypt was ruled from more than one throne at once, by kings some of whose own great-grandfathers had arrived as Libyan mercenaries rather than been born to the office at all.
Chapters
6 chapters
Ended by
conquest
Reach
Reach No cited figure
664–525 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, Saite Period
A Delta dynasty that talked its way out of Assyrian vassalage, reunified Egypt more by adoption and marriage than by battle, and spent much of the next century trying to look exactly like the Old Kingdom it could no longer remember firsthand.
Chapters
7 chapters
Ended by
conquest
Reach
Reach No cited figure
404–343 BC𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖
Egypt, the Native Restoration
Sixty years in which Egypt ruled itself between two periods of Persian rule, under three families in three different Delta capitals, ending with the last man to hold the office of native pharaoh fleeing south rather than surrendering it.
Chapters
6 chapters
Ended by
conquest
Reach
Reach No cited figure

Mesopotamia

10polities2334–539 BCHas a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Hatti and the Highlands

3polities1650–590 BCHas a thread

Walk the thread

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, a Cilician highland kingdom it absorbed by treaty rather than conquest, and a kingdom around Lake Van that outlasted the Assyrian army sent to end it. All three were written out of history until their own archives were dug up.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Caliphates

8polities622–1517Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Egypt and Syria

11polities868–1517Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Jazira

5polities890–1409Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Iranian Plateau and the Caucasus

Elam

3polities2150–645 BCHas a thread

Walk the thread

The oldest state on the Iranian side of the Zagros, and the one the rest of Iran was built on top of: a Shimashki king took a Sumerian capital captive, Susa served as an administrative center for two thousand years before Cyrus, and the Achaemenids kept its language, its scribes and its clay.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Iran before Islam

13polities678 BC – AD 651Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Khurasan and Transoxiana

9polities819–1231Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Daylam and the Caspian

5polities651–1349Has a thread

Walk the thread

The mountain and coastal dynasties of northern and western Iran, from the Ziyarid princes of Tabaristan to the Buyid amirs who held the Abbasid caliph himself, to the Nizari fortress-state that ruled without ever holding contiguous ground.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Iran after the Mongols

11polities1314–1925Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Caucasus

10polities302 BC – AD 1859Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Arabian Peninsula

South Arabia

9polities800 BC – AD 1962Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Oman

3polities750–1861Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Najd, the Hijaz and the Gulf

6polities425–1925Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Rome and Post-Roman Europe

The Eastern Mediterranean after Alexander

10polities323 BC – AD 636Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Rome and Byzantium

7polities753 BC – AD 1479Has a thread

Walk the thread

Legendary Rome under its kings, the republic that replaced them, the empire the republic became, the eastern half that outlived the empire 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 six records, and every page here says so.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Anatolia

7polities1071–1922Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Post-Roman West

5polities411–774Has a thread

Walk the thread

What the western provinces became when there was no longer anyone in Ravenna to send taxes to: Gothic, Vandal, Suevic 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

6polities412–1806Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

7polities697–1870

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The British Isles

10polities757–1800Has a thread

Walk the thread

Two islands off the Frankish coast, worked out separately: a Scandinavian settlement carved into the middle of a single Anglo-Saxon kingdom's own rise, a conquest that replaced its ruling class outright, and a northern kingdom that stayed formally independent for eight centuries before a treaty, not a battle, ended it.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Iberia

5polities718–1580Has a thread

Walk the thread

A peninsula reconquered piecemeal, over seven centuries, by Christian kingdoms that spent as much of that time fighting each other as fighting the Muslim south - and that went on, the moment the reconquest was finished, to launch the first colonial empires with a global reach.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Etruria

1polity616–283 BC

A confederation of twelve city-states in the hills north of the Tiber, whose kings once sat on the Roman throne itself - and whose three-century war of attrition with the republic that threw them out ended not in one battle but in a slow, city-by-city exhaustion.

