File talk:Countries by earliest date of nationhood.PNG

What on earth is the criteria behind this map? There's so must inconsistency here that I'm getting a headache just thinking about it. It seems that the countries categorized as the "oldest" on here are colored so on the basis of when urban civilization first emerged in their general regions rather than when they emerged as recognizable countries. That doesn't make sense when compared to the criteria used for later countries. Greece, for example, didn't emerge as a unified country until the first half of the 19th Century. Greece "before 1000 BC" was divided into many small, competing, Mycenaean city-states, and for much of its history after that, it was either similarly fragmented or it was subject to a larger empire. Iraq, Iran, and India, similarly, originated as many small states that were continually overrun by outside conquerers. Claiming a direct political or cultural continuity between the Sumerians and modern Iraq is very superficial and simplistic, discounting the many culture changes in the region since then (from the Assyrians to the Babylonians to the Kassites to the modern Arabs and Kurds), as well as the many empires that incorporated the region over time (the Persians, many Islamic Arab dynasties, Mongols, Turks, British, etc).

Meanwhile, the map has Latin America and Africa categorized by the modern independence of these countries rather than by the emergence of urban civilization in general. Peru and Greece both declared their independence (from Spain and the Ottoman Empire respectively) as unified nation-states in 1821, but here Greece is shown to emerge thousands of years earlier. Yet, Peru has long been a center of civilization as well - The Norte Chico culture of northern Peru was roughly contemporary to the Minoans of Crete in Greece. Many African countries can be viewed in contrast to how India is depicted - India is shown to have been around since before 1000 BC, yet like much of Sub-Saharan Africa, it began as a divided collection of feuding states and ethnic groups that were only brought together by colonialism and only made into a unified, independent country in the 20th Century.

So what should this map be? Do you want it to reflect when modern countries first came into existence in recognizable forms, or do you want it to reflect when state-level civilizations first came about within their territories, regardless of whether or not there is direct continuity with the modern state? --74.103.150.125 (talk) 22:01, 4 May 2011 (UTC)