On the margins of history: The vanishing of nations

As a result of historical occurrences like the fall of empires or contemporary dangers like climate change, “On the Margins of History: Where Nations Disappear” describes nations and states that have vanished. Examples range from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed after World War I, to low-lying island states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, which may become submerged due to rising sea levels. This phrase can also be used to describe the destruction of a country’s statehood due to environmental, political, or demographic factors.

Some (Chinese, Indians, Egyptians) have more or less successfully survived from antiquity to the present day. Others (the Aztecs, the Byzantines) left the chessboard of history with great fanfare. And then some seemed to be doing well, and then disappeared somewhere. You will find out more about this in the article.

Africa and the Middle East

The Phoenicians

The state of Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea was conquered by Assyria in the 8th century BC. However, thanks to the skills of navigation, the Phoenicians managed to establish colonies along the entire Mediterranean coast. One of them was Carthage, the future powerful rival of Rome. Now the inhabitants of Malta consider themselves descendants of the Phoenicians.

The Hittites

The kingdom of the Hittites occupied the territory of modern Turkey and for a long time fought with Egypt for Syria in the XIV–XIII centuries BC. The state weakened after the raids of the peoples of the sea in the 12th century BC. — the warlike tribes who arrived on the shores of the Hittites and Egyptians from the Aegean Sea (the same peoples of the sea besieged and eventually destroyed Troy). What remained of the Hittite kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians.

The Assyrians

The ancient Assyrians occupied the north of modern Iraq. Although the raids of the sea peoples affected them to a lesser extent than Egypt and the Hittite kingdom, the empire suffered from attacks by the nomadic Arameans. After long civil wars, the Assyrian kingdom was conquered by the Neo Babylonian empire in 605 BC. It is believed that modern Assyrians — the inhabitants of modern Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, whose number is estimated at more than 1 million people — are descended from the ancient Assyrians.

The Sumerians

The inhabitants of Southern Mesopotamia came under the influence of Babylon sometime in the 2nd millennium BC and received the name of the Babylonians. The Babylonian kingdom fought with Assyria for a long time (successfully), but in 538 BC, the Persian king Cyrus II came to the walls of Babylon and conquered it. The inhabitants of modern Iraq can be called distant descendants of the Sumerians, but the Sumerian language ceased to be used in everyday life back in Babylon and served only for religious and scientific purposes.

The Persians

Everything is fine with the Persians, except that this is Iran now. Visit. A F R I N I K . C O M . For the full article. The locals have called their country this way since ancient times (the name goes back to the Avestan “country of the Aryans”), and the name Persia was used only outside its borders until 1935, when Shah Reza demanded that the neighbors call the state Iran.

The Macedonians

After the death of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Empire disintegrated into Egypt, the Achaemenid Empire, and, in fact, Macedonia (northern Greece), which was soon conquered by Rome. During the years of the weakening of the Roman Empire, barbarians ruled there; at some point, the Crusaders occupied Constantinople, and then the Turks came here. The Macedonians actively participated in the Greek struggle for independence in 1821, but they managed to get out of the control of the Ottoman Empire only after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). Now the majority of Macedonians live in the city of Thessaloniki in Northern Greece; their number is estimated at 3 million people.

Europe

The Celts

The Celts are not a people, but a collective name for tribes that lived in Western and Central Europe. The Romans called them Gauls, whereas “Celts” was their proper name. The tribes were constantly at war with each other, with the Germans, and with the Romans, who eventually conquered them. It is believed that the Celtic blood flows in the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and native Bretons.

The Huns

The Huns came from Asia to Eastern Europe in the 370s. Before Attila came to power, they sometimes feuded with the Roman Empire, but then helped it as allies in the fight against other tribes. The leader of the Huns, Attila, swept through Roman cities like a plague and, in less than 20 years of rule, subjugated the territory from France to the Caucasus. After he died in 453, the empire of the Huns collapsed, and they themselves mixed with other peoples coming from the east.

Vandals

In the 5th century, ancient Germanic tribes invaded Spain, and from there crossed to Africa and captured Carthage in 439 (although the Romans destroyed it in 146 BC, they soon repopulated it). This is how the Kingdom of Vandals and Alans appeared, which lasted just under 100 years. During this time, the barbarians were noted for the looting of Rome in 455, after which the word “vandal” became a household name. In 534, the Byzantine commander Belisarius landed on the coast of Africa with an army of 15,000 men and recaptured Carthage.

The Vikings

The Scandinavian raids on Europe stopped in the 11th century with the spread of Christianity among the peoples, which put an end to the old way of life with robbery and the slave trade as the main occupations. The Scandinavian tribes moved to a sedentary lifestyle and, after a while, were divided into three separate states.: Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

The fate of the Vikings who settled Greenland is interesting. The last written source about the life of Scandinavian colonists dates back to 1408, in the settlement of Osterbug in the extreme south of Greenland, where a certain Sigrid Bjornsdottir married Thorstein Olafsson. There is a version that the Vikings could not stand the war with the native population, and perhaps they mixed with it. The cold snap in Greenland likely forced the settlers to return to Norway and Denmark, or to move west to Canada and the island of Newfoundland, which the Vikings called Vinland.

Central Asia and Southeastern Europe

Khazar

The Khazar Khaganate, a neighbor of Kievan Rus, occupied the territory of modern Western Kazakhstan, Eastern Crimea, the Ciscaucasia, and the Volga region from the 7th to the 10th century. The Khazars were unlucky: the Arabs pressed them from the south, the Byzantines stood firmly in the west, numerous dangerous nomadic tribes marched from the east, and the Ancient Russian state eventually formed in the north. In 965, Prince Svyatoslav captured several key cities of Khazaria, and the state virtually ceased to exist. After that, the Khazars are mentioned several more times in the chronicles.: They allegedly offered Vladimir Krasno Solnyshko to accept their faith (at that time, Islam). The remnants of the Khazar settlements were ravaged by nomads: Bulgars, Alans, and Cumans.

The Polovtsians

They’re Cumans, they’re Kipchaks. Nomads from the Turkic family occupied the territory from the Danube to the Irtysh River in the 9th century. Since the tenth century, Slavs have regularly complained about raids by Polovtsians on the principalities. The Mongols solved this problem for them: the Kipchaks were absorbed by the Golden Horde, and they ceased to exist as an independent political unit. Some of the Polovtsians moved to Bulgaria, Byzantium, and even Egypt, while others merged with the Russians. The last mention of them dates back to the 14th century — the Cumans participated in internecine wars in Georgia.

The Pechenegs

The Pecheneg Turks occupied the Northern Black Sea region in the 9th century and took control of a section of the trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks.” After the defeat of Yaroslav the Wise in 1036, the Pechenegs moved to the borders of Byzantium. The wars with Constantinople were unsuccessful: in 1091, Alexios I Komnenos won the final victory, and the Pechenegs had to move to Hungary, where they mixed with the local population.

The Mongols

Due to the struggle for power and weak administrative resources, the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan quickly collapsed into four smaller ones: the Yuan Empire on the territory of modern Mongolia and China, the Hulaguid state, or Ilkhanate, in Persia, the Chagatai Ulus (approximately on the site of Kazakhstan), and the Golden Horde. None of the uluses (a Mongolian word roughly meaning “people”, “horde”, “state”) proved stable enough and either fragmented or the Mongols lost power over the territory. In 1351, China rebelled and separated from the Yuan Empire, and in the 17th and 18th centuries, it occupied Mongolia and incorporated it into the Qing Empire. Mongolia declared independence with the fall of the Qing in 1911.