[swman]

Dang that just hit me. They were around for 1 THOUSAND years. I'm an Indian-American, and the country I was born in has only been around since 1947 and America since 1776.

In terms of "empires" that were founded, its crazy how young our modern societies are compared to Rome.

[staplung]

Ha, that's nothin'. The ancient Egyptians used a 365 day calendar (with no leap years) so it drifted by .25 days every year. So after 730 years it's essentially backwards (summer solstice is when winter solstice used to be etc.). After that, it starts coming back into alignment again but takes another 730 years to get there. They used their calendar for so long that it nearly had time to roll over like this twice!

[nine_k]

My favorite factoid about ancient Egypt is that Cleopatra, the last pharaon queen of Egypt, lived much closer to the time when humans landed on Moon than to the time when the great pyramids were built.

[bell-cot]

True...but "last pharaon queen of Egypt" may be misleading, for those unfamiliar with the history:

Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek, descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals. Alexander had conquered Egypt about 3 centuries earlier...taking it from the Persians, who had previously conquered the final "native" XXX Dynasty...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom

And giving Egypt's foreign conqueror the title "Pharaoh", if only for domestic consumption, persisted for centuries after Cleopatra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_pharaoh

Though Rome's appointed provincial governors mostly didn't care if the locals called them "Pharaoh".

[ithkuil]

To her credit though she was one of the few Ptolemaic rules of Egypt who even bothered learning the Egyptian language

[bell-cot]

Yes-ish. Quoting a bit from Dr. Bret Devereaux, whose take on Cleopatra VII I linked a bit further down:

> Let’s start with languages, because I think this fact can be presented in a somewhat distorted way. The language of the Ptolemaic court was Greek, initially Macedonian Greek (the Macedonians had a pronounced accent), though Plutarch notes that some of the later Ptolemies had lost their Macedonian accent (Plut. Ant. 27.3-4). Cleopatra, by contrast, was the first of the Ptolemies to bother to learn Egyptian (which should tell you something about the character of Ptolemaic rule; imagine if King Charles was the first English king since George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to learn English). The problem with this fact is that it is incomplete, presenting Cleopatra as a Greek-speaker who learned the language of her people out of sincere devotion, but that’s not what Plutarch says. Plutarch says:

>> She could turn [her voice] easily to whichever language she wished and she conversed with few barbarians entirely through an interpreter, and she gave her decisions herself to most of them, including Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. She is said to have learned the languages of many others also, although the kings before her did not undertake to learn the Egyptian language, even though some of them had abandoned the Macedonian dialect.16

> So let’s unpack that. This isn’t a native speaker of Greek who learned just the language of her subjects, but a spectacularly skilled linguist who learned a lot of different languages, quite regardless of if she ruled the people in question. Running through the list, she evidently learned Ethiopian, the language of the people on her southern border, the speech of the Troglodytae, the people who lived on the coast of the Red Sea (a hinterland of her kingdom). The ‘language of the Hebrews’ here is probably Aramaic rather than Hebrew (which would also cover much of Syria), while the language of the Medes and Parthians might mean both Old Persian and the Parthian language. To which we must add Egyptian, implied by that last sentence; it also seems fairly clear Cleopatra knew at least some Latin.17 This is part of why I find arguments that use Cleopatra’s knowledge of Egyptian as strong proof either for her Egyptian ancestry or deep attachment to Egypt less than fully compelling; she was surely not Parthian and did not have a deep attachment to Parthia, but she learned their language too. Again, there’s not nothing here, but it’s not a slam dunk either.

SO - literally truth that she learned Egyptian. But extremely sketchy to extrapolate from that fact to any sort of "she cared more about her subjects" conclusion.

[ithkuil]

Yeah. I didn't want to imply that she particularly cared about the language of the people she ruled, as much as I wanted to imply that none of her predecessors did

[wolfi1]

Troglodytes? cave dwellers?

[mr_toad]

> imagine if King Charles was the first English king since George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to learn English

After the invasion of England by William the court spoke French for hundreds of years. I don’t know if or when they learnt English.

[rags2riches]

Diocletian's Palace, presently the Old Town of Split, Croatia, was decorated with Egyptian sphinxes because the romans also liked ancient artefacts.

