Civilizations

← Encyclopedia

• Achaemenid Empire

  The first Persian empire (c. 550–330 BCE) — the largest state the ancient world had yet seen, governed under a king whose authority was framed in the language of the god Ahura Mazda.

• Adal Sultanate

  Powerful Muslim sultanate of the Horn, centered at Harar/Zeila, that waged the 16th-century conquest of Christian Ethiopia.

• Agartha

  The subterranean kingdom of 19th- and 20th-century esoteric lore, associated with Saint-Yves d'Alveydre and Ferdynand Ossendowski and often joined to the hollow-earth idea and the 'King of the World.'

• Akkadian Empire

  The Akkadian Empire — the first great territorial empire of Mesopotamia, founded by Sargon of Akkad around 2334 BCE, which unified the Sumerian city-states under one rule, spread the Akkadian language, and produced the deified king Naram-Sin and the poet-priestess Enheduanna.

• Alalakh

  the Bronze Age city-kingdom of the Amuq plain (Tell Atchana, northern Levant), a Hurrian- and Amorite-ruled crossroads of the Hittite, Mitanni, and Syrian worlds, known from its palace archives and the autobiographical statue of King Idrimi.

• Ancient Egypt

  The Nile civilization of pharaonic antiquity — its gods, temple cult, and funerary religion — and the deep well of esoteric fascination its memory later became.

• Ancient Greece

  The cluster of Greek-speaking city-states and their long afterlife — the civilization that gave the West its philosophy, its mystery cults, and much of its vocabulary for the divine.

• Asante Empire

  Akan empire centered at Kumasi, unified by the sacred Golden Stool embodying the soul of the Asante nation.

• Asia

  The continent the Greeks named for a half-forgotten Oceanid — and the landmass that cradled more of humanity's founding civilizations and wisdom traditions than any other.

• Assyria

  Assyria — the northern Mesopotamian power centered on Ashur, Nimrud, and Nineveh, which in the Neo-Assyrian period (911–609 BCE) became the dominant empire of the Near East, devoted to the god Ashur and remembered for its royal libraries, palace reliefs, and military reach.

• Atlantis

  The legendary island power of Plato's Timaeus and Critias, said to have sunk beneath the sea in a day and a night, and the vast modern esoteric and pseudo-historical reception built upon it.

• Avalon

  The Otherworldly isle of Arthurian legend where Excalibur was forged and the wounded king was borne away, and its later mystical reception around Glastonbury.

• Ayutthaya Kingdom

  Dominant Siamese kingdom (1351-1767) whose cosmopolitan capital was a major center of Theravada Buddhism and trade.

• Aztec (Mexica) Empire

  The Triple Alliance empire (1428-1521) ruled from Tenochtitlan, dominating central Mexico until the Spanish conquest.

• Aztlán

  The legendary northern homeland from which the Mexica (Aztecs) were said to have migrated, and its later reception as a symbol in Chicano thought.

• Babylonia

  The ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia centered on the city of Babylon — remembered in the West above all for its astronomy, its omen reading, and the lasting reputation of "Chaldean" wisdom.

• Bactria

  Bactria — the ancient land between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus (Balkh), an Achaemenid satrapy and then the Greco-Bactrian kingdom whose Hellenistic cities such as Ai Khanoum fused Greek and Iranian worlds and seeded the Greco-Buddhist culture to the south.

• Balhae

  the multi-ethnic kingdom of Manchuria and northern Korea (698-926 CE) raised by Dae Joyeong from the Goguryeo and Mohe peoples, a Buddhist realm of five capitals that Tang China called the flourishing land east of the sea.

• Bunyoro-Kitara

  Once-dominant Great Lakes empire ruled by the Bito dynasty, heir to the semi-legendary Cwezi state and rival of Buganda.

• Byzantine Empire

  The Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople from the fourth century until 1453 — the medieval keeper of classical Greek learning and of a distinctive Christian mysticism.

• Camelot

  Camelot — the legendary capital and court of King Arthur and the seat of the Round Table, first named by Chrétien de Troyes and elaborated by later romance, variously identified with Cadbury Castle, Winchester, and other sites.

• Canaan

  The ancient land of the southern Levant and the Bronze Age culture that worshipped El, Baal, and Asherah — the religious world the Hebrew Bible grew out of and set itself against.

• Carthage

  Carthage — the Phoenician colony on the North African coast that grew into a maritime empire dominating the western Mediterranean, Rome's great rival across the Punic Wars, worshipper of Baal Hammon and Tanit, destroyed in 146 BCE.

• Casarabe Culture

  Lidar-revealed low-density urbanism in Bolivia's Llanos de Mojos, with pyramids, causeways and reservoirs (Cotoca/Landívar), c. 500-1400 CE.

• Çatalhöyük

  Çatalhöyük — the large Neolithic proto-urban settlement on the Konya Plain (c. 7400–6000 BCE), famous for its honeycomb of doorless houses entered from the roof, its wall paintings and bull-horn installations, and the contested "mother goddess" reading of its figurines.

• Champa

  Champa — the Austronesian, long Hindu (later partly Muslim) civilization of the central Vietnamese coast (c. 2nd–15th century CE), a maritime and seafaring people, builders of the brick Shaiva temple-towers of Mỹ Sơn dedicated to Shiva-Bhadreshvara.

• Chavín

  Chavín — the early Andean religious culture and pilgrimage center at Chavín de Huántar in the Peruvian highlands (c. 900–200 BCE), whose cult of fanged, transformative deities (the Lanzón, the Tello Obelisk) spread a shared iconography across the central Andes.

• Chera

  one of the three crowned Tamil dynasties of the Sangam age (the muvendar, with the Chola and Pandya), ruling the Malabar coast and Kongu country from Vanji and the great port of Muziris, patrons of the Sangam poets and of the cults that would grow into the worship of Ayyappan and the goddess Kannagi.

• Chimú

  Chimú — the kingdom of Chimor on Peru's north coast (c. 900–1470 CE), builder of the vast adobe capital of Chan Chan, a moon-venerating maritime and irrigation state and the largest power of the Andes before its conquest by the Inca.

• China

  The civilization of the East Asian mainland whose classical age produced Taoism, Confucianism, and a shared cosmology of yin and yang, the Five Phases, and a single resonant order joining heaven, earth, and humanity.

• Cíbola and the Seven Cities of Gold

  Cíbola — the legendary Seven Cities of Gold of Spanish New World lore, sought by the Marcos de Niza and Coronado expeditions in the sixteenth-century North American Southwest and conflated with the Zuni Pueblos and the parallel mirage of Quivira.

• Classical Antiquity

  The Greco-Roman age taken as a whole — the long Mediterranean era, roughly the eighth century BCE to the fifth CE, in which this site's philosophy and mystery religion took shape.

• Colchis

  the ancient kingdom of the eastern Black Sea coast in western Georgia, the golden land of Aietes and Medea to which the Argonauts sailed for the Golden Fleece, a real Bronze- and Iron-Age civilization of goldsmiths whose sanctuaries at Vani underlie the Greek myth.

• Commagene

  Commagene — the small Hellenistic-Iranian kingdom of the upper Euphrates (163 BCE–72 CE), remembered for the colossal mountaintop hierothesion of Antiochus I at Nemrut Dağı, where Greek and Persian gods were fused in a single royal cult.

• Crusades

  The series of religiously sanctioned military campaigns waged by Latin Christendom from 1095 to 1291, chiefly to seize and hold the Holy Land.

• Cucuteni–Trypillia

  Cucuteni–Trypillia — the Neolithic and Copper Age culture of southeastern Europe (c. 5500–2750 BCE) whose vast 'mega-sites' in Ukraine were among the largest settlements of their day, famed for spiral-painted pottery, fired-clay female figurines, and the periodic ritual burning of whole towns.

• Dacia

  The ancient kingdom of the Dacians and Getae north of the Danube, remembered in Greek sources for the cult of Zalmoxis and a doctrine that the soul does not die.

• Đại Việt

  the medieval Vietnamese state (from 1054) ruled by the Ly and Tran dynasties from Thang Long, which made Buddhism a state religion, repelled the Mongol invasions, and wove Mahayana Buddhism, Confucian learning, and the indigenous Mother-Goddess cults into a distinct civilization.

• Dilmun

  Dilmun — the Bronze Age trading civilization of the Persian Gulf (centered on Bahrain and the eastern Arabian coast, c. 3000–600 BCE), the entrepôt linking Mesopotamia to the Indus, and the blessed pure land of Sumerian myth where Enki and Ninhursag dwell.

• Đông Sơn

  Đông Sơn — the Bronze and early Iron Age culture of the Red River valley of northern Vietnam (c. 1000 BCE–100 CE), famed for the great ritual bronze drums cast by the lost-wax method, a wet-rice society at the root of later Vietnamese identity.

• Dvaravati

  Dvaravati — the Mon Buddhist culture of the Chao Phraya basin of central Thailand (c. 6th–11th century CE), a network of moated city-states known for Theravada Buddhist sculpture, dharmachakra stone wheels, and the spread of Indic religion and art across mainland Southeast Asia.

• Ebla

  Ebla — the Bronze Age city-state of inland Syria (Tell Mardikh), whose third-millennium-BCE palace archive of cuneiform tablets, discovered in 1975, revealed a wealthy Semitic kingdom, its trade, and its pantheon centuries before the rise of Babylon.

• El Argar

  El Argar — the Early Bronze Age society of southeastern Iberia (c. 2200–1550 BCE), one of the earliest state-like polities of western Europe, known for its hilltop towns, its intramural jar-burials with grave goods of silver and bronze, and a sharply stratified social order.

