You have a very flexible definition of "unchanged" then. The Catholic Church pre-Charlemagne is going to be very different from Saeculum Obscurum-era, itself different from Investiture Crisis-era, itself different from the one familiar in the Late Medieval, different from Counter Reformation-era one. It's absurd to me that you think the first time it changes significantly is Vatican II!

> Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.

My knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history is extremely poor, but what little I do know strongly suggests that considering it as a single stable form of government for thousands of years is even worse an error than claiming the Catholic Church was so stable and unchanging. Perhaps akin to saying that the Holy Roman Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and modern Germany are all one single country that has lasted for 1200 years (because they're all called Germany).

If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.

That's a bit of a myth, thrown around a lot but not quite true. It has existed in some form, but by no means remained changeless. The doctrine is substantially similar but then we can say the same thing about Judaism. Here, we're really talking about the organization, which has many issues:

-The East-West schism in 1054 tore the Catholic Church in half.

-Then there was another schism about 500 years later when Martin Luther & subsequent Reformation really splintered things, sparking many violent conflicts over the centuries. I'm sure many Catholics felt like things were falling apart then.

In lesser events that still made people feel things were falling apart:

-Rome was taken & Pope Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican during the Italian Reunification in 1870 there was probably a similar feeling.

-After Vatican II from 1962-1965 I know from my own relatives that they felt (and still feel) that the catholic church began to fall apart.

-The last few decades with countless child abuse scandals.

Clearly, that was your point. It's just completely wrong given things like the Gregorian Reform.

You'd have a better argument that the Catholic Church has been largely unchanged in the nearly 1000 years since the Gregorian reform (or, even better, the 700+ years after the series of reforms starting there and running through the 13th century councils) than the 1600 years between Constantine and Vatican II. It’d still be making the qualifier “largely” do an unreasonable amount of work, though.

I don't think we can cite 1600 years of stability for the organization at all. We may do so, somewhat, for doctrine, which is an achievement, but it's also equalled or exceeded by a few other religions.

You can even see this right now, where countries do not consider themselves to be as old as the current government's age, but much older. For example, most Italians will not consider Italy to be "started" at the Republic in '46, or even the Unification in 1861, but that the country is much, much older.

Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.

Britain had the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Magna Carta which amounts to a major revolution was enacted in 1215, and the Norman conquest happened in 1066. All these major events hardly occurred "a few generations ago".

I'm afraid that the idea of things largely unchanging in the past comes from our poor knowledge of history, compared to recent events.

> Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.

There were some dynastic changes and bumps along the road, absolutely, but my point is the overall shape of Egypt was remarkably stable even through the Persian conquest.

Nothing comparable to modernity.

You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.

Perhaps with regards to "scale" this may be true, but in most ways I disagree. There were hundreds of democracies in the ancient world - particularly in Greece - and they all tended to break down along similar lines. The Greeks even had a term for this - stasis - which there's a body of literature about. In stasis, the norms of democratic government are slowly eroded through an escalating series of power plays (each justified by previous excesses). This in turn erodes the public trust in institutions required for society to function. Which usually ends in violence. So I think it's a mistake to assume our situation is unique.

No, it really didn't.

> Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first.

Modern democracies are almost entirely representative democracies, more like historical republics (and in fact, many of them are explicitly republics, though some are technically limited monarchies) than classical democracies.