The grave today
Bygone Companies
The Acciaiuoli Bank
The third of Florence's great 'super-companies', banker to the kings of Naples. It failed in 1343 — not from England's royal defaults, like the Bardi and Peruzzi, but from a war it financed at home.
Read the grave →The Wall · ancient to brand-new
One continuous line. 7 of the 351.Akkadian Empire
2154 BCE
Akrotiri
1600 BCE
Teshub
700 BCE
Seleucid Empire
63 BCE
Sasanian Empire
651 CE
The Acciaiuoli Bank
1343 CE
Hudson's Bay Company
2025 CE
2154 BCE1109 BCE64 BCE980 CE2025 CE
How they died
Replaced 127
Conquest 122
Overreach 73
Forgotten 63
Assimilation 56
Disaster 42
Only 42 of 351 graves were destroyed outright. The rest were replaced, absorbed, conquered, or simply forgotten — which is the whole argument of this museum.
The latest to fall
Bygone Companies
Hudson's Bay Company
1670 CE — 2025 CE
North America's oldest company ruled a fur empire for 354 years, then died a department-store death.
Vanished Worlds
Republic of Artsakh
1991 CE — 2024 CE
An Armenian-majority breakaway republic in the mountains of the South Caucasus, 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.
Lost Technology
Google Glass
2013 CE — 2023 CE
A face-mounted computer that promised the future on your eyeball and instead coined the insult 'glasshole'.