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Empires with sourced areas but without dates

I figured I'd make a section for empires where sources have been found for the maximum extent but with no year specified (meaning they can't be included in the list). My hope is that this will be helpful when people try to locate sources. Feel free to add entries of your own to the list below. TompaDompa (talk) 23:38, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ashanti Empire: 100,000 square miles^[1] – since added using this source which provides the corresponding figure of 250,000 km² and the year 1820.^[2] TompaDompa (talk) 21:05, 18 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Balhae: 438,000 km²^[3]
Đại Cồ Việt: 110,000 km²^[4]
Durrani Empire: 780,000 square miles/2,000,000 km²^[5]
Dzungar Khanate: 3,600,000 km²^[3] – since added using this source which provides the same figure and the year 1650.^[6] TompaDompa (talk) 03:03, 18 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kanem Empire: 300,000 square miles^[7]
Nguyễn dynasty: 370,000 km²^[8]
Southern Qi: 2,147,000 km²^[3]
Phoenicia: 250,000 square miles^[9]
Vijayanagara Empire: 360,000 km²^[10]
Wari Empire: 320,000 km^{2^[11]}
Wuhuan: 400,000 km²^[3]
Xianbei state: 4,500,000 km²^[3] – since added using this source which provides the same figure and the year 200.^[6] TompaDompa (talk) 03:03, 18 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think we can add those empires in the list, I would only noted in the time cell "unknown". Janos Neman (talk) 12:09, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about largest empires, as such they might not have been at the time they existed. Slatersteven (talk)

References

^ Obeng, J. Pashington (1996). Asante Catholicism: Religious and Cultural Reproduction Among the Akan of Ghana. BRILL. p. 20. ISBN 978-90-04-10631-4. An empire of a hundred thousand square miles, occupied by about three million people from different ethnic groups, made it imperative for the Asante to evolve sophisticated statal and parastatal institutions [...]
^ Iliffe, John (1995-08-25). Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge University Press. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-521-48422-0. At its peak around 1820 the empire embraced over 250,000 square kilometres [...]
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio; Rogers, J. Daniel; Wilcox, Steven P.; Alterman, Jai (2008). "Computing the Steppes: Data Analysis for Agent-Based Modeling of Polities in Inner Asia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Political Scientific Association. pp. 8–9. Retrieved 2020-07-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
^ Wade, Geoff (2014-10-17). Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia. Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-135-04353-7. [T]he state of Đại Cồ Việt was established in the tenth century [...] The maximum extent of the territory at that time was around 110,000 square kilometres.
^ Bosin, Yury V. (2009), "Durrani Empire, Popular Protests, 1747–1823" (PDF), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, p. 1029, doi:10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0481, ISBN 978-1-4051-9807-3, retrieved 2020-07-14
^ ^a ^b Bang, Peter Fibiger; Bayly, C. A.; Scheidel, Walter (2020-12-02). The Oxford World History of Empire: Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press. pp. 92–94. ISBN 978-0-19-977311-4.
^ Shillington, Kevin (2013-07-04). Encyclopedia of African History 3-Volume Set. Routledge. p. 733. ISBN 978-1-135-45670-2. The limits of the empire correspond approximately with the boundaries of the Chad Basin, an area of more than 300,000 square miles.
^ Wade, Geoff (2014-10-17). Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia. Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-135-04353-7. [W]hen Nguyễn Vietnam surrendered to France in the late nineteenth century the territory it claimed to control had more than tripled to over 370,000 square kilometres
^ Hart, Hornell (1948). "The Logistic Growth of Political Areas". Social Forces. 26 (4): 402. doi:10.2307/2571873. ISSN 0037-7732. In the Mediterranean area the earliest historic governments which extended their territory by major use of fleets were the Greek and the Phoenecian, reaching areas of approximately 250,000 square miles each
^ Morrison, Kathleen D.; Sinopoli, Carla M. (1992). "Economic Diversity and Integration in a Pre-Colonial Indian Empire". World Archaeology. 23 (3): 336. ISSN 0043-8243. At its maximal extent the Vijayanagara empire encompassed some 360,000 square kilometers
^ Alcock, Susan E.; D'Altroy, Terence N.; Morrison, Kathleen D.; Sinopoli, Carla M. (2001-08-09). Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Cambridge University Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-521-77020-0. The total spatial extent of the empire, not including the north coast, I estimate to have been some 320,000 square kilometers.