[cal85]

Another one: T-Rex lived much closer to the time when humans landed on the moon than to the time when the stegosaurus existed.

[rocqua]

Also, Cleopatra considered herself Greek (or rather hellinistic) and had the lineage to prove that. She is remembered fondly because she was decently respectful of her Egyptian subjects, but that was mostly in contrast to her predecessors.

[bell-cot]

> She is remembered fondly because...

From accounts by professional ancient historians, that "fact" may mostly be PR spin and "rule of cool" myth. For instance:

https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cl...

[pyuser583]

She’s remembered because of her alliance with Mark Anthony.

[selcuka]

Another fun fact is that mammoths weren't extinct yet when the pyramids were built.

[leononame]

Woah that's insane. I remember there was a reddit thread about these things and one nugget was that the Oxford University was built before the Aztec Empire existed.

[bregma]

Harvard University was founded shortly after Shakespeare's death and decades before calculus was invented.

[nathancahill]

When the Pilgrims landed in North America, universities were already printing books in Mexico City.

[imp0cat]

How else could they move those large boulders? Mammoths, of course! :)

[owlninja]

Somehow, for the first time ever, I recently heard the idea of the 13 month year and I sort of nodded my head in interest. Then I heard someone breakdown the history of calendars and it really blew my mind. Mainly the amount of thought that went into it and the incredible span of time it was revised and discussed!

[brandensilva]

The 13 month per calendar year (Mayan calendar) just makes so much sense as a web developer but somehow as a human it also seems hella mundane to have the same 28 day cycle repeated. Maybe that last day of the year party would make up for it though.

[mnw21cam]

I quite like the hobbit calendar. 12 months of 30 days each, plus 5 (or 6) extra days that don't belong to a month and are celebration days. Mid-year day and the leap day don't have a day of the week, so each date always is the same day of the week.

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar

[bombcar]

Days that aren't part of a month are such a elegant way to solve the problem.

Even now 29 Feb shouldn't exist, it should just be "leap day" and have no numerical significance.

Screw the computers, they can learn to adapt.

[andirk]

The Y29K Bug. That would fix the current "Don't Get Paid for A Day" trick that Leap Years do to salaried people.

[brandensilva]

More celebration days, no complaints here. I wish humanity cared more about such universal celebrations that brought us together.

Of course those days would be very hectic travel wise if the entire population of earth were to migrate around on those days.

[Ma8ee]

The only disadvantage I can see is that you’d have your birthday in the same day of the week every year. If you are born on a Monday, you’ll celebrate on a Monday every year in your life.

[eesmith]

In our current calendar system I don't always celebrate my birthday on my birthday.

[szundi]

This is so true and adds to the prev prev argument

[eternauta3k]

This is an excellent podcast on the history of timekeeping: https://www.hi101.ca/?p=566

[pier25]

Woah. The change happened over multiple generations but they must have noticed, no?

[Ekaros]

The farmers did not care. Nile floods at sometime, then it goes back then you do all the normal things until you harvest. Repeat. So they really did not need calendar for that.

And on other hand the clerks had enough time to make writing system really hard to learn so such thing would make things even better for them...

[riku_iki]

its always hot there, so no wonder they didn't notice winter shift (joking).

[bombcar]

This is actually partially part of it - if you're tracking your activities based on natural phenomena, you don't need to worry about a calendar - just things like "days since full moon" or "weeks since the flood".

[morcus]

If you consider the so-called Byzantines to be Romans (and you should, for lots of reasons), the Roman state was at least a notable regional power all the way from the mid 300s BCE all the way up to 1204 - that's around 1500 years. And it existed for a few hundred years more on either end.

Truly boggles the mind.

[schoen]

I remember someone (maybe Tamim Ansary?) writing that states that claimed to be the direct successor of the Roman Empire existed until 1922, at least in the sense that the Ottoman Empire used some titles and administrative terminology of the Byzantine Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoman...

> After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II, Ottoman sultans came to regard themselves as the successors of the Roman Empire, hence their occasional use of the titles caesar (قیصر qayser) of Rûm, and emperor, as well as the caliph of Islam.

