What’s changed, what’s the same, and why

Here are Inkhaven’s changes to my empire list from yesterday.  There weren’t that many changes, but they were interesting ones.

500’s BCE (and before) Egypt (Late Period) (Post New Kingdom)

Reason: coolness and hotness

My comments: Someone decided that Egypt needed to be on the list, noticed that the instructions were written in blue and therefore changeable, and edited the start date back a century. This is fair, both in terms of the rules as written and Egypt’s significance. Egypt is indeed extremely cool as a civilization and extremely hot as a place. Having a multi-millennium kingdom on a river in the desert is pretty epic.

Unchanged:

400’s BCE Achaemenid Persia

300’s Macedon

200’s Carthage

100’s Seleucid empire

100-1 BCE Han China

1-100 CE Parthia

100’s Rome

200’s Teotihuacan

300’s Sassanian Persia

400’s Gupta Empire

500’s Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire

600’s Tang China

700’s Umayyad Caliphate

This period of a bit over a millennium remained unchanged. I don’t think that this is because my list is perfect, though it does have somewhat less room for personal taste than blog posts or video games. More likely, people are unfamiliar with ancient and classical history beyond a few big names like Rome which were already on the board. This is the part where I feel the most like I’m in the edited xkcd comic at the top of the post (taken from https://xkcd.com/2501/). Apparently, most people at a blogging residency don’t have strong opinions about specific historic empires. Who’d have thought?

800’s Abassid Caliphate (Changed from Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire)

We absolutely need the glories of Baghdad. Their caliphate will last 600 years, and be remembered ever after as the golden age of Islamic civilization

My comments: Thankfully, there is at least one other person here with strong opinions on historical empires, namely William Friedman (writer of As Our Days). His change does put three Islamic empires in a row, but if there’s any era in which to do so, it’s this one.

Unchanged:

900’s Cordoba

1000’s Song (China)

1100’s Holy Roman Empire (Changed from Khmer)

Who can forget Frederick Barbarossa when discussing empires?

My Comments: This is William’s other change. With Charlemagne removed from the 800’s, it makes sense to put the Holy Roman Empire somewhere else. Khmer is aesthetically awesome (Angkor Wat) but not militarily powerful, so this is a reasonable change. The Holy Roman Empire is a weird political entity, but so are several of the other “empires” on this list.

Unchanged:

1200’s Mongols

1300’s Ming

1400’s Incan Empire (Changed from the Ottomans)

Reaching its greatest area with Topa Inca’s consquest of the last opposing coastal empire in Western South America, the Incas were dope. Have you ever ruled a preindustrial civilization of 15 million without a written language? Yeah, that’s what I thought, loser. All hail the son of the Sun!

My comments: The Inca are probably my favorite empire that I didn’t include on my original list. I would have had to have bumped out the Ottomans or the Ming, and those are major empires. But it is true that having an entire record system based on knotted ropes is extremely interesting, as is inventing the wheel and then choosing not to use it because your country is too mountainous.

Unchanged:

1500’s Spanish

1600’s Mughals

1700’s France

1800’s Britain

1900’s United States of America

2000’s People’s Republic of China

We have another long period with no changes, this one leading up to the present. The Mughals could reasonably be replaced by another European empire, like the Dutch, but no one did this – again, potentially because they don’t have strong opinions. The biggest change I could see being reasonable in the last few centuries is to move the USA to the 2000’s and put the USSR in the 1900’s.

Bonuses (not taking over a century):

2000’s: Amazon “← Not erasing the PRC yet b/c different types” (alongside the PRC)

A master of logistics, scaling, and providing the backbone for the web, Jeff Bezos’s commercial empire has grown unstoppably.

My comments: Very creative, and I like this one a lot. Corporations are not governments, but they serve many of the same purposes that imperial entities did in the past, and organizations like the Dutch and British East India Companies definitely blur the line between them.

1900’s: The New York Times (Alongside the USA)

My comments: This was written on the board in response to a joke someone made, I think implying that the New York Times peaked in the 20^th century the same way America (plausibly) did. It had no attached description. I’m still including it in the list because it’s on the board.

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Here’s the edited map, again made using Claude:

Coming soon: All my Rubik’s Cubes I cannot solve