Methodology
This is a museum that makes claims, so it owes you its workings. Here is how every grave is built, what the numbers mean, and where they are weakest.
Sourcing
Every fact on this site traces to a cited source. There are currently 249 graves carrying 554 citations between them; each grave links to where its claims came from. Language models help draft and organize the obituaries, but they never invent a number — a statistic is either lifted from a named source or computed by us from raw inputs we store. If a fact has no source, it does not appear.
The Forgottenness Index
The headline measure is the gap between how great a thing was at its peak and how little it is remembered today. For each grave we take two ranks, computed within its own wing (you cannot fairly compare an empire's territory to a language's speakers, so we never compare across kinds):
- Peak rank — its size at its height (an empire's territory, for instance), as a percentile among others of its kind.
- Remembrance rank — a present-day memory proxy: a blend of its English Wikipedia pageviews over the last twelve months and the number of language editions its article exists in, also as a percentile.
Forgottenness = peak rank − remembrance rank. A thing that was enormous and is now barely read about scores high. A thing remembered in proportion to its former size scores near zero. The index runs from about −1 to +1. It is only computed for graves that have a defensible peak figure; where a peak is genuinely unknown (most dead languages), we leave it blank rather than invent one.
Where the numbers come from
Remembrance inputs — pageviews and language-edition counts — are pulled directly from the Wikimedia REST and API endpoints and stored with the date they were fetched. They can be refreshed at any time; the index recomputes on every build. Dates, territories, and causes of death come from the cited sources on each grave's page.
Known biases — read these before trusting a score
- Anglophone and modern bias. Remembrance leans on English Wikipedia. A civilization vividly remembered in Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi will look more "forgotten" here than it actually is. Blending in the count of Wikipedia language editions softens this, but does not remove it.
- Small samples. With only a handful of graves in a wing, the ranks are coarse and the least-great item can look "least forgotten" purely as an artifact of sample size. The scores stabilize as a wing grows.
- Contested figures. Peak populations of ancient cities and empires are scholarly estimates with wide ranges. Where a number is disputed, the grave says so.
What "death" means
For an empire or a company, death is dissolution. For a language, we mark the death of the last native speaker — which is not the same as zero speakers, since several of these languages now have second-language learners and revival efforts. The grave notes this where it applies. We do not include any living tradition, and we do not stage the death of anything people still hold.