A more direct name claim would be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum

which lasted until 1308.

A different later tradition of claiming to be the Roman emperor is the Holy Roman Empire's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

which used that term after a break of several centuries (so not very continuously with the ancient Roman Empire). But Germans then claimed to be Roman emperors (in some sense) until 1806!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

These aren't as continuous with the ancient Roman empire as the Byzantines, but it's still pretty astonishing to think that various monarchs were still claiming to be (in at least a theoretical legal sense) Roman emperors during the 1800s and 1900s.

[jbandela1]

Also the Czars of Russia. The Romanovs were descending from the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor (Sophia Palaiologina niece of Constantine XI).

So you are right that WWI can be argued to the real end of the Roman Empire!!!

One of these days I am going to a series on “When did the Roman Empire End?” Currently, I have at least 10 plausible dates/events. It turns out to be a very interesting overview of a lot of events and characters in Western History.

[Turing_Machine]

> Also the Czars of Russia.

Yep. "Czar" = "Caesar". Likewise "Kaiser" in the Germanic regions.

The British monarch was called "Kaisar-i-Hind" by Hindi-speaking people, when the subcontinent was controlled by the British.

[PontifexMinimus]

Incidently, the last Caesar (the Czar of Bulgaria until 1946) is still alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

[tsunamifury]

Yea I think it’s a fair argument that the last gasp of the Roman Empire ended in world war 1

[xandrius]

If you forget Italian fascists trying to bring it back, otherwise you could push it to the end of WWII

[kibwen]

Unfortunately, Putin still occasionally invokes Russia as the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire in an attempt to justify his imperial ambitions, so we're still riding this train.

[sorokod]

There is a Russian name for Istanbul - Царьгра́д (Tsargrad). The relevancy of this traditional name in our time can be glimpsed from the media org tsargrad.tv , a Russian equivalent of fox news.

[alfnor]

This video claims 2011

https://youtu.be/j-KxS3L9bcM

[tsunamifury]

Solid point.

[cncovyvysi]

Found the gold player with conq knowledge

[nottorp]

> I'm an Indian-American, and the country I was born in has only been around since 1947 and America since 1776.

Hmm but India has existed in the form of multiple state entities that changed every hundred years or so for much longer than the 1k years.

The Roman empire was also fragmented before its creation, and after. Look at how many Italian states divided the peninsula before the 19th century.

Our modern notion of "country" is only a couple hundred years old.

The Roman empire was the most unified state entity for a millenium. But their idea of unified was different from ours.

[aikinai]

We are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the pyramids.

[josefx]

Cleopatra was also part of a greek dynasty that had been ruling egypt for centuries, since the times of Alexander the Great.

[petesergeant]

The distance of time between us and the Romans is less (by ~1,000 years) than the time between the Romans and the building of the pyramids

[aragilar]

2 thousand if you also include the eastern empire.

[ctoth]

Probably when thinking about these sorts of things the important number is the total number of lived human years, and not the number of chronological years.

[mik1998]

I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a thousand years.

[pteraspidomorph]

Assuming I don't die too early, Portugal will have existed continuously for 900 years during my lifetime (founded in 1143). It was administered by a governor appointed by a spanish king for 60 years at one point, but never stopped being a distinct country.

[neilkk]

This isn't true. The majority of countries are much younger than this. The thousand year old ones are the exceptions.

Many countries have an 'origin story' which implies that they are the same thing as random countries or regions which had similar names/languages/locations but in the vast majority cases these are something between a loose approximation and a myth.

[Manuel_D]

I think the above commenter's point is that "countries" doesn't just mean the formal nation state, but the cultural group. The nation of China was created on 1949. China is much older than 75 years. Likewise, Germanic tribes existed as far back as the Ancient World.

[neilkk]

But the only real connection between 'Germanic tribes' and the modern state of Germany is that people from the latter believe the former to be their forefathers. They are not genetically closer to them than other Europeans, nor do they speak the same language or call themselves the same word or have the same lifestyle or inhabit the same places.

During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most linguistic groups they adopted the national language and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia in Greece. They now have their own country (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced), and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).