• El Dorado

  El Dorado — originally "the gilded man," a Muisca consecration rite at Lake Guatavita, transformed by Spanish conquistadors into a legendary golden city or kingdom in the South American interior and pursued in disastrous expeditions for centuries.

• Elam

  The ancient civilization of southwest Iran, centered on Susa and the Zagros highlands — long a rival and neighbour of Mesopotamia, with its own gods, language, and the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil.

• Etruscans

  The pre-Roman people of central Italy, remembered above all for a revealed science of divination — the Etrusca disciplina — that Rome studied, preserved, and never fully replaced.

• Funan

  Funan — the earliest known state of mainland Southeast Asia, centered on the Mekong delta (c. 1st–6th century CE), a maritime trading power at the port of Óc Eo, and an early adopter of Indian Hindu-Buddhist religion and Sanskrit kingship.

• Gandhara

  Gandhara — the ancient region of the northwest Indian subcontinent (the Peshawar and Taxila valleys), the meeting of Greek, Iranian, and Indian worlds where, under the Kushans, the Buddha was first given human form in the Greco-Buddhist art that carried the image across Asia.

• Gaul

  The Celtic-speaking region of ancient Western Europe, roughly modern France and its borders — home of the Druids and, after Rome, of a long Gallo-Roman religious blend.

• Gaya

  the iron-rich confederacy of small kingdoms in the Nakdong river basin of southern Korea (c. 42-562 CE), traders in iron between Yamato and the mainland, remembered for the foundation myth of King Suro of Geumgwan Gaya and his bride Heo Hwang-ok, said to have sailed from Ayodhya.

• Ghana Empire (Wagadu)

  Soninke trading empire of Wagadu controlling the trans-Saharan gold and salt routes, centered at Koumbi Saleh.

• Göbekli Tepe

  Göbekli Tepe — the monumental hilltop sanctuary of T-shaped carved pillars in southeastern Anatolia, raised by pre-pottery Neolithic foragers around 9500 BCE, the oldest known megalithic ritual complex and a touchstone for debates on whether cult preceded agriculture.

• Gojoseon

  Gojoseon — the first kingdom of Korean tradition, the realm of the foundation myth of Dangun (legendarily 2333 BCE) in the Korean peninsula and Liaoning, a Bronze-to-Iron Age polity of dolmens and slender bronze daggers that fell to Han China in 108 BCE.

• Han Dynasty

  The Chinese dynasty of 206 BCE–220 CE — the era in which correlative cosmology was systematized, Confucianism became state orthodoxy, and organized religious Daoism first took shape.

• Hariphunchai

  Mon Buddhist kingdom of northern Thailand (7th-13th c.) centered at Lamphun, a northern outpost of Dvaravati culture.

• Hellenistic Period

  The Greek age after Alexander (323–31 BCE), when Greek and Near Eastern cultures mixed across his former empire — the setting from which Hermetism and Gnosticism later emerged.

• Himyar

  Himyar — the South Arabian kingdom that unified Yemen (c. 110 BCE–525 CE), notable for its royal house's turn to a monotheism and then to Judaism, and for the religious wars — culminating in the Christian Aksumite conquest of 525 — that swept Arabia on the eve of Islam.

• Hittite Empire

  the Bronze Age Anatolian empire (c. 1650-1180 BCE) ruled from Hattusa, a power that fought Egypt to a standstill at Kadesh and worshipped the Thousand Gods of Hatti, whose storm-god, sun-goddess, and rock sanctuary at Yazilikaya are known from vast cuneiform archives.

• Hy-Brasil

  Hy-Brasil — a phantom island of Irish legend placed off the west coast of Ireland, cloaked in mist and said to appear only once every seven years, charted on European maps from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century.

• Hyperborea

  The Greek mythical land beyond the north wind, home of a blessed people favored by Apollo, and its long afterlife in esoteric and political myth.

• Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)

  Largest empire of pre-Columbian America, the 'Four Regions' ruled from Cusco with sun-cult statecraft and Andean cosmology.

• Indus Valley Civilization

  The Bronze Age urban culture of the Indus basin, c. 2600–1900 BCE — its cities and craft well attested, its script undeciphered and its religion reconstructed only by contested inference.

• Iram of the Pillars

  Iram of the Pillars (Iram dhat al-'imad) — the lost city of "lofty pillars" named in the Qur'an (Surat al-Fajr) as the dwelling of the people of 'Ad, destroyed for their pride, identified in later legend with Ubar, the "Atlantis of the Sands."

• Iron Age

  The archaeological period named for ironworking — and, on this site, the era whose middle centuries saw an unusual concentration of new religious and philosophical thought across Eurasia.

• Islamic Golden Age

  The medieval flowering of learning across the Islamic world, roughly the eighth to thirteenth centuries — when Greek thought was translated, extended, and carried on toward Europe.

• Kanem-Bornu Empire

  Long-lived Saharan empire around Lake Chad, an early Islamized state linking the Maghreb to central Sudan.

• Khmer Empire

  The medieval Southeast Asian state centered on Angkor, whose god-kings built the Hindu and Buddhist temple-mountains as models of the cosmos in stone.

• Killke Culture

  Pre-Inca culture of the Cusco valley, predecessor to the Inca and early builder at Saqsaywaman.

• Kingdom of Benin

  Powerful Edo kingdom in present Nigeria, renowned for its bronze plaques, walled capital, and divine kingship.

• Kingdom of Buganda

  Largest of the Great Lakes interlacustrine kingdoms; its Kabaka, royal tombs at Kasubi, and Lubaale spirit cults endure today.

• Kingdom of Dahomey

  Fon kingdom of Abomey known for its female warriors, ancestral cult, and Vodun religious tradition.

• Kingdom of Kaffa

  Long-lived southwest Ethiopian kingdom with sacred kingship and spirit cults; namesake of coffee, conquered by Ethiopia in 1897.

• Kitezh

  Kitezh — the legendary Russian city said to have become invisible or to have sunk beneath Lake Svetloyar to escape the Mongol invasion, surviving in Old Believer and folk tradition as a hidden holy city.

• Kutai

  the earliest known Hindu kingdom of the Indonesian archipelago (Kutai Martadipura, eastern Borneo, c. 4th-5th century CE), known almost wholly from the seven yupa sacrificial pillars of King Mulawarman, which record Brahmanical gift-rites at the holy ground of Vaprakeshvara.

• Lan Xang

  The Lao 'Million Elephants' kingdom (1353-1707), a major Theravada Buddhist polity centered at Luang Prabang.

• Lemuria

  A hypothetical lost continent first proposed in 19th-century zoogeography and then absorbed into Theosophical cosmology as the vanished homeland of a 'root race.'

• Lycia

  Lycia — the federated people of the mountainous southwest coast of Anatolia (1st millennium BCE), known from Homer and Hittite records, for its distinctive rock-cut and pillar tombs, its Luwian-related language, and the proto-federal Lycian League.

• Lydia

  Lydia — the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia centered on Sardis (c. 7th–6th century BCE), inventor of coined money, ruled by the Mermnad dynasty culminating in Croesus, devotee of Cybele and famed for its lavish dedications at Delphi before its fall to Cyrus the Great.

• Lyonesse

  Lyonesse — the legendary drowned land of Cornish and Arthurian tradition, said to have stretched between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly before vanishing beneath the sea, and named as the homeland of Tristan.

• Majapahit

  Majapahit — the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist empire (1293–1527 CE), the greatest maritime power of medieval Southeast Asia, celebrated in the Nagarakretagama, whose syncretic Shiva-Buddha religion and wide trade network are remembered as a golden age in Indonesian tradition.

• Mali Empire

  Vast Mande empire of Sundiata and Mansa Musa, anchoring Saharan gold trade and Islamic learning at Timbuktu.

• Marajoara Culture

  Pre-Columbian mound-building society at the Amazon's mouth (Marajó Island), renowned for elaborate funerary ceramics and large populations.

• Mari

  Mari — the Bronze Age city on the middle Euphrates (Tell Hariri), a great river-trade kingdom (c. 2900–1759 BCE) whose vast royal palace and its archive of some 25,000 tablets illuminate the diplomacy, religion, and prophecy of the early second-millennium Near East.

• Maya Civilization

  Mesoamerican civilization renowned for hieroglyphic writing, astronomy, mathematics, monumental cities, and a sophisticated calendar.

• Medang Kingdom (Mataram)

  Hindu-Buddhist Javanese kingdom (8th-10th c.) whose Shaivite rulers raised the Prambanan temple complex.

• Merina Kingdom

  Highland Malagasy kingdom unifying Madagascar from Antananarivo, with royal sampy talismans, ancestor veneration and the Rova palace complex.

• Mesolithic

  The Middle Stone Age — the post-glacial hunter-gatherer cultures of Eurasia between the Paleolithic and the arrival of farming, known mainly from stone tools, burials, and rock art.

• Mesopotamia

  The land between the Tigris and Euphrates where cities, writing, and the systematic reading of the heavens began — the deep background of Western astrology and divination.

• Mezcala Culture

  Guerrero river-valley culture known for austere abstract stone masks and figures collected by the later Aztecs.

• Middle Ages

  The thousand years Europe named after the fact — conventionally the fifth century to the fifteenth — in which the ancient inheritance was copied, lost, translated, and transformed.

• Minoan Civilization

  The Bronze Age palace culture of Crete and the southern Aegean, named for the legendary King Minos — source of the labyrinth, bull-leaping, and the snake-handling goddess figurines.

• Mitanni

  Mitanni — the Hurrian-led kingdom of northern Mesopotamia and Syria (c. 1500–1300 BCE), a chariot power ruled by an Indo-Aryan-named elite whose treaty with the Hittites invokes the Vedic gods Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatyas.