616–283 BCRasna
Etruscan League (Etruria)
A confederation of twelve Etruscan cities whose kings once ruled Rome, who marched to restore an expelled Tarquin and were turned back at the Arsian Wood, and who spent a century and a half after losing Veii worn down city by city to one last stand at the Vadimonian Lake.
Chapters
7 chapters
Ended by
gradual absorption
Reach
Reach No cited figure

Africa and the Maghreb

The Islamic West

14polities757–1659Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Nile and the Horn

5polities850 BC – AD 1974Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

West Africa

7polities700–1903Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Central Africa

6polities1350–1962Has a thread

Walk the thread

The kingdoms of the equatorial forest and the savanna south of it, along the Congo and its tributaries — states with capitals of tens of thousands of people, and almost no written record of their own until outsiders arrived with one.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Zimbabwe Plateau and Kilwa

3polities957–1902

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Swahili Coast

4polities1589–1946

A chain of Indian Ocean port towns from Mogadishu to Mozambique, ruled by their own sultans and governors and fought over in turn by Portuguese viceroys and Omani Imams for the customs revenue that passed through them.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Ancient North Africa

3polities537 BC – AD 40

A Phoenician trading colony that grew into the one Mediterranean power Rome could never simply outlast - fought to a standstill twice, broken on the third attempt, and erased from its own site so completely that a curse was pronounced against rebuilding it - alongside the two Berber kingdoms Rome built up, played off each other, and eventually absorbed in turn: Numidia, an exiled cavalry chieftain's alliance that outlived Carthage by a century before a civil war not really its own ended it too, and Mauretania next door, whose own king betrayed his son-in-law to save his throne and whose great-grandson lost it anyway, over a robe an emperor found too fine for a client king to wear.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Southern African Kingdoms

3polities1816–1894Has a thread

Walk the thread

The Nguni and Sotho-Tswana states of the nineteenth-century interior, built and broken in the same generation that missionaries, traders and colonial officials were writing everything down - a documentary record as rich, for the years it covers, as any polity on this site.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Northern and Eastern Europe

The Balkans

7polities681–1859

Orthodox states that Constantinople converted and then had to live beside, from the peninsula between the Danube and the Aegean to the two tributary principalities just north of the river itself: powers in their own right for stretches of two or three generations, and the ground every empire on every side needed to hold and could not.

Eastern Europe

5polities895–1831Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Rus' and Muscovy

7polities878–1917Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Bohemia

4polities836–1804Has a thread

Walk the thread

The Czech-speaking kingdom of the Přemyslid and Luxembourg dynasties, an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire that briefly held the Imperial throne itself, and the country whose Hussite revolt produced Latin Christendom's first state to break openly with Rome and survive it - grown from a Moravian empire whose own princes' quarrel let the Magyars conquer it outright, and absorbed in turn into the Habsburg Monarchy its own kings had helped build.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Scandinavia

3polities872–1815

The Norse homeland kingdoms - Denmark, Norway and Sweden - whose own dynasties raided and settled half of Latin Christendom before converting, unifying, and periodically binding themselves to each other under a single crown.

The Steppe and East Asia

The Turkic Steppe

9polities209 BC – AD 1331Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Tibet and the Himalaya

5polities100–1912Has a thread

Walk the thread

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Mongol Empire and Its Khanates

6polities1206–1635Has a thread

Walk the thread

The largest contiguous land empire ever assembled, conquered in a single lifetime and partitioned within two generations into four khanates that answered to no single centre again - Ilkhanate Iran, the Golden Horde on the Volga, Chagatai's Central Asia, and the Yuan dynasty in China, whose own line held on in Mongolia for three centuries after Beijing was lost.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Post-Mongol Central Asian Khanates

11polities1438–1876Has a thread

Walk the thread

Eleven khanates ruling by descent from Chinggis Khan or from Timur, scattered from the Volga to the Tarim basin across four centuries after the classic khanates broke up - the Golden Horde's own steppe and river fragments, the Uzbek successor states of Transoxiana, and the last Mongol confederation still independent of a settled empire on either side of it.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

China

20polities221 BC – AD 1912Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

7polities540–1868Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

11polities2332 BC – AD 1904Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

8polities361 BC – AD 648Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Northern India

6polities730–1203

The Gangetic plain between the classical empires and the sultanates, and the powers that fought over it: three great kingdoms contending for one city for two centuries, and the regional states that outlived all three.