Effective control? Second portuguese empire

The lists presented in this article are supported by the values in Rein's work, the size measured is based on effective control rather than claimed territory. How can the editor of this article claim that For example: in the year 1800, European powers collectively claimed approximately 20% of the Earth's land surface that they did not effectively control when there's countless empires in the list from 2000BC-1800 where effective control could not be reliably measured. For example, for the mongol empire, the article attributes it the value of 24 million km2 in the list which corresponds to its extention on this map but everybody knows that the mongols did not have effective control on most of the territory they conquered, they had protectorates and every year they sent people to claim back taxes, if they did not comply, they'd invade and either raze the city or change the leadership. What I want to address then is to attribute a different value to the second portuguese empire.The portuguese had control over all the territory included in this official document map. The definition of effective control cannot be thrown around arbitrarily.The value to be introduced in the list will be an estimation. 5.5 million km2 is the old value at 1820 which includes half of brazil and the rest of the portuguese empire. Rein attributes 500 million km2 to the portuguese empire without the brazilian territory in 1822.The territory in the map is around the same size that Brazil has in 1900 which is the year in time where Rein attributes the size of 8.51 million km2. I will proceed with changing the value in the list from an exact value to an estimate which will give a much better idea of the size that the second portuguese empire had at its peak. The 5.5 million km2 value is grossly wrong and it is impacting the legibility of works that other people do when sourcing this wikipedia article.Going back to the value, the peak of the second portuguese empire was in 1820 with the landmass of 8.51 million km2 (size of brazil in 1900 according to Rein's work) + 500 million km2(size of the portuguese empire after brazil's independence in 1822 according to Rein) which would take it to around 9 million km2 for 1820 which would be an estimate.

Ygglow (talk) 22:39, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What you are describing is WP:Original research. You know this already, as this is not the first time it has come up. TompaDompa (talk) 22:48, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You are exploiting a technicality on this List of largest empires article, that everybody who has confronted you over and over again across the years has told you. There is no english article other than Rein's that attributes a number to the portuguese empire landmass at its peak, this means that, this secondary source, no matter how wrong they are, cannot be disputed because it will be argued as original research. And portuguese sources are not accepted, so this leaves people with no instrument to argue this misinformation that you have allowed to fester in that article. People have provided you with official documents that include contemporary maps/charters from governamental entities of the time ,secondary sources^[1] and even primary sources from the people that delineated the borders themselves in treaties here and here.

So what you have done is exploit a technicality by applying a metric that not all empires are able to be measured by reliably which is effective control, and this unreliable metric changes from empire to empire depending on the level of technology available to these civilizations. The fact of the matter is that the portuguese empire controlled all the territory that the empire of brazil later inherited, in fact, the empire of brazil ended up losing banda oriental in the areas that came later after independence. It cannot be dispusted that the borders were agreed upon by spain and portugal with the treaties of madrid and san ildefonso.