• Muisca Confederation

  Chibcha-speaking highland confederation around Bogota; master goldsmiths whose Lake Guatavita investiture rite seeded the El Dorado legend.

• Mycenaean Greece

  Mycenaean Greece — the Late Bronze Age civilization of mainland Greece (c. 1600–1100 BCE), centered on palace citadels like Mycenae, Pylos, and Tiryns, keeper of the Linear B script that records an early form of Greek and a pantheon ancestral to the later Olympian gods.

• Nazca

  Nazca — the desert culture of Peru's south coast (c. 100 BCE–800 CE), creators of the colossal ground-drawn lines and figures of the Nazca Pampa, of polychrome ceramics and the underground puquios, and of a ritual world centered on the pilgrimage site of Cahuachi.

• Neolithic

  The last phase of the Stone Age — the era of farming, settled villages, and the earliest monumental evidence that human beings built for the sacred.

• Nok Culture

  Early Nigerian Iron Age culture famed for distinctive terracotta figurines and the earliest sub-Saharan iron smelting.

• Norte Chico (Caral-Supe)

  Norte Chico, or the Caral-Supe civilization — the oldest known complex society in the Americas, flourishing on the north-central Peruvian coast from about 3500 BCE, builder of monumental platform mounds and sunken circular plazas in a society apparently without pottery or depicted warfare.

• Norumbega

  Norumbega — a legendary rich city or country placed in northeastern North America on European maps and travel accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, later revived in nineteenth-century claims of an ancient Norse presence in New England.

• Oyo Empire

  Dominant Yoruba empire with a cavalry army and the Ogboni and Sango cults central to its sacred kingship.

• Pagan (Bagan)

  Pagan (Bagan) — the first unified Burmese kingdom (c. 849–1297 CE), whose capital on the Irrawaddy raised thousands of Buddhist temples and stupas across the plain, the seat of Theravada Buddhism's establishment in Myanmar under King Anawrahta.

• Paleolithic

  The Old Stone Age — the long era of early human prehistory whose cave paintings, deliberate burials, and 'Venus' figurines are read as the earliest surviving traces of the sacred.

• Palmyra

  Palmyra (Tadmor) — the caravan city of the Syrian desert (flourishing 1st–3rd century CE), a Roman-era oasis emporium with its own Aramaic culture and the great temple of Bel, briefly the seat of Queen Zenobia's breakaway empire before Rome destroyed it.

• Panchaia

  Panchaia (Panchaea) — the utopian island in the Indian Ocean described by Euhemerus (c. 300 BCE) in his lost Sacred History, whose golden temple inscription claimed the gods had been deified mortal kings — the founding fable of euhemerism.

• Phoenicia

  Phoenicia — the network of Levantine maritime city-states (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) of the first millennium BCE, traders in purple dye and cedar, founders of Mediterranean colonies, and transmitters of the alphabet from which Greek and Latin letters descend.

• Phrygia

  Phrygia — the Iron Age kingdom of west-central Anatolia centered on Gordion (c. 1200–700 BCE), home of the legendary kings Gordias and Midas, and the cradle of the cult of the mountain mother-goddess Matar (Cybele) that spread across the ancient Mediterranean.

• Pohjola

  Pohjola — the mythic Northland of Finnish and Karelian oral poetry gathered in the Kalevala, a far-northern realm ruled by the mistress Louhi and the site of the forging and theft of the wealth-bringing Sampo.

• Qataban

  Qataban — one of the caravan kingdoms of ancient South Arabia (Yemen), centered on its capital Timna in the Wadi Bayhan, a first-millennium-BCE power in the incense trade and a worshipper of the moon-god Amm whose temples and inscriptions line the desert routes.

• Qatna

  the Bronze Age kingdom of inland Syria (Tell Mishrifeh near Homs), whose great palace concealed an undisturbed royal hypogeum where the dead kings were tended through the kispum ancestor-cult, feasts shared with the seated dead.

• Qing Dynasty

  The last imperial dynasty of China (1644–1912), Manchu-ruled, under whose long reign late Taoism, popular sectarian religion, and the textual tradition later read in the West took their familiar shape.

• Quimbaya Civilization

  Middle Cauca valley people renowned for exquisite tumbaga goldwork including the iconic poporo lime containers.

• Recuay

  the Andean highland culture of the Callejon de Huaylas in north-central Peru (c. 200 BCE-600 CE), a contemporary of Moche known for its fortified hilltop towns, underground galleries, and carved stone sculpture of ancestor-lords, fanged deities, and feline guardians.

• Roman Empire

  The imperial Roman state, from Augustus in 27 BCE to the fall of the West in 476 — the political world in which the mystery cults, Hermetism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and early Christianity took shape.

• Roman Republic

  Pre-imperial Rome, 509 to 27 BCE — a state that governed its public life by augury and a calendar of priesthoods, and slowly admitted the gods of the peoples it absorbed.

• Sailendra Dynasty

  Buddhist dynasty of 8th-9th century Central Java that built Borobudur, the world's largest Buddhist monument.

• Santarém-Tapajós Culture

  Complex chiefdom of the lower Amazon/Tapajós (Tapajó people), famed for intricate caryatid vessels and ritual ceramics, c. 1000-1600 CE.

• Shambhala

  The hidden kingdom of Tibetan Buddhist Kalachakra tradition, a realm of enlightened rule awaiting a final age, and its later Theosophical and Western esoteric reception.

• Shang Dynasty

  The early Chinese dynasty of roughly the second millennium BCE, known from its oracle-bone divinations and royal ancestor cult — the earliest documented stratum of Chinese religion.

• Singhasari Kingdom

  13th-century East Javanese kingdom of King Kertanagara, precursor to Majapahit, famed for tantric Shiva-Buddha statuary.

• Sogdia

  Sogdia — the Iranian civilization of the Zarafshan valley (Samarkand, Bukhara), the great middlemen of the Silk Road, whose merchants carried goods, letters, and the religions of half a continent — Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichaean, and Christian — across Central Asia.

• Song Dynasty

  The Chinese dynasty of 960–1279, remembered as the age when Neo-Confucian thought was synthesised and Taoist internal alchemy reached its mature form.

• Songhai Empire

  Largest West African empire, ruled from Gao, a hub of Islamic scholarship at Timbuktu and Djenne.

• Srivijaya

  Srivijaya — the Buddhist maritime empire of Sumatra centered on Palembang (c. 7th–13th century CE), master of the Strait of Malacca and the China–India sea trade, and a great center of Mahayana Buddhist learning visited by the pilgrim Yijing.

• Sukhothai

  Sukhothai — the early Thai kingdom of the upper Chao Phraya (c. 1238–1438 CE), remembered as a Theravada Buddhist golden age, the traditional cradle of the Thai script under King Ramkhamhaeng and of the serene walking-Buddha image.

• Sumer

  The earliest known civilization of southern Mesopotamia — birthplace of the first cities, of writing, and of a temple religion whose gods and stories shaped the region for millennia.

• Swahili Coast Civilization

  Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean trading civilization of Bantu-Islamic city-states linking East Africa to Arabia, Persia, India and China.

• Tairona

  Pre-Columbian civilization of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; builders of Ciudad Perdida (Teyuna), a terraced stone city.

• Tartessos

  Tartessos — the wealthy late-Bronze/early-Iron Age culture of the lower Guadalquivir in southwestern Iberia (c. 1200–500 BCE), a metal-trading society in contact with the Phoenicians, often identified with the biblical Tarshish and the sanctuary-rich realm of the legendary long-lived king Arganthonios.

• Tarumanagara

  Earliest known Hindu kingdom of western Java (4th-7th c.), attested by Sanskrit stone inscriptions near modern Jakarta.

• Teotihuacan

  Teotihuacan — the vast planned metropolis of the Basin of Mexico (c. 100 BCE–550 CE), one of the largest cities of the ancient world, builder of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the Feathered Serpent temple, whose founders' name for it is lost and whose Storm God and Great Goddess shaped later Mesoamerican religion.

• The Aboriginal Australians

  The indigenous peoples of the Australian continent, bearers of the oldest continuous living culture on earth, whose Law descends from the ever-present Dreaming and who endured the colonial catastrophe to reassert their belonging to Country.

• The Afro-Cubans

  the people of African descent in Cuba, gathered out of more than twenty enslaved 'nations' into the cabildos that kept the drums and the orishas alive — the human matrix of transculturation, Regla de Ocha, Palo, and Abakuá.

• The Ainu

  The indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, keepers of the religion of the kamuy — the spirit-beings who visit the human world in the form of bear and owl and fire — through conquest, forced assimilation, and a living revival.

• The Aja

  The Gbe-speaking people of the Mono river country in southern Benin and southeastern Togo who name the town of Tado as the cradle from which the Fon, the Ewe, and the royal houses of Allada, Dahomey, and Porto-Novo are said to branch, and who return each August to pray at the origin.

• The Akan

  Matrilineal ethnolinguistic family of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, bound by blood-clan descent, day-names, the 42-day Adae calendar, and the proverb-arts of goldweight, adinkra, and kente.

• The Ancestral Puebloans

  The Ancestral Puebloans — the farming culture of the North American Southwest (c. 100–1300 CE), builders of the great houses and kivas of Chaco Canyon and the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, whose astronomy and roads bound a sacred landscape; ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples.

• The Ancient Egyptians

  The people of the Nile — a civilization of three thousand years' continuity, whose order rested on maat and whose conviction that life was good built the tombs, the script, and the West's deepest image of secret wisdom.

• The Anishinaabe

  The Great Lakes and northern-woodland nation of the Council of Three Fires — the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi — whose world of manitou, the Midewiwin, and the birchbark scrolls endures as a living, sovereign people across the United States and Canada.

