Died of Conquest

The first empire the world ever built. Sargon of Akkad forged it around 2334 BCE; about 180 years later, drought and the Gutians did what no rival army could.

The radiant queen of the Hittite heavens who crowned every king, her light extinguished when her empire turned to ash.

The oldest written Indo-European language, lost when its capital Hattusa burned around 1180 BCE and forgotten until clay tablets gave it back its voice.

The gold-masked warlords of Bronze Age Greece — Agamemnon's world, the Lion Gate, the first written Greek. Around 1100 BCE the palaces burned, the writing was forgotten, and Greece fell into four centuries of darkness.

The tongue of the Mitanni kings, whose Hymn to Nikkal is the oldest written melody on Earth — before the cuneiform fell silent.

The storm-god who toppled his own father Kumarbi to rule the Hurrian and Hittite heavens, thrown down at last by the collapse of the empires that named him.

The largest empire the world had yet seen. Babylonians and Medes erased its capital, Nineveh, so thoroughly that for centuries people doubted it had existed.

The god who was Assyria itself, who fell silent the moment his empire was burned to the ground — Assur sacked in 614 BCE, Nineveh in 612 BCE, his cult collapsing with the state.

The axe-wielding Luwian storm-god who drove a bull-drawn chariot through the thunder, his Neo-Hittite kingdoms falling to Assyria and his name dying with the last who spoke Luwian.

The gate of the gods — Hammurabi's law and Nebuchadnezzar's blue-glazed Ishtar Gate and city walls, the greatest city on earth. Cyrus walked in without a fight in 539 BCE, and the centre of the world slowly emptied into dust and Scripture.

The seafaring traders of Tyre and Sidon who gave the world its alphabet, conquered city by city until Alexander the Great's siege of Tyre in 332 BCE left no Phoenicia behind.

The world's first superpower — its ceremonial capital Persepolis torched by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, a single night that ended two centuries of Persian rule.

Alexander conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen — Greece to the Punjab — in under a decade, then died in Babylon in 323 BCE at thirty-two, with no heir who could hold it. It came apart over his unburied body.

It conquered the Warring States and built the first unified Chinese empire, standardising its script, money, and roads. It fell apart within four years of the death of the emperor who made it.

The first empire to unite nearly all India, whose greatest king Ashoka renounced war after Kalinga and whose last was murdered by his general Pushyamitra Shunga.

The most prized metal in the Roman world — worth more than gold. It produced a dark, lustrous patina unique in antiquity. After Rome sacked Corinth in 146 BCE, Romans wrote about it as something they could no longer make. Not a single confirmed example survives.

Rome's great rival across three Punic Wars and the home city of Hannibal, erased so completely that 'Carthage must be destroyed' became a byword for total ruin.

Alexander's largest successor state, a Greek dynasty ruling Persia and Mesopotamia that crumbled inward until the Roman general Pompey swept up the last of it in 63 BCE.

Recovered in 1901 from a Roman shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, this geared bronze computer from roughly 100 BCE predicted eclipses and tracked the planets. Nothing of comparable mechanical complexity appeared anywhere on Earth for another 1,400 years.

The patchwork of Celtic tribes whose last great revolt under Vercingetorix ended at Alesia in 52 BCE, leaving Gaul to Julius Caesar's conquest and Roman rule.

The last dynasty of the pharaohs, the Greek line of Ptolemy that ruled from Alexandria until defeat at Actium, Cleopatra's suicide, and Egypt's fall to Rome.

The language of the Samnites, a Sabellic cousin of Latin: Vesuvius buried Pompeii and, in the same ash, sealed the last graffiti anyone ever scratched in Oscan.

The first great steppe empire, which trapped a Han emperor for seven days and forced China to buy peace with silk and princess-brides. Han offensives and an internal split broke it; the southern half was absorbed and the rest driven west into the dark.

For nearly three centuries it was Rome's equal in the east — at Carrhae in 53 BCE it destroyed Crassus's legions and kept the eagles, the only eastern power to wipe out a Roman army and hold its standards. In 224 CE Ardashir I killed its last king Artabanus IV at Hormozdgan and took everything.

The Nubian kingdom that ruled Egypt as the pharaohs of its 25th Dynasty and then outlasted it by a thousand years, raising two hundred pyramids at Meroë. Aksum sacked it around 350 CE — and its own script still cannot be fully read.

King of the Gods of imperial Egypt and master of Karnak, the largest religious building ever raised. His oracle at Siwa hailed Alexander the Great as a god's son; he outranked pharaohs, and ended with the old religion.

