Died of Conquest

The first empire the world ever built. It lasted about 180 years, then drought and revolt 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 empire burned and forgotten until clay tablets gave it back its voice.

The tongue of the Mitanni kings, which left behind the oldest written melody on Earth before it slipped into silence.

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

The largest empire the world had yet seen. Its enemies erased its capital so thoroughly that for centuries people doubted it had existed.

The god who was Assyria itself, who fell silent the very moment his empire was burned to the ground.

The axe-wielding Luwian storm-god who drove a bull-drawn chariot through the thunder, his name dying with the last who spoke Luwian.

The seafaring traders who gave the world its alphabet, conquered city by city until no Phoenicia remained.

The world's first superpower — ruled from a palace its conqueror torched in a single night.

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

Rome's great rival across three wars, 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 Rome swept up the last of it.

The patchwork of Celtic tribes whose last great revolt under Vercingetorix ended at Alesia, leaving Gaul to become Roman.

The last dynasty of the pharaohs, a Greek line that ended with Cleopatra's suicide and Egypt's fall to Rome.

The language of the Kingdom of Kush, written in its own script that we can read aloud but still barely understand.

It did not fall in a day. The last western emperor was a teenager named after the city's founder, deposed without a battle in 476.

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 the decimal zero was set down before Huna invasions tore the empire apart.

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

The last great Persian empire before Islam, drained by war with Byzantium and overrun by the Arab conquest.

The dynasty of Baghdad's golden age, whose House of Wisdom outshone the world until the Mongols drowned its libraries in the Tigris.

A maritime empire that ruled the Malacca trade for centuries, then sank so far from memory historians had to rediscover it.

It built Angkor, the largest pre-industrial city on Earth. Then the water it had engineered for centuries turned against it.

The Roman Empire that outlived Rome by a thousand years. It called itself Roman to the very last cannon-shot.

Neolithic islanders who had lived in the Canaries for over a thousand years with no iron or boats; conquered, enslaved and assimilated by Castile between 1402 and 1496.

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

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

The hummingbird of the south, born armed to slay his sister, who demanded hearts to keep the sun alive.

Lord of the lowest underworld, a blood-spattered skeleton who guarded the bones from which mankind was remade.

The feathered serpent who gave humanity maize and his own blood, mistaken at the end for the conqueror who killed him.

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

The goggle-eyed rain-bringer whose paradise welcomed the drowned, fed by the tears of sacrificed children.

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

An island city of a quarter-million souls, undone less by the armies that besieged it than by the allies it had made into enemies — and a plague it had never met.

The largest empire the Americas ever built, felled in a single year by 168 strangers, a war between brothers, and a plague that arrived before its conquerors did.

The golden sun whose son ruled as Inca, his temple stripped of its plates to pay a captive emperor's ransom.

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 in a single afternoon by a few thousand men carrying a weapon it had never seen: the gun.

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

The aged creator who taught the Maya writing and the calendar, then was erased by the script of his conquerors.

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

The Maya feathered serpent who slithers down the pyramid of Chichen Itza in light each equinox, his worshippers long gone.

The first American language Europeans heard, it gave English 'hurricane' and 'canoe' before its speakers were swept away.

South India's great Hindu empire, whose capital was so vast travelers compared it to Rome — until a single battle left it to be looted for months.

A West African gold empire so rich its emperor's pilgrimage crashed the price of gold across the Mediterranean.

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

A thousand-year merchant republic that ruled the seas, snuffed out without a fight when Napoleon arrived.

Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire — a thousand-year patchwork of German states dissolved at Napoleon's insistence.

The language of Newfoundland's first people, gone with the woman who was the last of her nation.

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

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

An independent Pacific monarchy recognized by the world's powers, overthrown by American businessmen and annexed against its queen's protest.

Shaka's military revolution forged a southern African power that humbled a British army at Isandlwana before being broken and annexed.

A whole family of island tongues wiped out within a single lifetime of British settlement, leaving barely enough words to know how many there were.

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.

A dual monarchy of a dozen nationalities that shattered into pieces the moment it lost the war it had started.

A six-century empire that bridged three continents, 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 the flat disc record in the 1910s and lingered until Edison's company shut it down in November 1929.

A language related to no other on earth, written down from its last two speakers just in time, and silent since 1940.

The militarized German state that unified Germany under its kings, then was legally abolished after its army outlived its monarchy.

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

For three decades the gold standard of audio fidelity, beaten not by any rival's quality but by the cassette's sheer convenience.

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

For 145 years Gimbels was Macy's great rival; 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 1985 and never recovered.

A whole university's computing might sit in one room; the terminal on every desk 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 died in a Turkish village in 1992.

Philips spent four years making the cassette digital; almost nobody bought it, and Sony's MiniDisc did no better in the same race.

It 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 died as an independent company when its cost structure could not survive Dell.

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.

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

The 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.

A 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.

Five of the world's biggest camera makers built it together in 1996; digital caught up fast enough to make it irrelevant within six years.

Born cheap and light, 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 that users renamed 'Worthless Application Protocol'.

The teacher's remote-control blackboard for three decades, retired when PowerPoint arrived on a ceiling-mounted projector.