Yes, hence my reference to the concept as created in the Treaty of Westphalia.

I understand using modern views on nationality can't apply to the ancient world, or even to pre westphalian Europe, but we can still try to see what there was. For all I know, the SPQR was more akin to a modern nation state?


This question is mostly laid in response to hundreds of hours at looking at borders on my EB map, but also real borders at various times. I understand that to be part of a Kingdom mostly just meant you paid taxes to a different person, using their coinage, and that's it. It's why Cyrus was so praised because he didn't impose any Persian culture on them, allowing his subjects to retain their cultural, religious and in some respects their political identities.

but what about in the real world equivalent of a type I government? where the political structure is directly connected to the primary decision making body, not it's satraps, or client kings.


was it totally and completely cultural and linguistic? non Persian subject people wouldn't see themselves in the larger political entity of the Persian Empire? was the Shahanshah a distant figure who meant nothing to you, or was he as (hypothetically) given utmost respect?

Obviously the British colonies weren't as culturally or linguistically disparate as Medeans, Persians, Arabs and Egyptians, but they eventually overcame their individual identities to become the larger political, not linguistic, not cultural, entity of the United States. Did these groups overcome their cultural precluvities to associate themselves with the "Persian" political entity?

there has to be a book on the subject as this really does fascinate me

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you´re part of something because you refuse to be something else :\ thats the basis of "nationality" since nations where those with whom you shared a common culture (germans and austrians for instance) and thus empires where those who had within their borders people from diferent cultural groups

in many ways you can view it today in most sub saharan countries they aren´t trully countries per se as much as they are empires since withint each countries borders you have alot of cultural (i don´t like using the term ethnic since thats always very biased i mean you have 2 parents 4 grandparents 8 great great parents and so forth wich can come from a miriad of diferent origins or parts of the globe) south africa had around 11 diferent languages angola as at least 11 major sub groups congo nigeria are like wtf are all those dudes doing together if we redrew the map of africa according to the natives interests instead of the worlds superpowers we would probably end up with around 245 diferent countries in africa

notable exceptions are liberia (it´s still a plastic non natural country but for diferent reasons) somalia (arab conections and muslim free cities) and ethiopia(coptic christians) since they where always part of a given "empire" before we the "whities" stepped in and even then you have many sub groups like the afar and those 2 great expections are mainly "nations" for religious reasons since the abyssinians and the somali represented themselfs and got attached to it as ways to say they wheren´t part of that other group

in the end it always comes down to the old political weapon of using the fear of the "others"

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I remember as citizenship of poleis was something that foreigners could be awarded...
Even among Athenai people differentiated themselves between demos, for example with trophies related to military campaigns in other countries...
SPQR had so many social/legal divisions, I don't think the whole "empire" considered themselves as Romani, even Lucan during the principality said he was a Celtiberos...

In ancient times, family had a much more important role than today, I can easily see commoners referring to themselves with patronymics or tribe names...
Only distinctions I think were social classes and whether or not someone was a member of a royal family...

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Nations depend on imagined communities and borders. Look for these things (among others mentioned) when looking for proto-nations in antiquity. It is far too easy to choose not to study the ancients in their own context and to instead impose our modern notions upon them.

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The last I checked, Westphalia was regarded as the more-or-less the first official recognition of the concept of the modern sovereign territorial state; which is AFAIK rather different from the rather newer concept of nation-state...
Or at least, an awful lot of the "Westphalian" sovereign states were quite emphatically anything but nation-states well into the 1800s.

Jus' sayin'.

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yes thank you for that, but you understand what I mean. the concept of a sovereign state in the ancient world, regardless of the many ethnicities (nations) within it.

nation states were probably more common in the ancient world, don't you think? a conglomerate of ethnically related peoples under one banner.

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not really i mean normally people would gather around their own family and village and unleass there was a strong threat from the outside they would bicker at each other

even today we can see that to some extent with inter villages rivarly

a good example is for instance the inter clan wars of scotland there´s roughly around 200 diferent clans inside a small country all competiting and allying with each other

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a conglomerate of ethnically related people doesn't necessarily mean that: the Lakhmids for example, were a series of Arab tribes under the tutelage of a more powerful tribe (banu Lakhm*), but there was no nationalism involved. it was simply a series of tribes "bribed", or coerced, into subordination-a loose one, since The Arabs in general had zero concept of national identity. if the Lakhmids messed up in war, or failed to send money to the tribal leaders, then the tribes simply abandoned them.

*themselves vassals of the Sassanids

(most Arabs didn't refer to themselves as "Arab"; they went by "lakhmiy" or "qurayshiy" or "taghlibiy"; there is evidence that the term "Arab" was even unknown to some tribes)

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