All countries have things like this in their history. It's just that generally they are a few hundred years further away.

[Manuel_D]

No, there are continuities in language. It's changed over time, but it's still descended from those older cultures. French has it's roots in Frankish people that settled there in the migration period, with Latin and other influence. It's not just people arbitrarily claiming lineage. There are also specifics in culture and tradition, e.g. Christmas trees date back to pagan Germanic festivals.

[neilkk]

Modern German is no closer to the language of a randomly chosen 'Germanic Tribe' than English, Prussian, Danish, Yiddish, Swedish, Czech, etc.

Most people living in what is now France would have spoken other languages than French well past the time of the Frankish people.

Literally all over Europe, and a lot of the world, people have trees at Christmas.

[vik0]

>During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most linguistic groups they adopted the national language and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia in Greece.

Wow, this is... biased. Sincerely, a Macedonian.

People living in Macedonia (or, to avoid confusion, sigh... North Macedonia), have at one point (and even today, by some), yes, been called Bulgarians, but we've also been called Serbs and Greeks (in northern Greece, since Greece claims that everyone in Greece is Greek, lol). So, you claiming that we have only been Bulgarians, who, judging by the tone of your comment, got brainwashed into thinking we're Yugoslavs and after that Macedonians is absurd, to say the least.

Serbs tried to make us Serbs before Bulgarians tried to make us Bulgarian, and they too failed. You can't make up an entire nation in a top-down manner, the people living in those lands first have to show signs that they consider themselves as a separate nation from the rest in any given region, which the Macedonians have, time and again.

Now, to be fair to Serbs, there's a lot of Serbian cultural influence here, and a lot of people here do understand Serbian more than Bulgarian (even though Bulgarian and Macedonian are, on paper, more similar than Serbian and Macedonian), but still, they failed in trying to convince us to be Serbian rather than what we are now, a separate nation, Macedonian.

Also, the modern idea of a separate, sovereign Macedonian state for the Macedonian nation has existed since at least 1880*

> (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced)

1. And this is how I know you're not a Bulgarian because a true Bulgarian nationalist would claim that Macedonian is not its own language, but that it's only a dialect of Bulgarian.

2. There are a lot of differences on paper from Serbo-Croatian. It's closer to Bulgarian. Still, you don't create a language in a top-down manner. Read "Za makedonckite raboti" by Krste Petkov Misirkov.

> and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).

Not sure how true this is. There are some definitely, but I feel they're more of a very loud minority, or at least not the majority by a long shot. Anybody who is seriously claiming they're direct descendants of some guy who lived over 2 thousand years ago, and completely forgetting about everyone that has walked and mixed in that region between then and now (think of all the Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Jews, Ottomans, and everybody else I'm not mentioning) is to have his mental faculties questioned. This goes not only for my fellow denizens, but for anybody claiming such a historical connection to a long-lost civilization, and especially so for those who are geographically not related (I could name names, but that would further diverge this conversation.) But at the same time to claim that people living in present-day Macedonia (the entire region, not just the state) have no connection whatsoever, is, as well, stupid.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_of_Macedonia... * https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:A_Manifesto_from_...

[neilkk]

Thanks for proving my point!

[derstander]

> I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a thousand years.

This is interesting to me. What does it mean for a country to exist non-continuously? I can understand making the case under some sort of continuity despite dramatic changes in e.g. control of land or type of government. Sort of like a nation-state Ship of Theseus.

But I don't understand how this works under the non-continuous case. If the temporal connection is broken how is it the same entity?

[troad]

I don't think anyone claims it's /exactly/ the same entity (except in a legal sense after a government-in-exile is restored home, such as after World War II). But there's a general sense that a country can in some way be a continuation of a previous one, particularly if it shares the same language and a similar territory.

Compare the borders of something like the Duchy of Bohemia and the modern-day Czech Republic. That's two states over a thousand years apart, separated by centuries of highs and lows, including uncountable foreign invasions and Austrian rule for four centuries. And yet there's something obviously parallel to them - states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.

Europe's natural and linguistic borders are relatively stable, so the emergence of similar states over similar territories in time is not unexpected.