• The Antemoro

  The scribe-people of Madagascar's southeast coast, keepers of the sorabe — the Malagasy language written in Arabic letters on beaten bark paper.

• The Apache

  The Nde — the southern Athabaskan kin of the Diné — whose sacred world turns on White Painted Woman, the Gaan Mountain Spirits who dance at the fire, and the four-day Sunrise Ceremony that a girl steps into to become the first mother.

• The Aquitani

  The ancient people of southwestern Gaul, between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, whom Caesar set apart from the Celts and whose gods' names, fossilized on Roman votive altars, are the oldest surviving fragments of the Basque language.

• The Asante

  The largest Akan nation of Ghana, a Twi-speaking matrilineal people under the Golden Stool, whose living king reigns from Manhyia in Kumasi within the Republic of Ghana.

• The Assyrians

  The upper-Tigris people of Ashur — merchant colonists turned imperial overlords — who built the first empire to span the Near East, ruling by army and deportation while their scholars kept the libraries and watched the sky.

• The Aymara

  The jaqi, the living people of the Lake Titicaca basin and the high altiplano across Bolivia, Peru, and Chile — heirs of Tiwanaku, speakers of a language family all their own, who feed Pachamama and the grandfather mountains, reckon the past as lying ahead, and greet the returning sun at the winter solstice.

• The Bali Aga

  The pre-Majapahit 'original Balinese' — the villages of Tenganan, Trunyan, and the northern coast who kept older temple forms, councils of married couples, and their own covenant with land and ancestor when the courts took on the imported caste order.

• The Balinese

  Wong Bali, the Austronesian Hindu people of one Indonesian island — a layered inheritance of Austronesian root, Hindu-Javanese court, and Majapahit imprint, held together less by a creed professed than by a weave of belonging: the compound and its shrine, the banjar, the desa adat, the subak, and the temple's turning year.

• The Balts

  The Indo-European peoples of the eastern Baltic forests — Lithuanians, Latvians, and the vanished Old Prussians — who kept the worship of the thunder-god and the sacred groves a thousand years after their neighbors turned Christian, the last pagans of Europe.

• The Bambara

  The largest of the Mande peoples of Mali — Niger-valley farmers whose men's initiation societies, blood-fed boli altars, and Ségou empire made them a byword for both political defiance and West African sacred art.

• The Basques

  Euskaldunak, the people of the western Pyrenees who never stopped speaking Euskara — Europe's one living language isolate — whose goddess Mari the Inquisition renamed a witch and burned people for at Logroño in 1610.

• The Belgae

  The peoples of northern Gaul whom Caesar judged the bravest of the Gauls, whose ditched war-sanctuaries and ruined offered weapons give the religion of the northern Celts in their own hand.

• The Betsileo

  The Malagasy people of the southern highlands around Fianarantsoa, master terrace-farmers whose standing with the ancestors is built into rice paddy and stone tomb alike.

• The Brahmin Priesthood

  The hereditary priestly order of the Vedic world — keepers of the sacred word and the sacred fire, masters of the sacrifice on which the cosmos was held to turn, and guardians of the oldest living scripture.

• The Burmese

  The Burmese (Bamar) — the Tibeto-Burman majority of the Irrawaddy valley, Myanmar's dominant people, who bow to the Theravada Buddha and keep the Thirty-Seven Nats together as one religious life.

• The Buryats

  The northernmost of the Mongol peoples, around Lake Baikal, who carried the worship of the sky and the masters of the land and water — the shamanism they call böö mörgöl — alongside Tibetan Buddhism through Soviet suppression and into a living revival.

• The Canaanites

  The West Semitic peoples of the Bronze Age Levant — the city-states, gods, and language out of which both the Phoenicians and the Israelites emerged, and against whom the Hebrew Bible defined itself.

• The Carabalí

  the Cuban nation carried out of the Cross River delta at Old Calabar, whose cabildos kept alive the Ékpè leopard society and forged from it the Abakuá — the island's only male initiatory order, its secret the voice of a fish heard in a hidden drum.

• The Carthaginians

  The Carthaginians — the western Phoenician people of Carthage, a daughter-city of Tyre that grew into a maritime empire of suffetes, sea-trade, and the gods Tanit and Baal Hammon, destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE and known mostly through the writings of its enemies.

• The Cathars

  The "Good Men and Good Women" of medieval Languedoc and Lombardy — dualist Christians who held the world the work of an evil power, and the heresy that called the crusade and the inquisition into being.

• The Caucasian Iberians

  The Caucasian Iberians — the people of the kingdom of Kartli in eastern Georgia, whose land the Greeks and Romans called Iberia (unrelated to Spain) — a city-dwelling, four-class society ranged under the armored god Armazi on the acropolis of Mtskheta, whose foundation the Georgian Chronicles give to Pharnavaz I and whose turn to Christ under Mirian III made it the second Christian state.

• The Celts

  The Iron-Age peoples of much of ancient Europe — a family of related languages, arts, and religious worlds the Greeks called Keltoi and the Romans Galli, stretching at its height from Ireland to Anatolia, and whose unity as a single people is now itself contested.

• The Chachapoya

  The Chachapoya — the 'cloud-forest' people of the northern Peruvian Andes (c. 800–1470 CE), builders of the great fortified citadel of Kuélap and of cliffside tombs and sarcophagi, a fiercely independent society absorbed by the Inca only shortly before the Spanish came.

• The Chaldeans

  The Semitic people of the southern Babylonian marshes who gave Babylon its last great dynasty, and whose name became, across the ancient world, a single word for astrologer and master of the stars.

• The Chola Empire

  The Chola Empire — the Tamil maritime power of southern India (c. 850–1279 CE), builders of the towering Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur, casters of the bronze Nataraja, a Shaiva dynasty whose fleets carried South Indian temple culture across the Bay of Bengal.

• The Cimmerians

  The horse-nomads the Scythians drove from the Pontic steppe, who crossed the Caucasus to shake Urartu, Phrygia, and Lydia before vanishing — a people known almost wholly through the records of those they struck.

• The Colchians

  the metalworking gold-people of the eastern Black Sea basin in western Georgia, Kartvelian ancestors of the Laz and Mingrelians, whose real fleece-and-torrent gold-washing lies beneath the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece.

• The Curonians

  The seafaring Baltic people of the amber coast — fishers, traders, and raiders whose hillfort at Apuolė, besieged by a Swedish fleet in the ninth century, gives the earliest datable event in Baltic history before they were absorbed into the Latvian and Lithuanian nations.

• The Cycladic Civilization

  The Cycladic civilization — the Early Bronze Age culture of the Aegean islands (c. 3200–2000 BCE), known above all for its spare white-marble figurines of folded-arm women, an art of the dead whose meaning is lost, and for the seafaring that knit the early Aegean together.

• The Dacians

  The northern Thracian people of the Carpathians, who built the stone sanctuary-citadels of the Orăştie mountains around Sarmizegetusa Regia, kept the religion of Zalmoxis under a powerful priesthood, and fell to Trajan in the Dacian Wars of 101–106 CE.

• The Diné

  The People of the four sacred mountains — Southern Athabaskan newcomers to the Southwest who keep hózhó, the Holy People, the emergence, and the memory of Hwéeldi.

• The Dogon

  The cliff-farmers of Mali's Bandiagara escarpment — millet-growers of the toguna and the mask, whose living religion of Amma and the Nommo reached the world through the famous, contested ethnography of Marcel Griaule.

• The Dorset Culture

  The Dorset — known in Inuit memory as the Tuniit, the strong and shy first inhabitants — were the last of the Paleo-Inuit, a vanished sea-mammal-hunting people of the eastern North American Arctic (c. 500 BCE–1500 CE), famous for miniature ivory spirit-carvings and the pecked faces of Qajartalik, and replaced almost without a trace by the incoming Thule ancestors of the modern Inuit.

• The Druids

  The priestly learned class of the ancient Celts — priests, judges, teachers, and keepers of an unwritten lore — known almost only through the eyes of strangers, and reinvented centuries later.

• The Druze

  The esoteric monotheists of the Levantine mountains, the Muwahhidun, who keep a closed scripture, hold that the divine appeared in al-Hakim, and have survived behind a wall of silence.

• The Egyptian Priesthood

  The learned class of pharaonic Egypt — the temple staffs who fed the god in his shrine, kept the sacred writing, and became the world's enduring image of secret wisdom.

• The Elamites

  The people of the highlands and plains of southwest Iran — Susa and Anshan, a language belonging to no family but its own, and gods who fell silent with the tongue that named them.

• The Evenki

  The Tungusic reindeer-people of the Siberian taiga, holders of the widest range of any Siberian people and the source of the word "shaman."

• The Ewe

  Gbe-speaking people of the coast between the Volta and Mono rivers — western kin of the Fon — who keep Mawu, the trɔwo, the Yewe thunder society, and the exodus from Notsie.

• The Faliscans

  The Italic people of Falerii in the Tiber valley — close kin and allies of the Etruscans, who kept their own Latin-like speech and their own goddess Juno Curritis inside the Etruscan sacred world.

• The Fante

  The coastal Akan nation of Ghana, bound by the Asafo companies and their posuban shrines, the ancestral oracle of Nananom Mpow, and the 1868 Fante Confederation.

• The Fomorians

  The monstrous sea-and-night race of Irish myth, powers of blight and disorder whose king Balor wielded the destroying eye, broken by the Tuatha Dé Danann at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired.

• The Fon

  West African people of old Dahomey in present-day Benin, keepers of the Vodun religion and the African taproot of Haitian Vodou.

• The Fortunate Isles

  The Fortunate Isles (Isles of the Blessed) — the paradisal islands of Greco-Roman myth at the western edge of the world where favored heroes pass a blessed afterlife, linked to Elysium and later mapped onto real Atlantic islands.