The Deccan and the South

15polities271 BC – AD 1793Has a thread

Walk the thread

Peninsular India, which was never governed from the north for long and spent most of its history under dynasties the north barely recorded — a Tamil empire that sent fleets to Sumatra, a city on the Tungabhadra that Persian visitors compared to Rome, and a sultanate that broke into five.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Indian Sultanates

8polities1206–1857Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Southeast Asia

Mainland Southeast Asia

12polities192–1824

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

12polities671–1946Has a thread

Walk the thread

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

7polities669–1686Has a thread

Walk the thread

Six centuries of Hindu-Buddhist kingship on one island's rice, from the Brantas valley through Majapahit's own thalassocracy — plus the western kingdom that was never part of it, and the Balinese court that kept the old religion after Java itself turned Muslim.

Islamic Java

5polities1475–1809Has a thread

Walk the thread

The sultanates that took Java from its Hindu-Buddhist courts - Demak's own conquest of Majapahit's port cities, the brief inland interlude at Pajang, and the last independent Javanese kingdom, Mataram, which besieged Batavia twice and never took it.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Eastern Archipelago

12polities1300–1915

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.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Americas

Mesoamerica

8polities200 BC – AD 1521

The states of the Mexican highlands and the Maya lowlands: cities of a hundred thousand people, a writing system, a calendar accurate over millennia, and no draught animals, no wheeled transport and no iron.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Andes

5polities180–1571

Empire built vertically, on a mountain range where a day's walk changes the crop — and administered without writing, by a state that ran a road network of thousands of miles and kept its accounts on knotted cord.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

The Eastern Woodlands

4polities900–1848

The agricultural and hunting societies east of the Mississippi, whose largest polity, the Iroquois confederacy, organized five nations under a shared council of hereditary sachems without ever developing a state of the Mesoamerican or Andean kind.

Pale ends are dates the sources give as a range.

Oceania

4polities1535–1893

Island kingdoms built and unbuilt an ocean apart from anywhere else in this collection - Tahiti, Tonga, Fiji and Hawaii, each fought over by rival chiefs and unified in turn by one line that outlasted the rest.

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 by287 of 419 polities coded

Revenue from277 of 419 polities coded

Succession by198 of 419 polities coded

Right to rule from383 of 419 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.

419 polities read · 57 regions

The Near East

Egypt, Early Dynastic Period

Egypt, Old Kingdom

Egypt, First Intermediate Period

Egypt, Middle Kingdom

The Hyksos

Egypt, New Kingdom

Egypt, Third Intermediate Period

Egypt, Saite Period

Egypt, the Native Restoration

Akkadian Empire

Third Dynasty of Ur

Dynasty of Isin

Kingdom of Larsa

First Dynasty of Babylon

Kassite Dynasty of Babylon

Mitanni

Middle Assyrian Kingdom

Neo-Assyrian Empire

Neo-Babylonian Empire

Hittite Empire

Kizzuwatna

Urartu

The Community at Medina

Rashidun Caliphate

Umayyad Caliphate

Zubayrid Caliphate

Abbasid Caliphate

Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba

Fatimid Caliphate

Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo

Tulunid Emirate

Ikhshidid Emirate

Ammarid Emirate of Tripoli

Principality of Antioch

County of Edessa

Kingdom of Jerusalem

County of Tripoli

Burid Emirate of Damascus

Zangid Dynasty

Ayyubid Sultanate

Mamluk Sultanate

Hamdanid Dynasty

Marwanid Emirate

Uqaylid Emirate

Mirdasid Emirate

Artuqid Dynasty

The Iranian Plateau and the Caucasus

Old Elam: Awan, Shimashki and the Sukkalmahs

Middle Elamite Kingdom

Neo-Elamite Kingdom

Median Empire

Achaemenid Empire

Macedonian Empire

Media Atropatene

Seleucid Empire

Kingdom of Persis

Greco-Bactrian Kingdom

Parthian Empire

Adiabene

Elymais

Characene

Sasanian Empire

Hephthalite Confederation

Samanid Empire

Tahirid Dynasty

Karakhanid Khanate

Saffarid Dynasty

Ghurid Sultanate

Ghaznavid Empire

Ma'munid Khwarazmshahs

Great Seljuk Empire

Khwarazmian Empire

Bavand Dynasty

Ziyarid Dynasty

Buyid Confederation

Kakuyid Dynasty

Nizari Isma'ili State

Muzaffarid Dynasty