The Egyptian sun himself — sailed nightly through the underworld and rose again each dawn for three thousand years. When the edict of Theodosius I closed the pagan temples in 391 CE, the sun kept rising, and no one prayed to it again.

An Anatolian mother goddess, the Magna Mater, shipped to Rome as a black stone in 204 BCE and installed as an official state cult. Her public worship was ended by the anti-pagan edicts of Theodosius I in 391–392 CE.

Greek goddess of love, beauty and desire, worshipped from Cyprus to Rome and claimed by Caesar's family as their ancestress. Her sanctuary at Paphos held unbroken cult until 391 CE, when Theodosius I outlawed pagan worship and the temples closed.

The oracle-god of Delphi, whose Pythia was consulted by the whole Greek world before war and colony. When Theodosius I turned Rome Christian his sanctuary was closed and his oracle fell silent in 393 CE.

Patron goddess of Athens, wisdom and war in one figure, the Parthenon raised in her name on the Acropolis. When Rome turned Christian her temples were closed and her worship silenced.

The sea-god every Greek sailor feared, brother of Zeus and Hades, lord of storms, earthquakes and horses. His temples emptied when Rome turned Christian and the sacrifices stopped.

King of the Greek gods, thunder in his hand, the Olympic Games sworn in his name at Olympia from 776 BCE and Pheidias's statue of him counted among the Seven Wonders. The emperor Theodosius I banned his games in 393 and his temple was burned; the sky-father fell silent.

The soldiers' mystery god of the tauroctony — Mithras slaying the bull — worshipped in windowless caves across the Roman frontier. For three centuries he was a serious contender for the empire's soul; then the empire turned Christian and Theodosius I walled him up.

The language of the Kingdom of Kush, written in its own script — phonetically deciphered by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1909, so we can read it aloud but still barely understand it.

The steppe horsemen who made both Romes pay tribute in gold. Within twenty years of Attila's death the empire that terrified Europe had vanished.

It did not fall in a day. The last western emperor, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus, was deposed without a battle by the Germanic commander Odoacer in 476.

The many-skilled god of the Gauls and the Irish — likely the deity Caesar called the Gauls' Mercury, with cities from Lyon to Carlisle carrying his name. In Irish myth he slew the Fomorian Balor with a sling; today he survives mostly as a date on the calendar: the festival of Lughnasadh and Lúnasa, the Irish month of August.

The jackal god who weighed the hearts of the dead against the feather of Maat and oversaw the embalming of Egypt. He died with the religion that needed him, when the last temples of the old gods were shut.

The falcon sky-god whose living image every pharaoh claimed to be. When Egypt's temples were shut under Christian Rome, he was silenced along with the rest of his gods.

Worshipped from the Nile to Roman Britain for more than two thousand years. The silence began c. 537 CE, when Justinian shut her last temple at Philae.

Egypt's god of the dead and of resurrection, who promised eternal life to anyone who knew his name. His own cult could not be raised again: when Justinian closed Philae's temple in 537, the last god of old Egypt went into the dark he ruled.

The Celtic speech of Vercingetorix and the druids, conquered by Caesar and worn away by the Latin that became French.

India's classical golden age, where Aryabhata set down the decimal zero before Huna invasions tore the empire apart.

The sailors' tongue that gave the world its alphabet, silenced in its Carthaginian form when Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE and ground its great rival into dust.

The last great Persian empire before Islam — founded by Ardashir I in 224 CE, drained by war with Byzantium, and overrun by the Arab conquest that killed its last shah Yazdegerd III in 651.

The first caliphate, which conquered Sasanian Persia and half of Byzantium in thirty years. It ended in the assassinations of the First Fitna, with Ali's death in 661 passing power to the Umayyads.

The 3rd-century prophet Mani ranked it among the four great powers of the world, beside Rome and Persia. When Islam redrew the Red Sea trade routes, the gold that fed it dried up; two centuries later the rebel queen Gudit is said to have sacked the capital and left it to the ruins.

The Slavs' thunder-god, sworn on by warriors and raised over Kyiv. When Vladimir chose Christ in 988, they dragged Perun's silver-headed idol through the streets and threw it in the Dnieper, and the people wept on the banks.

The lingua franca of the Silk Road, carried by the merchants of Samarkand and Bukhara from China to Byzantium for the better part of a thousand years. Persian and Turkic replaced it after the Arab conquest, and by about 1025 it had stopped being spoken.

