Forgotten Empires
Okay, grab a Singha, ice cold if you can get it. Because we need to talk about maps. Not the paper kind, the ones in our heads. This particular brand of bullshit they drew for us in school.
Civilisation™ – the officially licensed version – kicks off somewhere sandy near the Nile. Pyramids, pharaohs. Then Greece, philosophers in robes, inventing democracy and art. Next stop, Rome. Roads, legions, aqueducts, conquering everything. Then darkness, maybe some knights, and boom, suddenly we're talking Florence and London. Neat, tidy, centred.
As if Civilisation™ itself were a torch passed exclusively through white hands around the Mediterranean (the “middle of the earth”).
It’s like the rest of the human race was learning to walk and foraging for berries while Homer was writing verses and Caesar was crossing the Rubicon. Bullshit.
Take Babylon, while Europeans were still sleeping on dirt floors, King Nebuchadnezzar II was building hanging gardens and engineering hydraulic systems to irrigate terraced gardens that seemed to float in the sky. Muslims were inventing zeroes and complex loan contracts while the Parthenon was still a twinkle in Athena’s eye.
As Rome was just figuring out indoor plumbing, somewhere in West Africa, Mansa Musa was preparing for a pilgrimage to Mecca that would it literally crash the price of gold in Northern Africa and the Middle East for a decade. His caravan stretched as far as the eye could see: 60,000 people, 12,000 slaves carrying gold bars, heralds dressed in silks, and 80 camels each carrying 300 pounds of gold dust, and causing economic havoc wherever he went.
The Khwarazmian Empire produced scholars who calculated the Earth's circumference to within 0.5% accuracy and mapped star positions with precision that wouldn't be matched in Europe to 6 years later. Their ruler, Muhammad II, was so wealthy and powerful that when Genghis Khan sent a trade delegation, Muhammad had them executed—essentially spitting in the face of history's most successful conqueror. The resulting Mongol vengeance was so complete that irrigation systems the Khwarazmians had built were destroyed, turning the Fertile Cresent into deserts that remain barren today.
Such was the intellectual superiority of much of the Islamic empire in the 8th century, that as one author put it, when it came to writing about non-Islamic lands (e.g. the Christian west), “we did not enter them [in our book] because we see no use whatsoever in describing them” They were intellectual and societal backwaters.
And we haven’t even started on the civilisations of China, India, and the Americas…
In the 1700s, Ayutthaya was one of the largest cities in the world, home to a million souls - the city’s footprint dwarfed London’s muddy sprawl. A cosmopolitan metropolis where Dutch, Portuguese, French, English, Japanese, and Chinese merchants established their own quarters. The court was crowded with diplomats from Paris and Tokyo, each here to pay their respects to the kingdom at the heart of Southeast Asia—where grand balls were thrown that European visitors jealously reported of in their diaries.
The Siamese capital wasn't just big—it was beautiful on a scale that defied comprehension. Canals everywhere, earning it the nickname "Venice of the East", though that comparison does Ayutthaya a disservice. Venice was a clever little port town; Ayutthaya was a megalopolis of wealth and power. Three royal palaces. Four hundred temples with golden spires reaching skyward.
The temples were covered in gold—not gold leaf, not gold paint—actual gold. Housing Buddhas cast in solid gold, some weighing tons. Markets that stretched for miles.
This wasn't just some regional power; Ayutthaya was the capital of a kingdom that controlled or received tribute from kingdoms all around Southeast Asia. Foreign visitors wrote about it in the way people today might describe seeing Manhattan for the first time—with awe, disbelief, and the uncomfortable realization that their own capitals were, by comparison, provincial backwaters.
1767, it all came crashing down. The Burmese army, after repeated attempts, finally broke through. They didn't just conquer Ayutthaya; they annihilated it. Sacked, looted, and burned it to the ground. They melted down the gold from the temples, beheaded the Buddha statues, and set fire to everything else. It was destruction on a scale that's hard to comprehend - imagine if tomorrow someone burned Paris to the ground and stole the Mona Lisa to use as a doormat. A great tragedy for the world.
Today, you can walk among the ruins, the headless Buddhas, the toppled stupas. What's left is still magnificent, but it's a shadow of what once stood. A once world power that European history books forgot to mention.
Go on, I dare you, point out Ayutthaya on a map if you can - and it’s not where Bangkok is.
So the next time someone feeds you that neat little timeline of Western civilization—Egypt to Greece to Rome to the Renaissance to Us - remember that it's just an opinionated selection. A convenient fiction that ignores the vast, complex, astounding achievements of countless civilizations across the globe.
History isn't a straight line; it's a tapestry, and some of its most brilliant threads have been tragically left out of the picture.