[nindalf]

> a country can in some sense be a continuation of a previous one, particularly if it shares the same language and a similar territory.

This is the sort of thing that’s true, but only if you don’t think about it deeply. People in England definitely spoke English, but that doesn’t mean that we would be able to understand them. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote one of the first major works of literature in English, but 99.9% of Englishmen alive today wouldn’t be able to understand a word of it because of how much English has changed.

> In Gernade at the sege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye. At Lyeys was he, and at Satalye, Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See At many a noble aryve hadde he be.

This book needs to be translated into English for us to understand it, despite it being written in an older form of English.

And obviously, English isn’t a special case. Every language has evolved over time, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to understand a few hundred years later. So sure, we think the people who lived in this city a few hundred years ago are our countrymen, but realistically we wouldn’t be able to speak a word to each other.

[troad]

> This is the sort of thing that’s true, but only if you don’t think about it deeply.

I have a linguistics degree and a passion for historical linguistics that will result in me talking your ear off about Indo-European ablaut, so this is probably the first time in my life I've ever been accused of failing to think deeply about language variation / change!

But I do agree with tsunamifury's comment - what you say is interesting, but rather beside the point. What's relevant is a sense of continuity, not whether the modern speakers would understand the original language or not. (I'm unsure why the latter would be relevant at all?) As Benedict Anderson has argued, a nation is above all an imagined community, so what's relevant is that Czech speakers picture a sense of continuity with the speakers of Slavic dialects in 1000 AD, and not with - say - the speakers of Celtic or Germanic dialects spoken at the same time.

(It's worth noting that your example is fairly unrepresentative, by the by. English is a language with an unusually high rate of change (though I'm surprised you went with Chaucer, which many educated English speakers can largely follow, and not something like Beowulf, which no English speaker could understand without training). It's also worth noting that the Slavic languages are languages with an unusually low rate of change, so a text as old as Chaucer would be relatively much easier for Czech speakers to read.)

[nindalf]

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you thought so. I meant it is a widely held belief among most people. They would feel a stronger affinity for their ancestors from a thousand years ago than for their neighbour, if their neighbour looked different to them.

I meant to say that this idea that the people 1000 years ago being “my people” doesn’t hold up to close inspection. There is no continuity in a meaningful sense if you can’t communicate with them, wouldn’t agree with them on anything even if we could, and couldn’t even find a common activity to do together. They’d be about as alien as a green man from Mars. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to convince people to stop idealising ancestors.

[anon84873628]

England is also a funny example because one of their defining traits is the cultural continuity of the monarchy. Which, as I understand it, is the main justification for why the monarchy still exists today. A person from Chaucer's time transported to London today would have no trouble figuring out who's the king.

[jbandela1]

> Geoffrey Chaucer wrote one of the first major works of literature in English, but 99.9% of Englishmen alive today wouldn’t be able to understand a word of it because of how much English has changed.

That is true for Beowulf, but not for Chaucer. If you just read the words in Chaucer, pronouncing them exactly as you would if your were sounding them out, you will be able to understand pretty much the entire thing after at most a few hours practice.

We did this in my freshman English class and it was a lot of fun.

[neilkk]

> states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.

More like two polities which share a capital city, but barely have either a language or a geography in common. The idea that Bohemia is essentially Czechia has no more reliable historical basis than belief that it belongs to Greater Germany, or to Czechoslovakia.

[nottorp]

Before the european revolutions in the 19th century, the notion of a national state didn't really exist.

It was more about who controls what. Doesn't mean the actual population of the controlled areas changed much.

To give an example from my country's history, Romania has been divided into 3 provinces until very recent (historically speaking) times.

The first unification happened in 1600 when Michael the Brave, the king of the southernmost province, managed to take control of all 3 for about a year. He didn't proclaim himself king of Romania, he called himself king of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania.

100-150 years earlier, Stephen the Great, the king of Moldavia hit Wallachia militarily several times during his reign... not to conquer it and unify but to place a king friendly to him on the throne.

Pretty sure you can find examples like this in any country's history. Germany and Italy for sure, since they've been divided politically into smaller provinces for a thousand years.

