The Rise and Fall of Empires

What is an empire? Historians usually mean a state that rules many different peoples and lands, often won by force, from one centre of power.

Over four and a half thousand years, dozens of empires have risen and fallen. Many existed at the same time on different continents, knowing little of each other.

This film puts them on one globe and one timeline, so you can see what came first, what overlapped, and what replaced what.

The strip at the top left is that timeline. Each row is a region of the world. The white line marks where we are in time.

Before empires came cities. In Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, Sumerian city-states such as Uruk and Ur competed for land and water.

Around 3100 BC, Upper and Lower Egypt were united under one king. Egypt became one of the world’s first large territorial states.

But Egypt was then one people along one river. An empire ruling many peoples would come a few centuries later.

Around 2334 BC, by the usual dating, Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerian cities and campaigned up the Euphrates toward Syria.

His Akkadian Empire is often called the first empire in history: one king ruling many cities and peoples.

At its height, under his grandson Naram-Sin, it covered perhaps 800,000 square kilometres. It lasted less than two centuries.

Scholars still debate its exact dates, by up to about sixty years, and why it fell: revolts, invaders from the Zagros mountains, and possibly drought.

After Akkad came a sequence of Mesopotamian powers: the Third Dynasty of Ur, then Babylon, where Hammurabi issued his famous law code in the 1700s BC.

From about 1550 BC, Egypt’s New Kingdom pushed into the Levant and Nubia, while the Hittites built an empire in Anatolia.

In 1274 BC their armies met at Kadesh. Some years later, the two powers signed one of the earliest surviving peace treaties.

Around 1200 BC, many Bronze Age states collapsed, and for a while the map emptied.

From 911 BC, Assyria rebuilt its power with a professional army and a network of provinces.

By 671 BC it ruled from Iran to Egypt, about 1.4 million square kilometres, the largest empire the world had yet seen.

Then, in 612 BC, Babylonians and Medes sacked its capital, Nineveh.

Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar II, took its place, but only for a few decades.

In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia entered Babylon. His Achaemenid Empire grew to about 5.5 million square kilometres, from Egypt to the Indus.

Darius I organised it into provinces called satrapies, linked by the Royal Road.

Between 334 and 330 BC, Alexander of Macedon conquered it all.

When he died in Babylon in 323 BC, his empire split among his generals.

In the centuries around the year 1, three giant empires existed at the same time, far apart.

In India, the Maurya Empire under Ashoka ruled most of the subcontinent in the 200s BC.

In 221 BC, Qin unified China. The Han dynasty that followed ruled roughly as many people as Rome.

In the west, Rome grew from one city into an empire around the whole Mediterranean, reaching its largest extent in AD 117.

Rome was split in two. The western half fell in 476, while the eastern half, which historians call Byzantine, lasted another thousand years.

Persia rose again under the Sasanians. In India the Gupta Empire flourished, and in East Africa the kingdom of Aksum.

China broke apart after the Han, until the Sui and then the Tang reunited it.

In the 600s, Arab armies united by Islam conquered Persia and much of the Byzantine world within a few decades.

Under the Umayyads, by the 720s, the caliphate stretched from Spain to the Indus, over eleven million square kilometres.

At the same time Tang China reached deep into Central Asia. In 751, the two met in battle at Talas.

In Southeast Asia, Srivijaya controlled the sea lanes, and in 802 the Khmer Empire began at Angkor.

In 1206, Temüjin was proclaimed Genghis Khan. Within seventy years his successors had built the largest contiguous land empire in history.

By 1279 it stretched from Korea to eastern Europe, about 24 million square kilometres.

It soon split into four khanates. By 1368, Mongol rule in China had ended.

Meanwhile, the Mali Empire flourished in West Africa, and Angkor reached its height.

After the Mongols, new powers armed with gunpowder rose. In 1453 the Ottomans took Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire.

Ming China sent great fleets across the Indian Ocean. In the Americas, the Aztec and Inca empires rose, separately from the rest of the world.

Then, in 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Within about forty years, Spanish conquerors, helped by epidemics and Indigenous allies, brought down both American empires.

In India, the Mughals built a new empire from 1526.

From the 1600s, European sea empires spread around the globe, built on trade, settlement, conquest, and the Atlantic slave trade.

On land, Qing China and the Russian Empire reached their greatest size.

By 1920, the British Empire covered about 35.5 million square kilometres, nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land: the largest empire ever.

Siam, today’s Thailand, stayed one of the few Asian states never colonised, though it gave up territory to Britain and France.

The First World War ended four empires: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans.

After the Second World War, Japan’s empire ended, and a wave of independence followed across Asia and Africa.

The United Nations grew from 51 members in 1945 to 193 today. In 1991 the Soviet Union, which some historians describe as an empire, broke into fifteen states.

Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, and Macau in 1999. The age of formal empires was over, though people still debate new forms of power.

Seen side by side, the timeline shows a pattern. Empires often rose quickly, through conquest, and fell through overreach, rival heirs, revolts, disease or a changing climate.

Many lasted only a few generations. A few, like Egypt, Rome and China’s dynasties, built institutions that lasted for centuries.

Their languages, laws, religions and borders still shape the world we live in.

In the episodes that follow, we look at each empire in depth, one at a time.