The Allfather — god of war, wisdom and the hanged, who gave an eye at Mímir's well for knowledge and hung nine nights on the world-tree Yggdrasil. Christ's kings tore down his temple at Uppsala; now he survives mainly as Wednesday, the day that still carries his name.

The thunder god of the Vikings, god of the common people, whose hammer Mjölnir was the most-worn amulet and whose name was the most-given name of the age. Christianity switched him off.

An eleven-metre water-powered clock tower built in 1088, with an escapement six centuries ahead of Europe. When the Jurchen sacked Kaifeng in the Jingkang Incident of 1127 they carted it off, could not rebuild it, and the technology was lost in China for nearly a thousand years.

The Saharan Berber empire that founded Marrakesh and ruled from the Senegal River to the Ebro in Spain. The Almohads swept it away in 1147.

It left no text of its own — only the names of hills and rivers like Carlisle and Penrith, and the yan tan tethera sheep-counting numbers still chanted in Cumbria nine centuries after the language fell silent.

The Isma'ili Shia caliphate that founded Cairo and al-Azhar and challenged the Abbasids for the leadership of Islam. Saladin abolished it in 1171 and restored Sunni rule.

Sold at twice its weight in gold, it was the most valuable agricultural product of the ancient world. Pliny the Elder records that Jewish defenders destroyed the orchards rather than let Rome take them. In 2024 the Hebrew University grew a tree from a thousand-year-old seed — but the tree had none of the famous scent.

A weapon that burned on water and could not be doused, brought to Constantinople by the engineer Callinicus around 672 CE. The Byzantine Empire guarded its recipe so carefully that when the city fell to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the secret fell with it — and it has never been reproduced.

The Tangut Silk Road empire that invented its own script and held its ground for nearly two centuries. The Mongols annihilated it in 1227 and the script went unread for 700 years.

The dynasty of Baghdad's golden age, whose House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) outshone the world until Hulagu Khan's Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 and drowned its libraries in the Tigris.

The everyday Romance speech of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain — Latin's child, written in Arabic letters, surviving best in the kharjas, the little Romance refrains tacked onto Arabic love poems. Caught between Arabic and the Castilian of the conquerors, it was gone by about 1300.

A Buddhist maritime empire that ruled the Strait of Malacca from Palembang for centuries, until Majapahit sacked its capital in 1377 and it sank so far from memory historians had to rediscover it.

Chief thunder god of the Balts, the last pagans in Europe. His sacred oaks and the perpetual fire tended in his honour were felled and put out when Grand Duke Jogaila converted Lithuania, the last pagan state on the continent, in 1387.

The Old French of the Jews of medieval France, written in Hebrew script — the vernacular the great commentator Rashi used to gloss hard words in the la'azim of his commentaries. The expulsions of French Jewry broke its communities; after the final one in 1394, the language did not survive the scattering.

It built Angkor, the largest pre-industrial city on Earth. Then the water it had engineered for centuries turned against it, and a weakened capital fell to Ayutthaya in 1431.

The Roman Empire that outlived Rome by a thousand years, until Mehmed II's guns breached Constantinople in 1453. It called itself Roman to the very last cannon-shot.

The largest Andean kingdom before the Inca, ruling the north coast of Peru from Chan Chan, the biggest mud-brick city in the Americas. The Inca conquered it around 1470, captured its ruler Minchançaman, and absorbed its goldsmiths. At Huanchaquito-Las Llamas the Chimú left the largest known mass child sacrifice in the Americas — 137 children.

The written language of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of the middle Nile — Makuria above all — for seven hundred years, set down in a Coptic-derived alphabet and recovered largely from the dry mound of Qasr Ibrim. The kingdoms fell to Islam and Arabic, and the last dated document in the language is from 1484. After that, silence.

Neolithic islanders who had lived in the Canaries for over a thousand years with no iron or boats; under Mencey Bencomo they annihilated a Spanish army at the First Battle of Acentejo in 1494 — 'La Matanza' — before Castile conquered, enslaved and assimilated them between 1402 and 1496.

The state language of the vanished Western Xia empire, written in thousands of fiendishly intricate characters and silenced by Genghis Khan's last campaign.

The Mongol khanate that held the Russian principalities in tribute for two centuries. It shattered into rival khanates and was finished off in 1502.

The serpent-skirted Aztec mother of the gods, killed by her own children, who conceived the sun-god Huitzilopochtli from a ball of feathers.

The hummingbird of the south, Aztec god of war born armed to slay his sister, who demanded human sacrifice to keep the sun alive.