• The Galatians

  The Celtic war-bands who marched east, broke against Delphi, crossed into Asia Minor, and settled at the heart of Anatolia, keeping their tongue, their council, and their oak-sanctuary for centuries among the Greeks.

• The Garamantes

  The Garamantes — the Berber civilization of the central Sahara (the Fezzan, c. 500 BCE–700 CE), who farmed the desert through a vast network of underground foggara channels, controlled trans-Saharan trade, and built the towns and pyramid tombs of Garama.

• The Getae

  The Thracians of the lower Danube, the people of Zalmoxis whom Herodotus called the bravest and most just for their belief that they do not die.

• The Gun

  The Gbe-speaking people of Porto-Novo and the adjoining Nigerian coast, a western branch out of Allada who built their kingdom on the Fon-Yoruba seam, keep the Fon vodun and the Yoruba orisha at a single set of altars, and set the night-watch of the Zangbeto over their towns.

• The Gupta Empire

  The Gupta Empire — the north Indian power (c. 320–550 CE) remembered as a classical golden age, patrons of the Sanskrit renaissance of Kalidasa, of the decimal place-value mathematics of Aryabhata, and of a flowering of Hindu temple architecture and Buddhist learning at Nalanda.

• The Haitians

  The people of Ayiti, forged in slavery on Saint-Domingue from Fon, Yoruba, and Kongo Africans, who won the first Black republic and serve the lwa of Vodou as their national soul.

• The Hallstatt Culture

  The Hallstatt culture — the Late Bronze and early Iron Age culture of central Europe (c. 1200–450 BCE), the ancestral horizon of the Celts, named for the Austrian salt-mining site whose wealth filled the princely wagon-burials and whose trade reached the Mediterranean world.

• The Hattians

  The indigenous, pre-Indo-European people of central Anatolia, from whose land the Hittites took their name and whose gods and sacred language they kept at the heart of their worship.

• The Hawaiians

  The Kanaka Maoli, northernmost of the Polynesians, whose ranked island world bound chiefs to the cosmos through the Kumulipo, governed life by kapu and mana, and outlived the fall of the old order, an overthrow, and an annexation to reclaim its language, chant, and voyaging.

• The Helvetii

  The Celtic people of the Swiss plateau between the Jura and the Alps, whose burned-towns migration opened Caesar's war in Gaul and whose name endures in Helvetia, the Latin name of Switzerland.

• The Hittites

  The Hittites — the Indo-European Bronze Age power of central Anatolia, ruling from the capital Hattusa (c. 1650–1180 BCE), a rival of Egypt at Kadesh, keeper of a vast cuneiform archive and a state pantheon known as the "thousand gods of Hatti."

• The Hopi

  Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, the peaceable ones — Puebloan dry-farmers of three Arizona mesas who keep the katsinam, the covenant with Maasaw, and Old Oraibi, among the oldest inhabited villages in North America.

• The Huastec

  The Huastec — the Mesoamerican people of the Gulf coast of northeastern Mexico, a Maya-related culture cut off from the rest of the Maya, builders of circular temple-platforms and carvers of limestone deities, associated with the cults of fertility and the wind-god.

• The Hurrians

  A non-Indo-European, non-Semitic people of the upper rivers and the northern Syrian plains, whose storm-god Teššub, mother-goddess Ḫebat, and great succession-myth of the kingship of heaven passed into the Hittite state religion and were carved upon the rock at Yazılıkaya.

• The Iberians

  The Iberians — the Iron Age peoples of eastern and southern Spain (c. 6th–1st century BCE), a literate, urban, Mediterranean-trading culture in contact with Phoenicians and Greeks, sculptors of the Lady of Elche and the votive bronzes, worshippers at open-air and cave sanctuaries.

• The Ifugao

  The Austronesian terrace-builders of the Cordillera highlands of northern Luzon, whose mumbaki still feed the carved bulul rice-gods at harvest and whose women still chant the hudhud — a Philippine sacred world that survived where the conquered lowlands lost theirs.

• The Inca

  The small ruling people of Qosqo whose state became Tawantinsuyu, 'the four parts joined together' — an empire measured out from a sacred navel by golden rod, knotted cord, and forty thousand kilometers of road, and survived by the living Quechua who speak its tongue.

• The Indo-Aryans

  The Indo-Aryan-speaking people who composed the Vedas in the northwest of the Indian world around the second millennium BCE — makers of a language and a religion, and the subject of a contested debate over how they came to be there.

• The Indo-Greek Kingdoms

  The Indo-Greek Kingdoms — the Hellenistic states of the northwestern Indian subcontinent (c. 200 BCE–10 CE) descended from the Greco-Bactrians, whose greatest king Menander I (Milinda) is remembered in the Buddhist dialogue Milindapanha and whose coins fused Greek and Indian gods.

• The Inuit

  The Inuit — "the people," singular Inuk — the Thule-descended seal-and-whale hunters of the North American and Greenlandic Arctic, whose relational cosmology of the sea-mother, the taboo, and the angakkuq endures across four countries within Inuit Nunangat, through Nunavut, Greenlandic self-rule, and a hard colonial century.

• The Itza

  Maya people who founded Chichen Itza and held the forest-lake island of Nojpeten as the last independent Maya kingdom until 1697.

• The Jeju Islanders

  The people of Korea's great volcanic island, keepers of a shamanic world of their own — eighteen thousand gods, a giant creator-goddess, and a shrine in every village.

• The Jomon

  The cord-marked pottery culture of the Japanese archipelago, c. 14,000–300 BCE — sedentary foragers who made the world's oldest ceramics and the broken clay figures called dogu, and who are claimed, contestedly, as the deep-time ancestors of the living Ainu.

• The K'iche'

  The K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands, keepers of the Popol Vuh, conquered in 1524 and enduring as one of the largest living Maya nations.

• The Kadagi

  The oracle of the eastern Georgian highland shrines — the man or woman seized by a khati and made its first-person mouthpiece, the one shrine office nobody applies for, rendered at the public-record distance.

• The Kanaka Maoli

  The Kanaka Maoli — kanaka, a person; maoli, true and genuine — the Indigenous Polynesians of Hawai'i, who reach the record first through genealogy: the Kumulipo's 2,102 lines from the coral polyp in the dark to the chiefs and the people, a living nation that outlived the overthrow of its kingdom and is reviving its language, its voyaging, and its claim to sovereignty.

• The Karelians

  The Baltic-Finnic people of Karelia, the Orthodox keepers of the runo-song from whom the songs of the Kalevala were gathered.

• The Kassites

  The Kassites — the dynasty of foreign origin that ruled Babylon for over four centuries (c. 1595–1155 BCE), restorers of Babylonian temple cult, originators of the kudurru boundary-stones, and a stabilizing power of the Late Bronze Age Near East.

• The Khamnigan

  The Tungus-Mongol people of the Onon-Argun steppe east of Lake Baikal, who carry two inherited tongues and two inherited religions and are named, in Mongol, simply "the Evenki."

• The Khevsurs

  The Kartvelian highland people of the Great Caucasus watershed in northeastern Georgia, whose armored appearance made outsiders imagine lost European crusaders and whose real life is a Georgian Orthodox order of communes bound to their shrines, seasonal still under the same peaks.

• The Kingdom of Aksum

  The Kingdom of Aksum — the trading empire of the Ethiopian highlands and the Red Sea (c. 1st–7th century CE), raiser of the giant carved stelae, minter of its own coinage, the first sub-Saharan state to adopt Christianity under King Ezana, and keeper of the Ethiopian Ark of the Covenant tradition.

• The Kingdom of Kush

  The Kingdom of Kush — the Nubian power of the middle Nile (centered successively on Kerma, Napata, and Meroë), which ruled Egypt as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty, worshipped Amun and the lion-god Apedemak, and developed its own Meroitic script and pyramid burials.

• The Kingdom of Saba

  The Kingdom of Saba (Sheba) — the South Arabian incense-trading power centered on Marib in present-day Yemen (early first millennium BCE onward), builder of the great Marib dam, worshipper of the moon-god Almaqah, and the realm later remembered as the home of the Queen of Sheba.

• The Kongo

  The Kikongo-speaking BaKongo of west-central Africa, the largest single source-region of the Atlantic trade to Saint-Domingue, and the makers of the Kongo layer of Haitian Vodou — the Petwo rite, the Simbi, the nkisi that became the pwen, and the zonbi.

• The Koreans

  The people of the Korean peninsula and their diaspora, bearers of a religious world layered like few others — an indigenous shamanism and mountain-worship beneath Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Christianity in turn.

• The Kushan Empire

  The Kushan Empire — the Central Asian power (c. 30–375 CE) that united Bactria, Gandhara, and northern India under the Yuezhi-descended dynasty of Kanishka, a great patron of Buddhism, minter of a polyglot pantheon of coins, and the hinge of the Silk Road between Rome, Parthia, and Han China.

• The Lakota

  The Lakota — the western, Teton division of the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires the outside world called the Sioux — a living sovereign people of the northern Plains whose religion of the pipe, the vision, and the Sun Dance turns on Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, and whose history carries the seizure of the Black Hills, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and an unbroken claim to Paha Sapa.

• The Lucumí

  The Yoruba-descended people and religious community of Cuba, bearers of Regla de Ocha and of the Lucumí liturgical tongue, whose very name — a Yoruba greeting frozen by the enslavers into the name of a nation — records how a colonial category became a people.

• The Luwians

  The Indo-European people of western and southern Anatolia, kin to the Hittites, whose storm-god Tarhunza and whose hieroglyphic script carried the Anatolian sacred tradition from the Bronze Age down into the Iron.

