No matter how you define or name these things, your definitions will still be arbitrary. Polity. Empire. Civilization. It's like defining species, or musicals genres. There's obviously a there there, but it's not discreet.

Civilization or polity don't really have discrete meanings or beginning/end dates. Did Cyrus' civilization really end when Alexander beat the Persian imperial armies? Most of the political structures endured and then evolved under Hellenism. Did Hellenism end when Rome conquered the "world?" Well... Greek language and culture continued to dominate politically for another 1000 years.

While the physical and temporal scope of a particular empire, and the civilization it ruled over, have sometimes been co-extensive, that does not mean that the definitions are arbitrary or interchangeable. My understanding is that 'civilization' refers to a social organization in which populations, economic and political activity are concentrated in cities, and is independent of which political entity is running the show. In ancient times, civilization did come and go in various regions (e.g. the Indus valley and the Amazon basin), while in the last thousand years, empires have come and gone while the civilizations they fought over have endured.

To be clear, the world did not switch uniformly from one mode to the other. In the Nile and Yangtze valleys, for example, civilization has persisted through several millennia of political change. Cyrus' empire did end with Alexander's invasion, but the underlying civilization of the region remained.

Take turkey....

Did the Byzantine/Roman civilization end when the ottomans took over? Social organization changed, but not wholesale. social organization in which populations, Economic and political activity continued, concentrated in cities. Greek remained a major language, as did many Greek laws.

Incidentally, why was Rome/Byzantine civilization Greek speaking in anatolia? Because it had been Hellenised long before Rome conquered it. ..and language isn't everything. Before the Greeks were others, notably the hittites, a great civilization.

What I mean by arbitrary is that whether your chart shows continuity of a civilisation or not depends on how you define the term. One chart will show continuity from the bronze age to the present (or maybe until 1908). You could make that case. The cities mostly remaining occupied and the political organization probably had a lot of continuity. Another chart (like this one) will have Hittite, Hellenic, greco-roman, Byzantine, ottoman, etc. Civilisations lined up one after the other

What you are doing here is writing 'civilization' where 'empire' is the more appropriate usage. Up to that transformation, we are in agreement.

I assume the author of the second chart that you mention is doing the same thing.

Frequency of use is not the most important issue, but Google estimates 75,400 hits for "Byzantine civilization" (plus 15,400 for "Byzantine civilisation"), and 4.3 million for "Byzantine empire".

S'not me. It's the article, and the comments... and everyone.

I think you hit these sorts of problems regardless though. You could say empire, civilization, polity, society, culture... They're all fuzzy classifications.

They aren't discreet terms. A civilization doesn't begin or end at a certain date.. unless you agree to some specific formulation. But, that will not be an exact fit when you try to apply it elsewhere.

Taken totally literally, civilization just means urbanism. But obviously, that's not what we're talking about here.

I see that you have gone back to claiming an interchangeability in meaning that is not supported either by dictionaries or general usage.

The 'fuzziness' is just a consequence of your (and the article's, and some comments, but by no means everybody's) idiosyncratic usage: by treating 'Byzantine empire' and 'Byzantine civilization' as if they were interchangeable terms, then you have to explain that civilization on the Bosporus did not end with the fall of Constantinople, as you did a couple of posts ago. If, however, you stick with the usage that is preferred by a ratio of 50:1, then the fuzziness and potential confusion goes away, as then you would be using two distinct terms for two distinct concepts.

Your last paragraph is a non-sequitur, as the issue is not whether 'civilization' just means urbanism here, but whether it means the same thing as 'empire'.

>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term?

They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity.

Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.

They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe.

There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures.

And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium.

Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.

This reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with one of my daughters about species, specifically Homo Sapiens, but generally as well.

She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. The way they would have categorised hominid species would depend on the populations they saw at that time.

It’s the same with civilisations. How we categorise them is temporally dependent and is in fact an artefact of language. Reality doesn’t care if our linguistic categorizations make sense, or how they are limited.

>She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening.

There is no such person. Speciation isn't some quick and dramatic happening, it's a generally slow evolution (though a lot faster for things like bacteria). "Species" is just how biologists categorize things, but organisms are continually evolving to some extent, so if you grab some random humans from 1M years ago, and compare them to random humans today, you'll find some pretty significant differences most likely, even if it is possible for them all to interbreed. If you go back even farther, the differences will be greater, you might not be able to interbreed, but there's no clear delineation if you look at humans and their ancestors over the course of the last ~5M years, just a slow progression. Our modern biologists/anthropologists make up names for the beings from various select points in time, since they do differ markedly from beings at other far-removed points in time, but we don't have a clear picture anyway because all we have is fossils which don't show a clear picture, they're just select points in time where we got lucky and were able to find an artifact.

Continuity existing between separate categories doesn't mean categories are arbitrary nor artifacts of language. For example adults and children really are separate categories for many important purposes yet there is never a single day when a child becomes an adult.

That's an excellent analogy. How a society differentiates adults and children, is often more a reflection of societal norms than it is an objective biological distinction.