[rdlw]

Poland was occupied by Germany during WWII. The people still considered themselves Poles during this time, and the only reason there wasn't a 'Poland' was because of military strength, so it seems silly to say that early 1939 Poland and late 1944 Poland are different countries because of lack of continuity. Certainly, almost all Poles will tell you the country 'began' (it kind of had a soft start) in 966, and not in 1944.

(Note: there was technically the government-in-exile in London, which you could argue maintained continuity, but I don't think it's necessary so I'm leaving that out of this.)

[rocqua]

This (and most other examples here) could just as easily be explained by nationalism. specifically nationalist projects to claim a much older heritage for the current nation state, to legitimize the current nation, and to give it a glorious and hard fought past so people will be proud of their country.

Personally I think a lot of the idea of countries having existed 'for a long time' is the result of these nationalist projects that all occured in the 1800 hundreds

[scns]

> This (and most other examples here) could just as easily be explained by nationalism.

Tribalism?

[JdeBP]

Cue all of the animated YouTube videos about Poland's border changes caused by WW2! (-:

[brabel]

What we call Poland today was part of so many kingdoms, empires, Duchy's it's not even funny. WWII was just the last of a long history of changes.

[GrumpySloth]

You could legitimately argue that it began in 1918 though.

[praptak]

I can speak of Poland which had a discontinuity of 123 years. For most practical purposes Poland 1918 was not Poland 1795. It had none of the military alliances nor administrative obligations, just a new country out of nothing.

The only continuity was in the collective mind of people who identified as Polish and grabbed the opportunity to fight and (re-)establish their own country.

Now if you look at the continuity of ideas, it gets pretty philosophical so we could leave it to philosophers... if it wasn't for the fact that people use the ideas to justify wars. I don't have a confident answer for continuity between "being Polish in 1795" and "being Polish in 1918".

[eesmith]

Was Iceland a country when it was founded? Or later, with the start of the Icelandic Commonwealth? Did it end being a country after the pledge of fealty to the Norwegian king in 1262?

If it was always a country, then go west. When Eric the Red founded Greenland, was it a European country? Did it become a country? After the Norse died, the Danish-Norwegians still claimed sovereignty, and reestablished a colony. The place is now a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark.

[jononor]

Some examples were given as answers, occupations etc. But even when nothing like that happens, in the "continuous" case - a country is still undergoing changes. Laws, language, culture, people, etc are not the same 100s of years later. So even that is kind of a Ship of Theseus type of challenge...

[groestl]

I think non-continuous succession of the same entity comes down to using or grandfathering the law, claiming the same assets, but also honoring liabilities of the predecessor. It's the same as with companies.

[marginalia_nu]

Mostly through people still living in the same place remembering the glory days of old. If you look at Poland and Lithuania, which became Poland-Lithuania, which roughly split so that Poland went into Prussia and Lithuania into Russia; where Prussia lasted for 100 years and ended with WW1 where Poland re-emerged and had their common sense of identity enhanced by Hitler almost immediately re-invading, and Lithuania existing as part of the USSR for some additional 100 years before breaking out and doing their own thing.

There's still a cultural identity in these places. The people living in them weren't replaced or relocated, primarily the flag and regent.

[gerikson]

Prussia lasted until 1947 (de jure) even if it had been subsumed into the German Reich in 1932:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

State of Israel had 2000 years of disconinuity, both the state and the (spoken) language.

[lloeki]

> What does it mean for a country to exist non-continuously?

What does "country" means? State? Geography? Leadership? Ancestry? People?

If you get far back enough the birth of France starts with Gaul which bears more than a passing resemblance with today's France:

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3044d40d-8af2-47aa-81e5-785...

And around 50BC with Vercingétorix surrendering to the Romans at Alésia the tide turns and it gets administratively split up largely to ensure they don't come together as a force against the Roman Empire again. Then as the Roman Empire starts showing cracks, various local powers emerge again:

https://www.alex-bernardini.fr/histoire/images/division-gaul...

Then "France" itself starts to exist since Clovis I united Franks in 481 and around 511 looks somewhat the same as today again if you squint hard enough:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/3b/79/fb3b7985c2063f6a9839c6918...

