A question on geography

[Nathan G]

I know that John and Matt try to treat every country as having its own generational cycle (and even going as far as separating individual tribes), but sometimes groups of countries are treated as one unit (like the Greek city-states for example. Why do we lump Greece together instead of generating generational timelines for Athens, Sparta, Corinth, etc.?). Of course, I already know the answer to that. Countries that are very small are going to tend to behave the same way, all have crises at the same time, and thus it makes sense to treat them as one unit.

My question is this: exactly what factors causes a country to have its own unique generational cycle? If it's size, for instance, then how small does a country have to be in order to be "not unique enough"? For example, do we consider kingdoms near Greece like Latium, Macedon, and Lydia as having the same cycle as the Greek city-states? If not, why not? What makes them more unique than Athens and Sparta?

This is a very pivotal question to me. If every single country that ever existed had a unique generational cycle, then that would be on the order of thousands, if not tens of thousands of potential timelines. But, if many of these smaller nations can be lumped together as larger units (like the Greek city-states), then that significantly decreases the amount of work, perhaps even to a few dozen major regions.

Curiously,
Nathan

[John]

> My question is this: exactly what factors causes a country to have
> its own unique generational cycle? If it's size, for instance,
> then how small does a country have to be in order to be "not
> unique enough"? For example, do we consider kingdoms near Greece
> like Latium, Macedon, and Lydia as having the same cycle as the
> Greek city-states? If not, why not? What makes them more unique
> than Athens and Sparta?

> This is a very pivotal question to me. If every single country
> that ever existed had a unique generational cycle, then that would
> be on the order of thousands, if not tens of thousands of
> potential timelines. But, if many of these smaller nations can be
> lumped together as larger units (like the Greek city-states), then
> that significantly decreases the amount of work, perhaps even to a
> few dozen major regions.

There probably were thousands or even tens of thousands of individual
timelines at one time, millennia ago. But as time goes on, identity
groups form and crisis wars force timelines to merge. For example, in
America there were probably dozens of timelines among the different
Indian tribes. But since then, all these timelines have merged into a
single timeline, along with Europe.

** Book I - Chapter 3 -- The Principle of Localization I
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... ation1.htm

** Book I / Chapter 4 -- The Principle of Localization II
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... ation2.htm

John

[Nathan G]

There probably were thousands or even tens of thousands of individual
timelines at one time, millennia ago. But as time goes on, identity
groups form and crisis wars force timelines to merge. For example, in
America there were probably dozens of timelines among the different
Indian tribes. But since then, all these timelines have merged into a
single timeline, along with Europe.

** Book I - Chapter 3 -- The Principle of Localization I
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... ation1.htm

** Book I / Chapter 4 -- The Principle of Localization II
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... ation2.htm

John

I think I understand now. In chapter 3, you show this map of Europe that divides the continent into 50 cultural regions:


"The Principle of Localization claims that each of these regions has its own 80-year cycle timeline, at least to start with"

That seems to explain why you treat Greece as one cycle timeline (even though it was composed of many city-states), it occupies one cultural region. Even though each city/tribe would technically have its own timeline, we treat them as one because they occupy only one cultural region (I suppose America has cultural regions as well). As time moved on, these regions merged together to form Spain, France, Germany, America, etc.

If we examine the distant past, then there was a time when these Identity Groups were smaller than these cultural regions (like the Greek city-states or the American tribes), but we still group them into these regions for the sake of clarity.

Am I reasonably close?

Sincerely,
Nathan

[John]

> That seems to explain why you treat Greece as one cycle timeline
> (even though it was composed of many city-states), it occupies one
> cultural region.

It's quite possible that Sparta and Athens were on one timeline, and
some other cities were on different timelines. Nailing that down
would take a lot of research.

[Nathan G]

It's quite possible that Sparta and Athens were on one timeline, and
some other cities were on different timelines. Nailing that down
would take a lot of research.

I guess I was hoping that there was some lower limit to the extent a generational timeline can be.

[Harry]

This is a very pivotal question to me. If every single country that ever existed had a unique generational cycle, then that would be on the order of thousands, if not tens of thousands of potential timelines. But, if many of these smaller nations can be lumped together as larger units (like the Greek city-states), then that significantly decreases the amount of work, perhaps even to a few dozen major regions.

[Nathan G]

Please do not write in font that nobody can read, especially if it's important.

If we were counting individual tribes and people-groups, it would be on the order of tens of thousands. However, if we are only counting historical states, then the number is thousands (one source I found said the number is 5,024).

I was inspired for the idea of "lumping" by Peter Turchin's article on cultural regions. For the purposes of his study, Turchin divided Europe into about 40 indivisible regions of approximately equal size. If this were expanded to the rest of the world, that would divide history into about 200-300 crisis lists. Thus the order is reduced to hundreds instead of thousands.

By the way, welcome to the Forum, Harry.

[John]

I just wanted to let you know, Nathan, that Harry is a troll, and may
be a bot. He/it created an account, posted a message by copying a
couple of sentences of someone else's message, and added a signature
to his account, all of which makes him/it look legitimate. The plan
is that in a couple of weeks he/it will change his signature to
contain a link to his porn shop or viagra site, in the hope that the
webmaster (me) won't notice, because it's not a new message. I have
to deal with these aholes all the time. These are the hardest spam
messages to track, since there are no tools that really help.