The Evolution of Empire: from the Ancient World to Modern Times

Imperial formations occupy a key place in the political and religious history of Humankind. The article traces the evolution of this phenomenon, with a future global perspective, from the time of the emergence of macrostates in the Ancient World, through the period of the classical empires of Antiquity to the religious empires of the Middle Ages and the late empires of the New Age, in the space of Asia Minor and the Greater Mediterranean. The focus is on the transformation of the ideological foundations of imperial formations, traced primarily on the basis of titular formulas, which are the most important source on the history of the ideological self-identification of states. The analysis revealed several evolutionary phases of imperial construction, characterized by the following features: 1) “mechanical” consolidation of primary polys-nomic political formations around a particular military-administrative center, with the preservation of mosaicism and polycentrism in the religious sphere; 2) formation of the new generation of all-imperial religious systems (usually associated with the ruler’s cult), designed to complement military and political consolidation by an ideological one; 3) displacement of primary personality-oriented imperial cults by more morally authoritative universal religions with a transcendental ideal (Christianity, Islam); 4) secondary politicization of theocratic empires, leading to the consolidation of religious-state dualism (emperor / patriarch; caliph / sultan); 5) final decline of politicized theocracies and their more or less painful transformation into national states of the modern type, formed in the specific conditions of Western Europe. The phenomenon of instability of monopolar geopolitical structures and, on the contrary, the impressive stability of bipolar configurations, embodied in the evolutionary space of the Greater Mediterranean in the competitive coexistence of Hellenism and the East, Rome and Iran, Byzantium and the Caliphate, the Russian and Ottoman empires, was identified. 

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