Similarly, analyses like these cannot help but be a reflection of the society that produced them. This article features a callout in the middle with weirdly axis-ed charts about climate change, inequality and environmental degradation, it's difficult not smirk knowing that within the context of our current society, there was no way it could be otherwise. One wonders 50 or 150 years ago what the cultural bugbears were and what the callout in the middle of the page would have featured. Overpopulation? Nuclear war? Out-of-wedlock births?

It's a decent analogy, but not a great one. Most people grow up in a fairly similar way. Every civilisation develops differently. Also, it's clear where one person ends and the next person begins. With civilisations, that's not so clear.

Categorizations can be useful definitely, but we need to bear in mind they’re not definitive or absolute. The underlying reality is primary, not the categorization, but it’s easy to get it the wrong way round.

Sure, but then the western roman empire only begins in the 3rd century with the partition of the unified roman empire (and collapsed in the 5th).

Even if you just want to look at who controls rome (understandable if we're talking about calling something the roman empire), after the reconquest by Justinian, it belonged to the eastern empire about the same amount of time as the west.

This quickly gets into a "Ship of Theseus" discussion. Arguable modern Turkey is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, but would you say that modern Turkey is the same political entity as the Roman Republic?

The is no objective answer to such questions - it gets down to who gets to write history and what they are trying to achieve. Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy derived legitimacy by considering themselves the true successor of Rome. So did the Catholic church to some extent. Therefore western historiography have traditionally sidelined the Eastern Roman Empire. Even the name "Byzantine Empire" is part of this framing.

Good point.

I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.

One defenition of Civilizations as per historian Arnold Toynbee (I am quoting from Wikipedia page for his work "The Study of History") is as follows:

"The 19 major civilizations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumerian, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern, Orthodox Christian (main body), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mexican, Yucatec, and Babylonic. There are four "abortive civilizations" (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian, Abortive Syriac) and five "arrested civilizations" (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan), for a total of 28."

"In the graphic below, I have compared the lifespan of various civilisations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure. Given this definition, all empires are civilisations, but not all civilisations are empires."

Under this definition, the British Empire and the USA are totally different civilizations.

You are talking about a cultural entity for which we do not really have a word.

There has been such blocks in the past "Christianity", the "Hellenestic world" which share common values but are separated into entities that may even wage war between them.

the roman political structure was stable between the republic and empires.

and if you accept the claim that civil wars or political discontinuity are enough to split a civilization the graph is still fishy because why is the empire not split around the 160something civil war while egypt was split around ruling dynasties?

it's not much consistent, all in all determining the civilization arcs is hard, but you need some form of hard barrier if you want to use the data in such fashion as averaging or deriving any conclusion from it.

I agree. Sumerian civilization is reasonably constant from the earliest writing until the conquest by the Persians, if not longer. I'll bet Chinese scholars would agree that China is similar---the same civilization through many changes of governments.

I note the author is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

I think its easy to be hung up on the meaning of the word, but a Civilization would start with a common governance, and sometimes that includes culture, as the proper Britons and Franks of old will have always had a different culture compared to Rome but were part of Rome. But that's just technical.

Emotionally your Civilization is where you would feel comfortable, and that might be Western Europe and North America, Australia, NZ.

Theoretically, yes. But Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire were waging wars against one another.

"Western civilization" is not a useful concept so is falling out of use

More specifically, there is not continuity that would make it one big civilization. Later civilizations copied things like legal system from the romans and inherited language. a lot of the seeming continuity is due to renaissance copying the "classics"

It's called the "west" in opposition to the eastern block during the cold war. And yes it's a useful concept because it exists and is well defined.

No, the concept of “Western civilization” is much older than the cold War, and the West in it is more in reference to the East-West Schism (or perhaps the East/West split of the Roman Empire) than the Cold War.

There really isn't a "western civilization". It's a fairly recent geopolitical term made for political purposes.

There is greco or more expansively greco-roman civilization that we adopted, but that doesn't make us part of the greco-roman civilization or a "western civilization". No more than japan adopting bits of chinese civilization makes japan "chinese civilization".

If you think western civilization exists, then there must be an eastern civilization? There is no such thing, other than for convenient geopolitical purposes. There is the chinese civilization, the indian civilization, the myriad of middle eastern, northern african civilizations, etc. But no such thing as an eastern civilation.

Were the chinese, persian, mongol, ottoman, etc empires part of an "eastern civilization"? Of course not.

The idea of a western civilization is a geopolitical concept we invented for political purposes and of course to claim "civilization" for ourselves. To claim we are a part of the greco-roman civilization when we are not part of it. We are adoptees of it. "Western civilization" is ultimately a sneaky way of claiming civilization status for ourselves.

Having said that, I may be a bit biased, but given the cultural, societal, global, linguistic, financial, systematic, military, etc impact we've had, I think the US has moved from an empire to an actual civilization. But ultimately, history confers the status of civilization, not the living. So maybe in a few hundred years, historians will say the US is an actual civilization. But for certain, 500 years, nobody is going to talk of anything called a "western civilization". It simply doesn't exist just like an "eastern civilization doesn't exist.