Aztec lord of Mictlan, the lowest underworld — a blood-spattered skeleton who guarded the bones Quetzalcoatl stole to remake mankind.

The feathered serpent who gave humanity maize and his own blood, mistaken at the end for the Spanish conqueror whose seizure of Tenochtitlan in 1521 ended his cult.

The smoking mirror who saw every heart, lost a foot to the earth-monster Cipactli, and watched empires rise to fall at his whim.

The goggle-eyed Aztec rain-bringer whose paradise welcomed the drowned, fed by the tears of sacrificed children — until the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521 ended his cult.

The Aztec flayed lord who wore the skin of the sacrificed as new spring growth wears the dead husk of seed.

The Aztec sword: a wooden blade edged with obsidian sharper than steel, said to behead a horse in one blow. Spanish steel made it obsolete in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, and the last real one burned in a Madrid fire in 1884 — so not even an original survives.

Tenochtitlan, an island city of a quarter-million souls, undone in 1521 less by Cortés's armies than by the allies it had made into enemies — and a smallpox it had never met.

A Hindu-Buddhist sea power founded in 1293 that claimed 98 tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea at its mid-14th-century peak under Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada. Civil war and Islamic coastal sultanates hollowed it out, and its capital fell to Demak around 1527.

The largest empire the Americas ever built, felled in a single year when Francisco Pizarro's 168 men seized the emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 — amid a war between royal brothers and a plague that arrived before its conquerors did.

The golden sun whose son ruled as Inca, his Coricancha temple in Cusco stripped of its gold plates to ransom the captive emperor Atahualpa.

The creator who rose from Lake Titicaca to make the sun, moon, and men, then walked west across the sea and never returned.

An empire larger than Western Europe, broken at the Battle of Tondibi in 1591 by a few thousand Moroccans carrying a weapon it had never seen: the gun.

The long-nosed Maya god of rain who split the clouds with his lightning-axe, fed by the bodies cast into cenotes, the sacred sinkholes.

The aged Maya creator known to scholars as God D, who taught writing, the calendar, and cacao, then was erased by the script of his Spanish conquerors.

The jaguar-clawed Maya moon goddess of childbirth and weaving, whose shrine on the island of Cozumel drew pilgrims across the sea.

The Maya feathered serpent god of Chichen Itza, cognate with Quetzalcoatl, who slithers down his pyramid El Castillo in light each equinox while its 365 steps still count the solar year.

The first American language Europeans heard — the Arawakan tongue Columbus met in 1492 — it gave English 'hurricane' and 'canoe' before its speakers were swept away.

The Inca knotted-cord recording system. Spain ordered it destroyed in 1583, and within a generation the trained khipukamayuq readers were dead. About 900 khipu survive in museums worldwide. The numeric ones are partially decoded. The narrative ones — the histories, the stories — are completely mute. There is no Rosetta Stone.

The language of the Jin dynasty that ruled northern China, given its own script by imperial order in 1119. Within five centuries it had evolved into Manchu and lost its name, when Hong Taiji renamed the people in 1635; the last inscription dates to 1526.

South India's great Hindu empire, whose capital Hampi was so vast travelers compared it to Rome — until the Battle of Talikota in 1565 left it to be looted for months.

The amanteca built shimmering mosaics from quetzal and cotinga feathers for the Mexica court. The 1521 conquest broke the guild, the tribute, and the supply of birds. The technique died with the last masters, and the few surviving pieces have never been truly matched.

A West African gold empire so rich that Mansa Musa's 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca crashed the price of gold across the Mediterranean.

The only West Baltic tongue that ever reached writing — conquered by the Teutonic Knights, then printed its own catechism in Königsberg so its speakers could be converted away from it.

The dynasty that made Iran Shia and rebuilt Isfahan into a showpiece capital, broken when Afghan invaders besieged that capital in 1722.

A thousand-year merchant republic of doges that ruled the seas, sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade of 1204, and was snuffed out without a fight when Napoleon arrived in 1797.

One of the world's first public banks, founded in Genoa in 1407 to consolidate the republic's war debt into tradeable shares — among the earliest government bonds. It governed colonies from Corsica to the Crimea and banked for Columbus and Charles V, until Napoleon dissolved it in 1805, after 398 years.

Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire — a thousand-year patchwork of German states, from Charlemagne's crown in 800 to Francis II dissolving it in 1806 at Napoleon's insistence.

The language of Newfoundland's first people, gone in 1829 with Shanawdithit, the last of her nation.