But then in 840 it gets split in three after infighting among Charlemagne grandchildren, tearing the whole thing apart again:

https://www.lhistoire.fr/sites/lhistoire.fr/files/img_portfo...

Middle one's fate is to dwindle, west one will become France, right one will become Germany.

France's shape will then vary a lot through time, alliances, weddings, and battles, sometimes eaten at on the east, west, north, south, but more or less gravitating around the center part.

But then here comes Prussia in 1870, then WW1, then WW2, culminating in the partial occupation then administration of northern and western France between 1940-42 and a literal fork of France leadership and government: France de Vichy led by Pétain in the south east, France Libre led by De Gaulle exiled in London. In theory the Vichy government was also leading occupied the north of France but in practice it was ruled by Germany.

1942 comes and Germany resolves the conundrum by forcefully merging south with north, France de Vichy becomes devoid of any power (not that it had much before, being a satellite state of Germany), France is de facto a part of Germany, essentially leaving only France Libre as an actual French government, which is not even in any part of the territory!

So again, what does "country" means? State? Geography? Leadership? Ancestry? People? There's definitely some ship of Theseus going on along these 2k years, as well as forks, takeovers, infighting, and whatnot. This abridged version only highlights so much as there's much more intricacy to it, reality is incredibly messy, yet somehow "France" going all the way back to Gaul over 2k years carries some sense.

[helpfulContrib]

Imagine being able to tell stories that were passed down to you, mouth to ear, for 20,000 years!

Sadly, that civilization has perished in the last 100 years.

Still, Australians are teaching the languages in their schools now. Finally. We might still yet hear a whisper...

[gsky]

Indian Empire is older than Roman Empire if i'm not wrong and even America had emires before Europeans colonized. You need to read more history

[nindalf]

At no point was all of modern India under one administrative entity until modern India. Even British India wasn’t one state, it was a patchwork of provinces governed by the British and Princely States. Modern India only came into being in 1948, when the Princes were gently persuaded to take a hike.

But you’re right in the broader sense, that Indian people feel that India has been around for longer even if it hasn’t. That is arguably more important to keeping the nation together than anything else.

[archon1410]

That's not true? Maurya and Gupta empires spanned nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.

[ithkuil]

The Maurya empire lasted 137 years and the Gupta empire for 148 years and their reigns were not one after the other but were 500 years apart.

Now depending how you're counting, and your definition of empire the Roman empire had a continuous history (with radical transformations over time but nevertheless continuous) for 2000 years.

But hey, it all depends on how you define things. Undoubtedly the Indian subcontinent produced an incredibly deep and rich cultural history that spanned thousands of years.

It was just slightly more fractured and dynamic. The Romans objectively held their firm (and often brutal) hold on a lot of land for a lot of time with a continuous identity, in a way that is not just to say that the same common culture continued on across various political arrangements that changed over time. Because I'd that's what we're talking about we could say that the whole of Europe has a kind of cultural union (fostered by the shared religion) that continued on till today.

But the details of how you define things matter of course. Today you wouldn't consider the byzantine empire to be the Roman empire, but ask somebody from the 1300s living somewhere in the aegean see or anatolia and they will tell you they were Romans.

[nindalf]

Not the South of India. And they held areas in the North West that aren’t part of modern India.

[archon1410]

That's also not really true. It included large parts of south India, including present day states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh etc. It only did not include the southern tip.

[saagarjha]

Except for the southern part of India, of course.

[rsynnott]

I mean, most of the Roman Empire wasn’t controlled by Rome for most of Rome’s history. Particularly towards the end (it went on for about a thousand years after they lost Rome), Rome was more of a _concept_ than anything else.

[mminer237]

???

What is the "Indian Empire"? The Mughal Empire? That lasted like 300 years.

[supriyo-biswas]

I guess if we're talking about the Indus Valley Civilization[1] we're looking at a range of 700-2000 years based on how you define the start and end, but even that cannot be considered as equivalent to "India" which was formed as the union of multiple princely states around the general region after the end of colonial rule.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation

[gsky]

Mughals were invaders just like europeans

[cncovyvysi]

He's comparing countries to ancient empires.

Not locations.