I request that you allow portuguese sources in the article and the establishment of an estimated value for the landmass of the second portuguese empire or else I will have to ask for senior "authorities" in wikipedia because you have monopolized the article for yourself and have in the opinion of some users, bullied fellow users away from contributing to the article and from preventing misinformation from being passed to the general population (which has effectively been happening since you first started reappropriating the article for yourself a couple of years ago. This is a matter of recognizing something that is self-evident and not exploiting technicalities. Ygglow (talk) 00:18, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why you think only English-language sources are permitted here? Per the policy WP:NONENG English-language sources are preferred ceteris paribus, but other languages are not prohibited, and in fact this very article already cites a couple of non-English sources. We do have to use the WP:BESTSOURCES, however, so if we are to use non-English sources they have to be of at least equal quality to the English-language ones we use for the same material. You also seem to be under the impression that WP:Primary sources are the ideal ones to use? That is not the case on Wikipedia; secondary sources are the ideal ones to use here. The source currently cited for the area of the Portuguese Empire is a peer-reviewed scientific article specifically about the territorial extents of historical polities, which is just about the WP:BESTSOURCE we could get for something like this. Measuring empire size by effective control is likewise not something that I came up with—that's the metric the WP:BESTSOURCES use, and we appropriately follow suit. I understand that this must be frustrating if you don't think that's the metric that should be used, but we have to go by how the sources do it. And of course we cannot give one entry in the list special treatment by measuring its area in a different way than the others. Really, your best bet if you want the information on the page to be changed is to locate better sources that provide an explicit estimate for the maximum area. TompaDompa (talk) 01:11, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The source used for the Empire of Brazil says: "The first official estimate of the surface area of the Brazilian territory dates from 1889. A value of 8,337,218 km2 was obtained from measurements and calculations made on drafts of the Map of the Empire of Brazil, published in 1883". A non-Rein source was used and it seems to be in portuguese, furthermore, they made measurements from a map of the empire of brazil, how was effective control calculated here? Why are we being petulant about this thing? While Rein and the sources he could have used, been right about most empires in this list, for the second portuguese empire it massively failed to make an estimation of the size of the empire. Most empires in that list did not have effective control over some of its territory. I told you before that this article is leading to the spread of misinformation over a technicality, either intentionally or not you are unwilling to accomodate something that is self-evident, and you have previously discarded portuguese sources for not being the best source for the article. For now, I will request the addition of a footnote, like you did, to explain why the empire of brazil is bigger than the second empire, or I could edit yours and explain that if the reader has eyes and can distinguish an apple from an orange then he will be able to understand that even though that there are no secondary sources that properly mention the size of the second portuguese empire at its zenith the reader can look at the map drafted by officials from that time and understand, because it is self-evident,that the second portuguese empire, by deduction had around 9 million km2 in land mass at its peak.

The value should be a range, from the one in Rein's to the one I gave and should be sorted by the highest value in this case because the real value the second portuguese empire had at its peak is closer to the value of 9 million km2.

There have been countless videos and articles written about the largest empires in the world, you have sucessfully contributed to passing around the idea and misinformation that the empire of brazil was larger than the second portuguese empire at its peak. Every single one of these videos have brought countless amounts of people to dispute the way this article is being edited.

Wikipedia is full of characters like, you know who...

Until then I will keep looking for a secondary source that clearly points out the value.

I request you to do what I said or these problem will always occur. Ygglow (talk) 17:09, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes please do, as we by what RS say. Slatersteven (talk) 17:13, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You say it's self-evident. I don't agree with that. More importantly, the sources don't. TompaDompa (talk) 17:19, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Do you disagree that there are countless maps showcasing the official borders of the second empire of portugal in the territory of brazil and that they would amount to close to ~8.337 millions km2 (the same size attributed to the empire of brazil if the notion of "effective control" was not taken into consideration) if they were measured using modern tools on a old map?

Do you understand the chicanery that is being done here? You are forcing people to forgo their sense of logic and basic deduction over a technicality.

It is official that the second portuguese empire included that territory. Ygglow (talk) 00:13, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The official borders do not matter. The official borders are not what determines the area for the other empires on the list, and for many of them the very concept itself is anachronistic. Following the WP:BESTSOURCES in terms of what metric to use (in this case, effective control) is not a "technicality". TompaDompa (talk) 06:41, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Establishment of borders between civilizations has always existed and some have been written on treaties and drawn on maps, saying it is anachronistic is simplifying it and saying that land masses should be measured by effective control rather than official borders set by treaties is definitely a technicality and preference.

You talk about best sources but a different source was used for the brazilian empire, what criteria did you apply to accept that one than just Rein's. Ygglow (talk) 22:46, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You may say it is a technicality and a preference, but that's the way the WP:BESTSOURCES do it. If you think some other approach should be taken, by all means present sources of comparable quality that do it otherwise.

For some entries in the list, we use suboptimal sources when we don't have ideal ones. The alternative is omitting those entries entirely. I wouldn't be opposed to more stringent sourcing criteria being applied. TompaDompa (talk) 23:26, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Cortesão, J. (1950). Alexandre de Gusmão e Tratado de Madri. Revista De História, 1(4), 437. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9141.v1i4p437-452

Size of roman empire and ottoman empire.

