Vanished Worlds

Disaster · 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.

Assimilation The first civilization on Earth — Mesopotamia's city-states of Uruk and Ur, inventors of cuneiform — absorbed so thoroughly its own language became a relic of scholars.

Disaster A Minoan trading town on Thera (modern Santorini), evacuated just before the Minoan eruption tore the island 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 like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, with indoor plumbing and an undeciphered Indus script, that vanished as its rivers shifted.

Disaster An Anatolian superpower whose capital Hattusa fought Egypt to a draw at Kadesh, then vanished so completely the Bible was almost its only memory.

Assimilation Europe's first great civilization, of bull-leapers and the labyrinthine palace of Knossos on Crete, weakened by the eruption of Thera and absorbed by the Mycenaean Greeks who told its myths.

Disaster · Conquest 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest · Forgotten 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

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

Disaster A wealthy Roman seaside resort of about 5,000, entombed by Vesuvius in 79 CE under a wave of 400°C gas that preserved it far more completely than Pompeii — its wooden furniture and the Villa of the Papyri's 1,800 scrolls intact beneath up to 18 metres of hardened rock.

Disaster A Roman port of 10,000–20,000 people, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 CE under six metres of ash in a single afternoon and forgotten for 1,700 years.

Conquest · Assimilation · Overreach 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest · Disaster 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.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

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

Disaster The largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas — 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 — 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.

Overreach · Conquest 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.

Replaced · Conquest 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.

Disaster · Overreach For six centuries the lowland Maya raised stone cities and read the heavens more precisely than anyone then alive. Across a hundred years of drought and war — the Classic Maya collapse — they walked out of their great cities and let the jungle take them, though the Maya themselves never left.

Disaster · Overreach A great Andean capital that ruled the southern Lake Titicaca basin for centuries before the Inca, raising the Gateway of the Sun and the cut-stone blocks of Pumapunku at 3,850 m. A prolonged drought broke its raised-field farming, and the city was emptied around 1000 CE.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest 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.

Assimilation · Replaced The first of the great West African gold empires, grown rich on taxing the trans-Saharan trade from its capital at Koumbi Saleh. Absorbed into the rising Mali Empire by about 1240, when Sundiata Keita's forces took the capital.

Conquest 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.

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

Disaster · Overreach For a few centuries it was the largest city in North America — up to 20,000 people, bigger than London. By 1350 CE no one lived there.

Overreach · Assimilation The largest contiguous empire that has ever existed, built by Genghis Khan from 1206. It grew faster than it could be governed, and that is what killed it.

Conquest 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.

Disaster · Conquest 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.

Replaced · Overreach The Shona stone capital that ran southern Africa's gold trade to the Indian Ocean. By the mid-1400s its 18,000 people had walked away and the walls were left standing over nothing.

Conquest 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.

Conquest · Assimilation 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.

Conquest · Assimilation 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.

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

Conquest · Disaster 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.

Conquest · Overreach · Assimilation 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.

Conquest · Disaster 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.

Conquest · Overreach 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.

Conquest 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.

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

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

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest · Forgotten 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.

Conquest · Assimilation 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

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

Overreach China's last imperial dynasty, founded by Manchu conquerors in 1636 and toppled by the 1911 Xinhai Revolution — the child emperor Puyi abdicated in 1912.

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 — two centuries of Romanov rule undone by war, hunger, and the 1917 revolution.

Conquest 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.

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

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Disaster A Colombian market town of 29,000, buried in the dark by walls of volcanic mud — lahars from the Nevado del Ruiz eruption 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, born by treaty in 1922 and dissolved by Mikhail Gorbachev's stroke of the pen in December 1991 — 69 years undone by a failed coup.

Assimilation A democracy carved from the Habsburg wreckage in 1918, betrayed at Munich, occupied by two empires, and finally split in peace by the Velvet Divorce of 1992.

Disaster A union of South Slavs that held together under Tito, then tore itself apart in the wars of 1991–1992 once he was gone — ended by ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica genocide.

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

Assimilation The last fragment of Yugoslavia — the Federal Republic that fought the 1990s breakup wars under Slobodan Milošević, took 78 days of NATO bombing over Kosovo in 1999, then clung on as a state union. In 2006 Montenegro voted to leave by the narrowest of margins, 55.5%, and the name Yugoslavia went out of the world with it.

Conquest 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.

Conquest 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.

Assimilation A six-island Caribbean country created in 1954, split across two island groups 800 km apart and held together inside the Dutch kingdom. The islands never much wanted the shared government, and on 10 October 2010 it was abolished — two became countries, three became Dutch towns.

Conquest 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.