• The Magi

  The hereditary priestly caste of the Medes and Persians — keepers of fire and sacrifice, readers of dreams and stars — whose name passed into Greek as the word for magic.

• The Majapahit

  The Hindu-Javanese empire of eastern Java (c. 1293–1527) that the Balinese remember not as a foreign conqueror but as the ancestral homeland — the source from which the priesthood, the kawi letters, the temple forms, and the wangsa order are said to have crossed the strait.

• The Malagasy

  The one people of Madagascar, of doubled Austronesian and African descent, whose living religious world turns on the razana, hasina, fady and the rites of return.

• The Mandaeans

  The last surviving Gnostics of antiquity — a small Aramaic-speaking, baptizing people of the southern Iraqi and Khuzestani marshlands who honor John the Baptist, seek the soul's return to the World of Light, and now live scattered across a worldwide diaspora.

• The Mannaeans

  The Mannaeans — the Iron Age kingdom of the northwestern Iranian plateau around Lake Urmia (c. 10th–7th century BCE), a buffer between Assyria and Urartu, known from the gold and ivory of Hasanlu and Ziwiye and from its mention in Assyrian and biblical records.

• The Maori

  The indigenous Polynesian people of Aotearoa, whose whakapapa genealogy binds gods to the living, whose marae and mana-tapu-utu order their world, and whose Treaty of Waitangi remains the country's legal fault-line.

• The Mari

  The Finno-Ugric people of the middle Volga who have kept their pre-Christian religion of sacred groves and grove-sacrifices alive into the present, sometimes called the last pagans of Europe.

• The Maroons

  The figure of the runaway who walked into the mountains and turned African memory into an armed counter-society — Haiti's marronage from the one-armed Makandal to the conch-blowing Marron Inconnu, set against the wider maroon world of the Americas.

• The Marquesans

  The East Polynesian people of Te Fenua 'Enata, raisers of the great stone me'ae and the first voyagers to Hawai'i, a living people of French Polynesia whose language, tattoo, and chant are being reclaimed.

• The Mauretanians

  The westernmost Berber kingdom of the Maghreb — the Mauri of the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores between the river Mulucha and the Pillars of Heracles, ruled by Bocchus and, last and most learned, by the scholar-king Juba II at Caesarea, before Rome made them a province.

• The Maurya Empire

  The Maurya Empire — the first empire to unite most of the Indian subcontinent (c. 322–185 BCE), founded by Chandragupta with the statecraft of the Arthashastra and brought to its height by Ashoka, whose conversion after the Kalinga war made him the great royal patron of Buddhism and of the dhamma of his rock and pillar edicts.

• The Medes

  The Medes — the Iranian people of the northwestern plateau who built an empire from Ecbatana (c. 678–549 BCE), helped overthrow Assyria, and whose priestly class, the Magi, lent its name to magic and tended the early fire-cult later gathered into Zoroastrianism.

• The Medieval Icelanders

  The Norse settlers of a remote north-Atlantic island who built a republic without a king and then wrote down nearly all that survives of the old Norse world.

• The Minaeans

  The merchant kingdom of Ma'in in the Yemeni Jawf, whose caravans carried frankincense and the god Wadd the length of the incense road.

• The Mississippian Culture and Cahokia

  The Mississippian culture and Cahokia — the mound-building societies of the North American Eastern Woodlands (c. 800–1600 CE), whose greatest city, Cahokia by the Mississippi, raised Monks Mound and a planned ceremonial center expressing the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.

• The Mixe

  The Mixe (Ayuujk ja'ay) — the never-conquered highland people of the Sierra Mixe in eastern Oaxaca, Mexico, whose living Mixe-Zoquean language is argued to be the last heir of the speech of the Olmec, and whose summit cult of Zempoaltepetl and King Condoy, thunder god Konk änää, and 260-day calendar endure as living practice.

• The Mixtec

  The Mixtec (Ñuu Dzaui) — the civilization of the Oaxacan highlands of Mexico (flourishing after c. 900 CE), keepers of the great screenfold codices recording their dynastic and sacred history, master goldsmiths and lapidaries, and authors of the saga of Lord Eight Deer.

• The Mixtec

  The Mixtec (Ñuu Savi, the People of the Rain) — an Otomanguean-speaking people of the Oaxacan highlands and coast whose screenfold codices are the deepest indigenous historical record of the Americas, whose goldsmiths were the foremost of Mesoamerica, and who remain a living nation of some 830,000 across Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero, and the migrant communities of California and New York.

• The Moche

  The Moche — the civilization of Peru's north coast (c. 100–700 CE), builders of the great adobe huacas of the Sun and Moon, masters of portrait ceramics and metalwork (the lords of Sipán), whose art records an elaborate Sacrifice Ceremony presided over by warrior-priests.

• The Mon

  The Mon — a living Austroasiatic people of Lower Burma and central Thailand, whom the Bamar long called Talaing and whose old Pali realm was Ramaññadesa; the early carriers of Theravada Buddhism, Pali letters, and temple-craft into the Irrawaddy valley, remembered in the Nat sacred world as the Buddhist teachers of the Bamar.

• The Mudang

  The shamans of Korea, ritual specialists and overwhelmingly women, who stand between the living and the gods and the dead and whose great rite, the gut, carries the indigenous Korean religion.

• The Mường

  The upland mountain kin of the Vietnamese — a Vietic people of Hòa Bình and the north-central hills whose creation epic Đẻ đất đẻ nước, sung over the dead, preserves the older Việt world of earth and mother.

• The Nabataean Kingdom

  The Nabataean Kingdom — the Arab caravan state that cut the rock city of Petra and controlled the incense routes of the southern Levant and Arabia (c. 4th century BCE–106 CE), worshippers of Dushara and al-Uzza, masters of desert hydraulics, annexed by Rome as Arabia Petraea.

• The Nabataeans

  The Arab caravan people of northwestern Arabia and the southern Levant who carved Petra and Hegra from the rock, mastered the incense road and the desert's rare water, worshiped Dushara in the standing stone, and wrote the cursive Aramaic that became the Arabic script.

• The Nahua

  The Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico, the broad nation of which the Aztecs were one branch, and the bearers of a religious world that outlived the empire.

• The Naxi

  The people of the Lijiang basin in northwestern Yunnan whose Dongba priests still read the last living pictographic scripture, carrying south a ritual inheritance kin to Tibetan Bon.

• The Nivkh

  The living fisher-people of the lower Amur and northern Sakhalin — speakers of a language related to nothing else on earth, and, like their Ainu neighbors across the Tatar Strait, keepers of the bear festival that sends an honored guest home to the mountain gods.

• The Norse

  The Old Norse-speaking peoples of medieval Scandinavia, whose heathen worship of the Aesir and Vanir, whose law and seafaring, and whose conversion to Christianity made them one of the most vivid of pre-Christian Europe.

• The Numidians

  The Berber horsemen of the eastern Maghreb, whose kings welded a confederation of tribes into a kingdom that took up the gods and the script of the Punic world.

• The Nuragic Civilization

  The Nuragic civilization — the Bronze and Iron Age culture of Sardinia (c. 1800–238 BCE), builders of the thousands of stone tower-fortresses called nuraghi, of sacred well-temples for a water cult, and of the bronzetti figurines that are its chief record.

• The Odrysians

  The Odrysians built the greatest of the Thracian kingdoms, the power of the Hebrus plains that under Teres and Sitalces gathered the tribes of Thrace and dealt as an equal with Athens, Persia, and Macedon.

• The Okhotsk Culture

  The sea-mammal hunters who ringed the coasts of the Sea of Okhotsk from the fifth to the tenth centuries, whose pit-houses at Moyoro held a shrine of bear skulls — the northern root of the Ainu kamuy religion, and a major genetic ancestor of the Ainu themselves.

• The Old Prussians

  The pagan Baltic nation between the Vistula and the Neman, conquered by the Teutonic Order in a thirteenth-century crusade and remembered chiefly through the words of its enemies and the last records of its lost tongue.

• The Olmec

  The Olmec — the formative civilization of the Mexican Gulf coast (c. 1500–400 BCE), builders of San Lorenzo and La Venta, carvers of the colossal basalt heads, and a likely source of the Mesoamerican calendar, ballgame, and were-jaguar imagery inherited by later cultures.

• The Ombiasy

  The Malagasy diviner-healer who reads a person's destiny in cast seeds and prescribes its remedy, heir to an Antemoro learning written in Arabic script.

• The Oyo Empire

  The cavalry empire of the savanna Yoruba, where the Aláàfin's sacred majesty was caged by the council that could order him to die.

• The Pala Empire

  The Pala Empire — the Buddhist dynasty of eastern India (Bengal and Bihar, c. 750–1161 CE), the last great royal patrons of Indian Buddhism, sustainers of the monastic universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila and of the Vajrayana teachers who carried tantric Buddhism to Tibet.

• The Pandya Dynasty

  The Pandya dynasty — one of the three ancient Tamil royal lines, ruling the far south of India from Madurai across two millennia, patrons of the Sangam poetic academies in legend, of the great Meenakshi temple, and of a pearl-and-spice trade that reached Rome.

• The Paracas Culture

  The Paracas culture — the society of the south coast of Peru (c. 800 BCE–100 CE), famous for its vast desert necropolis, its intricately embroidered funerary mantles wrapping mummy bundles, and its practice of cranial modification and trepanation.

• The Parsis

  The Zoroastrians of India — refugees from Islamized Iran who carried the sacred fire to Gujarat and became, far out of proportion to their numbers, a founding force in modern Indian commerce, philanthropy, and nationhood.

