Vanished Worlds

Disaster · Conquest The first empire the world ever built. It lasted about 180 years, then drought and revolt did what no rival army could.

Assimilation The first civilization on Earth, inventor of the written word, absorbed so thoroughly its own language became a relic of scholars.

Disaster A Minoan trading town on the rim of a supervolcano, evacuated just before the island tore itself apart around 1600 BCE — its frescoes, painted ships and drains left intact under 60 metres of pumice.

Disaster A Bronze Age society of gridded cities and indoor plumbing that left no readable writing and vanished as its rivers shifted.

Disaster An Anatolian superpower that fought Egypt to a draw, then vanished so completely the Bible was almost its only memory.

Assimilation Europe's first great civilization, of bull-leapers and labyrinthine palaces, weakened by a volcano and absorbed by the Greeks who told its myths.

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

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

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

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

Conquest Rome's great rival across three wars, erased so completely that 'Carthage must be destroyed' became a byword for total ruin.

Conquest Alexander's largest successor state, a Greek dynasty ruling Persia and Mesopotamia that crumbled inward until Rome swept up the last of it.

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

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

Assimilation The civilization that taught early Rome its arches and gods, then was swallowed by the city it had tutored.

Disaster A wealthy seaside resort of about 5,000, entombed overnight by a wave of 400°C gas, its wooden furniture and library of papyrus scrolls intact beneath 20 metres of hardened rock.

Disaster A Roman port of 10,000–20,000 people, buried under six metres of ash in a single afternoon and forgotten for 1,700 years.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

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

Disaster A metropolis of pyramids the Aztecs found already abandoned and named 'the place where the gods were created' — its builders and rulers still unknown.

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

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

Disaster Cliff-dwelling architects of the American Southwest who built Chaco's great houses and then walked away during a megadrought.

Overreach · Assimilation The largest contiguous empire that has ever existed. It grew faster than it could be governed, and that is what killed it.

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

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

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

Conquest · Assimilation 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.

Conquest · Disaster 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.

Conquest · Disaster 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest 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.

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

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

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

Conquest · Forgotten 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.

Conquest 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.

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

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

Disaster Martinique's cultural capital — theatres, cafés, 28,000 people — erased in under two minutes by a pyroclastic surge at 8:02 a.m. on 8 May 1902.

Overreach China's last imperial dynasty, founded by Manchu conquerors and ended by a child emperor's abdication and a republic.

Conquest 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.

Overreach The largest contiguous land empire of its age, stretched across eleven time zones, undone by war, hunger, and revolution.

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

Conquest A six-century empire that bridged three continents, dismembered after World War I and abolished by its own republic.

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

Conquest 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.

Disaster A Colombian market town of 29,000, buried in the dark by walls of volcanic mud moving at 50 km/h; three-quarters of its people were dead before dawn on 14 November 1985.

Overreach The world's first communist superpower, dissolved by a stroke of the pen after 69 years and a failed coup.

Assimilation A democracy carved from the Habsburg wreckage, betrayed at Munich, occupied by two empires, and finally split in peace by its own peoples.

Disaster A union of South Slavs that held together under one strongman and tore itself apart in war once he was gone.

Disaster Capital of Montserrat for over 300 years, evacuated in 1996 and buried under volcanic ash — still the official capital of a British territory, with a population of zero.