Ancient Dynasties by John D. Grainger

Author:John D. Grainger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY/Military/Ancient
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2019-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Comparisons beyond the Classical World

I have deliberately restricted my survey of dynasties to a definite historical period and area, in part because ‘ancient world’ dynasties are not studied in themselves as a set. It is, however, worth also looking briefly at other times and places to see if the results of an ‘ancient world’ investigation are replicated elsewhere and elsewhen, and if they are in fact ‘typical’ in that the same overall results can apply to dynasties in those other times and places; alternatively, any differences might also be of some significance.

Geographical areas that produced a large number of dynasties include the most ancient Babylonia and Egypt, mediaeval and modern Europe, China and Japan, India, South East Asia, the Muslim Middle East, West Africa, and to a degree, Central and South America. Any of these might produce a set of statistics that could be large enough to be used in comparison with those of the ancient world. Here I shall restrict my comparisons to those of Europe in the mediaeval and modern period, and China and Japan. Without exhaustively collecting data on all possible dynasties, it is nevertheless possible to suggest that the European dynasties diverged from those of the ancient world in their statistical results, while those of the Far East largely conform to those of the ancient world.

Just over fifty dynasties in Europe can be counted – in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Russia – and there have been almost thirty in China and Japan. There are a mixture of national and provincial dynasties in Europe, but no imperial dynasties – the Carolingians and the Habsburgs were never more than local rulers with an imperial title; the Chinese dynasties were partly imperial and partly those of the regional states into which the empire repeatedly split between imperial regimes, and in Japan there were both imperial and regency dynasties. There is thus largely the same mixture of imperial and regional dynasties in the Far East as in the ancient world, with the exception of the city dynasties, and in Europe the dynasties studied would in the ancient world all be classified as regional. (European city-states, in Germany and Italy, were rarely monarchies, and if they did produce a monarchy this quickly expanded its power to regional size.) Italy did produce a number of such dynasties in the later mediaeval period and after, though they were relatively few, and were large enough to be counted as regional powers.

The first point of difference that appears is that European dynasties tended to last longer than in the ancient world. The median duration for the European dynasties is 236 years, that compares with the median of the ancient dynasties’ duration of no more than a century. The Far East median is also a little over a century. (The apparent predominance of China as an imperial state is largely an illusion in terms of dynasties – Chinese dynasties proved to be as vulnerable to destruction, murder and deposition as all others.

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