• The Parthian Empire

  The Parthian Empire — the Arsacid Iranian power that ruled from the steppe-edge of Khurasan across Iran and Mesopotamia (247 BCE–224 CE), Rome's enduring eastern rival, patron of an emerging Zoroastrian and Mithraic religious culture and of the Silk Road trade.

• The Philistines

  The Aegean-descended sea-people of the southern Canaanite coast, biblical enemies of early Israel, whose name became a byword for the boor — a slur the excavator's trowel has overturned.

• The Phoenicians

  The seafaring Canaanite merchants of the Levantine coast — the cities of Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre — whom the Greeks named the purple people, who planted colonies across the Mediterranean and carried the alphabet from which the Western scripts descend.

• The Polynesians

  The Austronesian voyaging people of the Pacific triangle, whose memorized star-and-swell navigation found and settled the last habitable islands on earth.

• The Priests of Amun

  The Theban clergy of Amun, the Hidden One, who grew on the wealth of empire into a state within the state and at the New Kingdom's close ruled Upper Egypt as priest-kings.

• The Pshavs

  The highland Georgian community of the Pshavis Aragvi and upper Iori, organized into shrine-bound communes and famed for an improvised poetry that carried the law of the temi and gave modern Georgian literature its national poet, Vazha-Pshavela of Chargali.

• The Pueblo Peoples

  The Pueblo peoples — the maize-farming, town-dwelling village nations of the North American Southwest, the Hopi of the Arizona mesas, the Zuni, and the Keres, Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa of the Rio Grande and the western pueblos, descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, keepers of the kiva, the katsina, and one of the most carefully guarded ceremonial traditions on the continent.

• The Purépecha

  The Purépecha (long called the Tarascans) of highland Michoacán — the lake-and-mountain people the Aztecs never conquered, speakers of a language unrelated to any other, keepers of the sacred fires of Curicaueri, master metalworkers, and a living nation still ringing Lake Pátzcuaro.

• The Pyu

  The Pyu — the earliest urban, Buddhist civilization of Myanmar (c. 2nd century BCE–11th century CE), builders of the great walled city-states of Sri Ksetra, Beikthano, and Halin, whose remains mark the entry of Buddhism into the Irrawaddy valley.

• The Pyu

  The Pyu — the ancient Tibeto-Burman city-states of the Irrawaddy dry zone (c. 2nd century BCE–mid-11th century CE), builders of the great brick-walled, moated cities of Sri Ksetra, Beikthano, and Halin, the first urban and Buddhist civilization of Myanmar and the founding stratum beneath the Bamar, Bagan, and the living Burmese sacred world.

• The Quechua

  The Runa, 'the people' of Runa Simi — the ten-million-strong Quechua-speaking communities of the Andes who did not vanish with Tawantinsuyu, who hold the land in common by the ayllu and feed Pachamama and the mountain-lords in a living present, and whose language is older than the empire that made it famous.

• The Reformation

  The sixteenth-century movement that split Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant — and, on one influential reading, helped drain the visible world of its older enchantment.

• The Renaissance

  The European revival of classical learning, roughly 1400–1600 — and the setting in which Hermetism, Neoplatonism, and learned magic re-entered Western thought.

• The Rishis

  The seer-poets of the Veda — the sages who, the tradition holds, did not compose the hymns but saw them, and whose families and lineages carried the revealed sound unbroken for three thousand years.

• The Rus

  The river-state of the eastern Slavs, founded where Scandinavian traders met the Slavic tribes of the Dnieper, ruled from Kiev, that worshiped the old gods for a century and then in 988 took the Christianity of Byzantium.

• The Sa Huỳnh Culture

  The Sa Huỳnh culture — the Iron Age culture of the central and southern coast of Vietnam (c. 1000 BCE–200 CE), known for its jar burials and its distinctive jade and glass ear-ornaments (the lingling-o), a maritime-trading people ancestral to the later Cham.

• The Sabaeans

  The Sabaeans — people of the South Arabian kingdom of Saba, builders of Marib and its great dam, servants of the god Almaqah, who wrote their own history in the tall musnad script and whom the outer world remembered as Sheba.

• The Sabians of Harran

  The pagan, star-worshipping community of north Mesopotamian Harran who took the Quran's undefined name "Sabian" to win protected status under Islam and so carried the planetary religion of antiquity two centuries into the medieval world.

• The Saka

  The Saka — the eastern Scythians, Iranian-speaking horse-nomads of Central Asia from the Aral and the Syr Darya to the Pamir and the Altai, named in their divisions on the Behistun inscription of Darius and remembered above all in the gold-sewn Issyk burial.

• The Sakalava

  The ancestor-monarchy of Madagascar's western coast, whose kings do not stop reigning at death but govern on from the reservoir of royal power, served in relics and voice.

• The Sakha

  The northernmost Turkic people, horse- and cattle-keepers of the Lena basin, whose religion sets the bright Aiyy of the upper world against the abaahy below and crowns the brief summer with the sky-festival of the Yhyakh.

• The Sami

  The indigenous reindeer-herding people of the European far north, whose pre-Christian religion centered on the noaidi, the painted drum, and the sacred land — a living people of Sapmi and a continuing shamanic heritage.

• The Sangomas

  The ancestrally-called diviners of the Zulu world — the izangoma who are summoned to their office by a calling-sickness, trained under a senior diviner, and set apart from the herbalist inyanga, and who today practice as a registered profession, women foremost among them.

• The Sarmatians

  The Iranian horse-people who followed the Scythians onto the Pontic steppe and held it for half a millennium — the armored cataphract lancers, the fire-and-sword cult, and the warrior-women the Greeks called daughters of the Amazons.

• The Sasanians

  The last and most self-consciously Iranian of the pre-Islamic Persian empires (224–651 CE), under which the worship of Ahura Mazda became the throne's own confession, bound to the sacred fire until the Arab conquest.

• The Satavahana Empire

  The Satavahana Empire — the Deccan power of early-historic India (c. 2nd century BCE–3rd century CE) that bridged north and south, patrons of both Vedic sacrifice and the Buddhist stupas of Amaravati and the Western Ghats cave-monasteries, and issuers of some of India's earliest royal coinage.

• The Scythians

  The Scythians — the Iranian-speaking nomadic horse peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the first millennium BCE, known from Herodotus and from their gold-rich kurgan burials, masters of mounted archery and the "animal style" of art.

• The Sicán (Lambayeque) Culture

  The Sicán (Lambayeque) culture — the society of Peru's north coast (c. 750–1375 CE) between the Moche and the Chimú, builders of the adobe pyramids of Batán Grande, master goldsmiths, and bearers of the Sicán Lord icon and the founding legend of Naylamp.

• The Slavs

  The peoples who in a few centuries spread across eastern and central Europe to become its largest ethno-linguistic family, and whose pagan religion — left almost unwritten — must be pieced together from hostile outsiders, Christian chroniclers, and the deep memory of folklore.

• The Soyot

  Reindeer-herding people of the Oka valley in the Eastern Sayan of Buryatia, written off as assimilated Buryat and now herding and speaking again.

• The Sumerians

  The people of the world's first cities in southern Mesopotamia — inventors of writing and of the temple-city, speakers of a language without kin — who were forgotten for three thousand years and then deduced back into existence from the wedge-marks of a script no one had read.

• The Svans

  The Kartvelian tower-village highlanders of upper northwestern Georgia, who kept a mountain religion of the golden huntress Dali and the icon-shrines through the isolation of the high Caucasus valleys.

• The Tagalog

  The people of the river and the tidal bay of central Luzon — barangay-dwellers of Bathala and the anito, keepers of baybayin, whose healer-priestess the catalonan the friars turned into the aswang, and whose country became the cradle of the Filipino nation.

• The Tahitians

  The Mā'ohi of the Society Islands, whose sacred center at Taputapuatea on Ra'iatea — the island the old voyagers knew as Havai'i — sent canoes across the ocean, and whom Hawaiian tradition remembers as the people of Kahiki, the second wave that carried a whole religious order north.

• The Tarascan State

  The Tarascan (Purépecha) State — the western Mexican empire centered on Tzintzuntzan by Lake Pátzcuaro (c. 1300–1530 CE), the great rival the Aztecs never conquered, metallurgists in copper and bronze, worshippers of the fire-and-sun god Curicaueri.

• The Tày

  The valley Tai people of north-eastern Vietnam, most populous of the country's minorities, whose Then ritual-song mediumship carries spirit-soldiers up the đàn tính lute to the sky and ties their forests to the Mother of the green Palace.

• The Tellem

  The vanished cliff-dwellers of the Bandiagara Escarpment, known less by monuments than by what the dry caves kept — medieval cotton cloth, wooden figures, and a thousand of their dead — and named by the Dogon who found them already there.

• The Tibetans

  The Bodpa, people of the high plateau — a single Tibeto-Burman nation who carry two whole religions, Yungdrung Bon and Tibetan Buddhism, around one axis of the world.

• The Tlaxcalans

  The Nahua people of the unconquered highland confederacy of Tlaxcala, bound to the war-god Camaxtli and the flower wars, who allied with Cortes and helped bring down the Aztec empire.

• The Tocharians

  The Tocharians — the Indo-European people of the Tarim Basin oasis city-states (Kucha, Turfan, Karasahr), known from the naturally mummified dead, from the Tocharian-language Buddhist manuscripts, and from the Silk Road art of Kizil, an easternmost outpost of the Indo-European world.

• The Tofalar

  One of the smallest of all Siberia's peoples — Turkic-speaking hunters of the Eastern Sayan taiga who rode and packed small bands of reindeer up stony mountain paths after sable, and whose shamanic world of the underworld lord Erlik survived to be recorded on the very edge of its passing.