The size for the ottoman empire in 1683 is listed as 5,200,000 km2 and for the roman empire as 5,000,000 km2 in 117 This is clearly wrong, just look at the map, even common sense it can't be true since the roman empire had basically control of everything the ottomans had plus the whole of western europe, italy spain france etc. Furthermore i went on a mapping website(https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculator-tool.htm) and drew the areas (from the pictures). The roman empire (which again contains the ottomans) came out at around 5.5m km2 and the ottoman at around 4.5m km2. My drawings weren't extremely accurate (especially coastlines) but the results are more sensible the the provided sources. I checked the sources in the link and they don't explain how they measured their numbers, also the sources are overall really poor and self referencing. 93.106.187.235 (talk) 00:56, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The cited sources (Taagepera, at least) arrived at those figures by a method rather similar to yours—they measured the areas on maps from historical atlases. For the Roman Empire that's Shepherd's Historical Atlas and for the Ottoman Empire it's Muir's Atlas of Ancient and Classical History. The sources are peer-reviewed scientific articles specifically about the territorial extents of historical polities, which is just about the WP:BESTSOURCES we could get for something like this. TompaDompa (talk) 01:46, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[1] Obeng, J. Pashington (1996). Asante Catholicism: Religious and Cultural Reproduction Among the Akan of Ghana. BRILL. p. 20. ISBN 978-90-04-10631-4. An empire of a hundred thousand square miles, occupied by about three million people from different ethnic groups, made it imperative for the Asante to evolve sophisticated statal and parastatal institutions [...]

[IlliffeAsante-2] Iliffe, John (1995-08-25). Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge University Press. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-521-48422-0. At its peak around 1820 the empire embraced over 250,000 square kilometres [...]

[Steppes-3] Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio; Rogers, J. Daniel; Wilcox, Steven P.; Alterman, Jai (2008). "Computing the Steppes: Data Analysis for Agent-Based Modeling of Polities in Inner Asia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Political Scientific Association. pp. 8–9. Retrieved 2020-07-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[4] Wade, Geoff (2014-10-17). Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia. Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-135-04353-7. [T]he state of Đại Cồ Việt was established in the tenth century [...] The maximum extent of the territory at that time was around 110,000 square kilometres.

[5] Bosin, Yury V. (2009), "Durrani Empire, Popular Protests, 1747–1823" (PDF), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, p. 1029, doi:10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0481, ISBN 978-1-4051-9807-3, retrieved 2020-07-14

[Oxford-6] Bang, Peter Fibiger; Bayly, C. A.; Scheidel, Walter (2020-12-02). The Oxford World History of Empire: Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press. pp. 92–94. ISBN 978-0-19-977311-4.

[7] Shillington, Kevin (2013-07-04). Encyclopedia of African History 3-Volume Set. Routledge. p. 733. ISBN 978-1-135-45670-2. The limits of the empire correspond approximately with the boundaries of the Chad Basin, an area of more than 300,000 square miles.

[8] Wade, Geoff (2014-10-17). Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia. Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-135-04353-7. [W]hen Nguyễn Vietnam surrendered to France in the late nineteenth century the territory it claimed to control had more than tripled to over 370,000 square kilometres

[9] Hart, Hornell (1948). "The Logistic Growth of Political Areas". Social Forces. 26 (4): 402. doi:10.2307/2571873. ISSN 0037-7732. In the Mediterranean area the earliest historic governments which extended their territory by major use of fleets were the Greek and the Phoenecian, reaching areas of approximately 250,000 square miles each

[10] Morrison, Kathleen D.; Sinopoli, Carla M. (1992). "Economic Diversity and Integration in a Pre-Colonial Indian Empire". World Archaeology. 23 (3): 336. ISSN 0043-8243. At its maximal extent the Vijayanagara empire encompassed some 360,000 square kilometers

[11] Alcock, Susan E.; D'Altroy, Terence N.; Morrison, Kathleen D.; Sinopoli, Carla M. (2001-08-09). Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Cambridge University Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-521-77020-0. The total spatial extent of the empire, not including the north coast, I estimate to have been some 320,000 square kilometers.

[12] Cortesão, J. (1950). Alexandre de Gusmão e Tratado de Madri. Revista De História, 1(4), 437. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9141.v1i4p437-452

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