Civilizations last about 340 years on average, and age may not matter
One researcher surveyed dozens of ancient civilizations and found they typically endured for roughly 340 years. The Kushite Kingdom managed 1,150; China's Qin dynasty fell after just 14. Another analysis suggests that an empire's fall is essentially random, no more likely when it is old than when it is young.
Scholars define collapse as a complex society losing its political structure, social complexity and often its sense of identity. Joseph Tainter's 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies founded the modern field and treated collapse as a political process unfolding within a few decades, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire as the best-known Western case. Proposed causes range from environmental damage and costly complexity to invasion, disease, inequality and plain bad luck.
Luke Kemp counted a civilization as a society with farming, several cities, regional military dominance and continuous government, and studied examples from 3000 BC to 600 AD. Aksum in East Africa lasted 1,100 years, the Vedic civilization and the Olmecs about 1,000 each, and India's Nanda Empire only 24. Complex systems specialist Samuel Arbesman compared the pattern to the Red Queen hypothesis in biology, where extinction stays a constant threat regardless of how long a species has existed.
Climate can tip the balance. A megadrought between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, called the 4.2-kiloyear event, dried the Green Sahara and disrupted Asian monsoons, and it may have helped bring down the Akkadian Empire and the Indus Valley Civilization. Indus cities began declining around 1900 BC and were mostly empty two centuries later; drought, fading trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, and earthquakes are all suspects.
Many historians push back on the word itself. After Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse, critics argued that societies usually reorganise rather than vanish. The Maya lost divine kingship mainly in the eastern lowlands, yet highland cities kept it into the 16th century, and Maya languages and culture continue today.
Source: Societal collapse