Hunter-gatherers of Newfoundland who painted their bodies, canoes and tools with red ochre — one suggested origin of the term 'Red Indians' — gone as a distinct people by June 1829, when Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis in St. John's.

A Hindu-Cham maritime kingdom that held the central Vietnamese coast for over a thousand years. The Vietnamese ground it down south by south until the fall of Vijaya in 1471 and the final annexation in 1832 left nothing of the state.

The empire that built the Taj Mahal and once ruled a quarter of humanity, hollowed out until a British company pensioned off Bahadur Shah II, its last emperor.

Easter Island carved a script no other Pacific culture had. Then the Peruvian slave raids of 1862–63 and the smallpox that followed killed the people who could read it within a few years. Twenty-six inscribed objects survive, and after 150 years of attempts, no one can decipher a line of them.

An independent Pacific monarchy recognized by the world's powers, overthrown in 1893 when American businessmen and US Marines deposed Queen Liliuokalani; annexed by the United States in 1898.

Shaka's military revolution forged a southern African power that humbled a British army at Isandlwana in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 before being broken and annexed into Natal.

The tongue of a people who kept a covenant of peace. After the 1835 invasion of their islands killed or enslaved them, the language faded with the survivors; its last fluent speaker, Hirawanu Tapu, died around 1900. The people endure and are learning it again.

The gold-rich Akan empire united by the Golden Stool, which beat back the British for most of a century before being annexed into the Gold Coast colony in 1901.

A whole family of island tongues wiped out within a single lifetime of British settlement, fading with Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905 and leaving barely enough words to know how many there were.

Fidelia Fielding, last speaker of this Eastern Algonquian language of Connecticut, filled four diaries with sounds no one else could still hear by her death in 1908; the notebooks are now the only way back in.

A band of perhaps 400 in the California foothills who hid from settlers for 44 years; the last survivor, Ishi, walked out of the hills alone in 1911 and died in 1916.

The 1867 dual monarchy of a dozen nationalities under Franz Joseph, which shattered into pieces the moment it lost the First World War it had started.

A six-century empire that bridged three continents — seizing Constantinople in 1453 — dismembered after World War I and abolished by its own republic.

The first commercial recorded-sound medium held the market for three decades, then lost to Emil Berliner's flat disc record in the 1910s and lingered until Edison's company shut it down in November 1929.

The British-built oil company — El Águila — that pumped most of Mexico's petroleum when Mexico was the world's number-two producer. On 18 March 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated it, handed the wells to a new state company, Pemex, and made the date a national holiday.

A language related to no other on earth, written down from its last two speakers in 1930s Louisiana by the linguist Morris Swadesh, and silent since 1940.

A company with its own flag, police, stamps, and money that governed Manica and Sofala — a slab of central Mozambique the size of a small country — on behalf of mostly foreign shareholders. Its fifty-year lease ran out in 1942, when Salazar's government declined to renew it and simply handed the territory back to Portugal.

A railway company that was secretly an empire — 340,000 employees, seventy-one subsidiaries, coal and steel and airlines and spies across a territory two and a half times the size of Japan, its Asia Express the fastest train in Asia. When Japan lost the war, the Soviets carried it away as scrap, and it simply ceased to be.

The militarized German state that, under Bismarck, unified Germany into an empire in 1871, then was legally abolished in 1947 after its army outlived its monarchy.

The largest company in Europe and the chemical engine of the Third Reich — it made the synthetic fuel, the synthetic rubber, and the Zyklon B, and ran a slave-labour plant at Auschwitz. Its directors stood trial at Nuremberg, and the Allies did not let it survive the war they had built it to fight — they took it apart on purpose.

An isolate with a grammar reserved for the voices of cannibals in its winter tales — and, after its last fluent speaker Nancy Raven died in 1957, no one left to tell them.

Mbabaram's word for dog was dug, near-identical to English by pure coincidence — a standing reminder that two tongues can match without sharing a single ancestor. Its last fluent speaker, Albert Bennett, died in 1972.

Nomadic hunters of Tierra del Fuego whose ~4,000 people were reduced to about 100 by 1930 through a bounty-funded genocide by sheep ranchers.

Founded in 1898 by Alfredo da Silva around the chemical works at Barreiro, it became the largest industrial group in Portuguese history — banks, shipyards, tobacco, insurance, around a twentieth of the national economy in one family's hands. The 1974 revolution nationalised the lot and broke it up. The CUF name survives only on unrelated successors.

