Only a handful of the world’s peoples, now nations, can boast multi-millennia of longevity, from antiquity to the present day: the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Greeks, Jews and Armenians. Despite conquest, partial assimilation and colonial domination, these six long-lived world-peoples have succeeded in maintaining – or restoring – their language, culture and/or religious specificity, and in reconstituting an independent state. The Chinese and Iranians relied on a vast territorial base and successive dynasties. The Greeks and Indians alternated between recurrent political fragmentation and periods of imperial unification. Jews and Armenians dispersed very early on throughout the Mediterranean and Eurasian regions, and then throughout the world. Unlike the Egyptians, none of them transformed themselves through contact with their conquerors.
What factors help explain the longevity, influence and resilience of these six peoples? A territorial hold, a demographic mass, an ability to integrate into global trade networks? What role did religions, societal structures, political institutions and languages play in these peoples’ ability to endure for nearly three millennia? Their comparison should provide a better understanding of the geohistorical significance of this concept of « people-worlds of the long term ».