• The Toltec

  The Toltec — the central Mexican people centered on Tula (c. 900–1150 CE), remembered by the later Aztecs as the archetype of civilization and craft (toltecayotl) and as the realm of the priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, whose history and legend are hard to disentangle.

• The Torres Strait Islanders

  The Melanesian seafaring people of the islands between Cape York and New Guinea, whose law is read in the constellation Tagai and whose island custom, Ailan Kastom, stands distinct from mainland Aboriginal Australia.

• The Totonac

  The Totonac — the people of the central Gulf coast of Mexico, builders of the great Classic-era city of El Tajín with its Pyramid of the Niches, masters of the ballgame and its sacrifice cult, and keepers of the ritual flying ceremony of the Voladores.

• The Tuatha Dé Danann

  The divine race of Irish myth — gods of pagan Ireland whom medieval Christian scribes recast as a magical people, victors of the two battles of Mag Tuired, who withdrew into the hollow hills to become the fairies of folk tradition.

• The Umbrians

  The Italic people of the central Apennines whose seven bronze tablets from Gubbio, the Iguvine Tables, preserve the fullest surviving liturgy of any ancient Italic religion.

• The Vascones

  The Iron Age and Roman-era people of the middle Ebro and the western Pyrenees — Pompaelo, the classical notices, the Hand of Irulegi, and the contested "Vasconization" — the documented ancient ancestors of the living Basques.

• The Veneti

  The Indo-European people of the northeastern Adriatic corner of Italy, breeders of fine horses and worshipers of Reitia, the healing goddess who kept the gift of writing, whose sanctuary at Este gathered thousands of inscribed offerings.

• The Vietnamese

  The Kinh, người Việt of the Red River delta and the long coast — a single Austroasiatic nation who keep the ancestors, the Buddha, Confucius, and the Four Mothers of Đạo Mẫu all at once.

• The Vikings

  The Norse in their three-century phase of overseas raiding, trading, and settlement (c. 793–1066), borne on the longship from Newfoundland to the Caspian.

• The Villanovan Culture

  The Villanovan culture — the earliest Iron Age culture of central and northern Italy (c. 900–700 BCE), the formative phase of the Etruscans, known for its biconical cremation urns, its proto-urban settlements, and the metalworking wealth that opened Italy to Mediterranean trade.

• The Vinča Culture

  The Vinča culture — the Neolithic society of the central Balkans (c. 5400–4500 BCE), builders of large tell-settlements, early workers of copper, and makers of the figurines and incised 'Vinča symbols' that figure in debates over the origins of writing.

• The Visayans

  The Bisaya of the central Philippine islands — the tattooed Pintados whom Magellan met and Lapulapu killed in 1521, keepers of the babaylan priesthood, the diwata, and the vast Hinilawod epic, whose old dance to the spirits survives as Cebu's Sinulog.

• The Xiongnu

  The Xiongnu — the nomadic steppe confederation of Mongolia and China's northern frontier (3rd century BCE–1st century CE), the first great power of the eastern steppe, worshippers of the sky Tengri, whose pressure shaped the Han dynasty and the building of the Great Wall.

• The Yamabushi

  The mountain-ascetics of Japan, practitioners of the syncretic path of Shugendō, who fused the cult of the kami with esoteric Buddhism and the lore of the hills into a single discipline of power sought in the high and sacred places.

• The Yamato People

  The Yamato — the majority people of the central Japanese state and its imperial line, bearers of the kami-cult as the matrix of a national identity and keepers of a throne the chronicles trace, unbroken in their own reckoning, to the sun-goddess Amaterasu.

• The Yazidis

  A Kurdish-speaking people of the Sinjar mountains and the valley of Lalish whose ancient religion honors the Peacock Angel and who have been slandered for a thousand years as devil-worshippers, down to the genocide of 2014.

• The Yolngu

  The Aboriginal people of north-eastern Arnhem Land, whose ancestral Law is carried in song, sacred design, and ceremony, and who turned the painted clan design into a title-deed in the modern land-rights struggle.

• The Yoruba

  A West African people of southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, bearers of the orisha religion and the Ifa divining science, whose gods crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved.

• The Yotvingians

  A Baltic forest people of the lakes between the Neman and the Narew, known almost wholly through their enemies and their graves, destroyed and divided in the thirteenth century.

• The Yucatec Maya

  The Maya of the northern limestone peninsula, heirs of the lowland cities and keepers of the Books of Chilam Balam, whose katun-prophecy, rain-rite, and day-count carried the old order through the conquest, the Caste War, and into a living present.

• The Yup'ik

  The Yup'ik of the Bering Sea coast — a distinct Eskaleut people, not Inuit, whose cosmology of the yua, the indwelling person inside every animal and thing, is watched over by Ellam Yua and enacted in the Bladder Festival and the masked dances of the qasgiq; a living people whose language, carving, and community-owned archaeology at Nunalleq endure through a century of missionization.

• The Zapotec

  The Zapotec — the Be'ena'a, the Cloud People of Oaxaca, whose Monument 3 at San José Mogote carries some of the oldest writing in the Americas, who ran two meshed calendars and a five-part sky ruled by the rain-lord Cocijo, and who remain today a living nation of nearly half a million speakers of the cloud-tongue.

• The Zapotec

  The Zapotec — the Mesoamerican civilization of the Oaxaca Valley centered on the hilltop city of Monte Albán (from c. 500 BCE), developers of one of the earliest Mesoamerican writing systems, worshippers of the rain-god Cocijo, and carvers of the enigmatic danzante reliefs.

• The Zoroastrians

  The living worldwide community of the faith of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord — heirs of the ancient Iranian religion of Zarathustra, keeping the sacred fires and the daily covenant of the cord across Iran, India, and a small aging diaspora.

• The Zulu

  The amaZulu of KwaZulu-Natal — the sky-people whom Shaka welded into a kingdom, whose dead are kept at the byre and the umsamo, whose diviners are called by the ancestors, and whose living monarchy still tastes the first fruits before the nation may eat.

• Thrace

  The ancient land north and east of Greece, home to the Thracian peoples and, in Greek tradition, to Orpheus and the ecstatic cults the Greeks half-feared and half-borrowed.

• Thule

  The farthest-north land of Greco-Roman geography (Ultima Thule) and its modern occult-nationalist reception, including the Thule Society.

• Tiwanaku

  Tiwanaku — the highland Andean civilization on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca (c. 110–1000 CE), builder of the Akapana platform and the Gateway of the Sun with its staff-bearing deity, a ceremonial and political center later woven into Inca myths of Viracocha and the world's creation.

• Tlaxcala

  Independent Nahua confederacy that resisted the Aztecs and allied with Cortes, decisive in the fall of Tenochtitlan.

• Ugarit

  the Bronze Age Canaanite port-kingdom on the Syrian coast (Ras Shamra, destroyed c. 1190 BCE), whose palace archives preserved, in the world's first alphabetic cuneiform, the Baal Cycle and the myths of El, Baal, and Anat, the fullest surviving record of Canaanite religion.

• Urartu

  The Iron Age kingdom of the Armenian highlands, centred on Lake Van, whose state cult was built around the warrior-god Haldi and his fortified temples.

• Urkesh

  Urkesh (Tell Mozan) — one of the oldest Hurrian cities of upper Mesopotamia (flourishing in the third millennium BCE), a holy city of the underworld-god Kumarbi and site of the abi, a stone-lined pit dug for rites to summon the spirits of the earth.

• Valdivia Culture

  Coastal Ecuadorian culture producing some of the oldest pottery in the Americas, including the celebrated Venus figurines.

• Vandals

  The East Germanic people whose fifth-century North African kingdom held to Arian Christianity and ruled, for a century, over a largely Nicene population.

• Vijayanagara

  the great South Indian Hindu empire (1336-1646) centered on Hampi on the Tungabhadra, a sacred-imperial capital of the Virupaksha and Vitthala temples founded under the guidance of the sage Vidyaranya of Sringeri and dedicated to upholding dharma against the northern sultanates.

• Vikings

  The Norse seafaring peoples of the Viking Age (c. 793–1066) — remembered here for their gods, their cosmology, and the sagas and Eddas that preserve them.

• Wari

  Wari (Huari) — the highland Andean empire centered near Ayacucho in Peru (c. 600–1000 CE), builder of a road and administrative network across the central Andes, carrier of the Staff God iconography from Tiwanaku, and often called the first Andean empire.

• Xia Dynasty

  The first dynasty of traditional Chinese history — remembered as the line of Yu the Great, who tamed the floods; its historical existence remains debated.

• Yamato

  Yamato — the early Japanese state of the Kofun and Asuka periods (c. 250–710 CE), raisers of the colossal keyhole-shaped imperial tomb-mounds, shapers of the kami worship later called Shinto, and the court that adopted Buddhism and Chinese statecraft to forge the Japanese monarchy.

• Ys

  Ys (Ker-Is) — the legendary city of Breton folklore said to have been built below sea level behind a sea-wall and swallowed by the ocean for its sins, bound to King Gradlon and his daughter Dahut.

• Zagwe Dynasty

  Medieval Christian Ethiopian dynasty centered at Roha (Lalibela) that bridged Aksum and the Solomonic restoration.

• Zenu (Sinu)

  Lower Sinu and San Jorge floodplain culture; engineers of a vast ridged-field hydraulic network and filigree gold ornaments.

• Zhangzhung

  The ancient kingdom of far western Tibet, centered on Mount Kailash and the upper Sutlej, that the Bon tradition holds to be the cradle of its religion and the homeland of its sacred tongue — absorbed by the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century.

• Zhou Dynasty

  The long Chinese dynasty of roughly 1046 to 256 BCE — the age of the Mandate of Heaven and of the founding teachers later gathered as the Hundred Schools.