One of the largest mining companies on earth, owner of the world's biggest copper pit and master of the state of Montana. Allende's Chile nationalised its copper mines in a single unanimous vote in 1971, and ARCO swallowed the gutted remnant six years later.

From 1917, for sixty years, one company owned every diamond in Angola and ran its corner of the country as a private state, on the forced African labour the Portuguese called xibalo. When Angola won independence, the new state took the diamonds back through its own company, Endiama, and dissolved the firm that had been the colony's richest export.

Born as AEG's Magnetophon in 1935 and for three decades the gold standard of audio fidelity, beaten not by any rival's quality but by the cassette's sheer convenience.

A click language of the Angolan desert — the only Angolan branch of its family, spoken by a few dozen herders and fishermen called the Kwepe. They shifted to the Bantu language Kuvale, and by 1981 no fluent speakers could be found.

RCA spent seventeen years building SelectaVision, a vinyl-record video player it launched in 1981 into a market VHS already owned, and lost about $580 million in three years.

Founded by Adam Gimbel in 1842, for 145 years Gimbels was Macy's great rival — a feud immortalised in Miracle on 34th Street — until in 1986-87 its British tobacco-company owner decided it wasn't worth saving and closed every store.

"When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen" — until America's second-largest brokerage pleaded guilty to 2,000 counts of fraud in a 1985 check-kiting scandal and never recovered.

Laura Fish Somersal told a linguist everything she remembered, then died in 1990 knowing no one was left to answer back.

A whole university's computing might sit in one room; the terminal on every desk — DEC's VT100 and its kin — was just a window into it: keyboard, screen, nothing else.

It had around 80 consonants and barely two vowels — one of the most intricate sound systems ever spoken. The last man who held it, Tevfik Esenç, died in a Turkish village in 1992.

Philips and Matsushita made the cassette digital in 1992; almost nobody bought it, and by 1996 it was dead — Sony's MiniDisc did no better in the same race.

It introduced the GIF format and connected millions to the online world a decade before the web — then lost the consumer market to AOL and was quietly absorbed in 1998.

It out-IBM'd IBM in its first year and became the world's biggest PC maker, then — unable to survive Dell on cost — was swallowed by Hewlett-Packard in 2002 and ceased to exist.

Sony won every technical review and lost the market anyway — 12 companies made Beta hardware in 1984 versus 40 for VHS, and the arithmetic was conclusive.

Sony's 1987 format that mastering studios trusted for a decade — lossless, exact to copy — was kept out of living rooms by price and a copy-protection fight.

Russia's largest oil company and its most valuable firm, built cheaply out of the post-Soviet fire sale. When its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed the Kremlin, the state used back-tax claims to break it, seized its core unit Yuganskneftegaz for the state oil company Rosneft, and liquidated what was left.

The Chechen republic that fought Russia to a standstill in 1996 and won a few years of de facto independence. Russia came back, took Grozny in 2000, and ground it out. By 2007 even its exiled leadership had dissolved it into the pan-Caucasus Emirate.

Sony and Panasonic's first digital video format that fit in a shirt pocket — every wedding and holiday from 1996 to 2007 ran through a cassette the size of a matchbox.

For about a decade the Tamil Tigers ran a de facto state from Kilinochchi across northern Sri Lanka — police, courts, taxes, a bank, even a navy. The Sri Lankan army destroyed it on the beaches of Mullivaikal in May 2009, killing tens of thousands of trapped civilians and the LTTE's founder Velupillai Prabhakaran.

A Great Andamanese tongue of the Andaman Islands, perhaps tens of thousands of years old. Its last speaker, Boa Sr, spent her final years unable to speak it with anyone.

Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Minolta and Nikon built it together in 1996; digital caught up fast enough to make it irrelevant within six years.

Born cheap and light with the Asus Eee PC, the netbook carved out a fifth of the laptop market before the iPad arrived and collapsed it in two years.

The mobile web before the mobile web — a slow, costly, stripped-down imitation of the internet, renamed 'Worthless Application Protocol' by users and made obsolete by the iPhone's full-HTML browser in 2007.

3M's remote-control blackboard for the teacher from 1962, a classroom mainstay retired in 2015 when PowerPoint arrived on a ceiling-mounted projector.

An Armenian-majority breakaway republic in the mountains of the South Caucasus, declared in 1991 and governed from Stepanakert, unrecognised by any country for over thirty years. A two-day Azerbaijani offensive in 2023 emptied it of almost its entire population, and on 1 January 2024 it formally ceased to exist.