Peoples that survived, peoples that disappeared, and peoples that became someone else entirely.

Six peoples, six different fates — from the largest ethnic group on Earth to a language with no living relatives.

Cover — peoples that survived, peoples that disappeared, peoples that became someone else.

The Largest — 1.4 billion people call themselves Han Chinese, named after an emperor who died in 195 BCE.

The Most Divided — around 420 million Arabs share one language, Arabic, across 22 different states.

The Partition — around 300 million Bengali speakers were split between India and Bangladesh by the 1947 partition.

The Transformed — the Phoenicians became Lebanese, Tunisian, Maltese and Spanish; the Romans became Italian, French, Romanian and Portuguese.

The Lost — the Etruscans dissolved into Latin, the Sogdians into Persian and Arabic, and the Sumerians became Babylonians, then Assyrians, then Iraqis.

The Holdouts — the Basques speak the oldest living language in Europe with no known relatives, and the Jewish diaspora preserved its identity for 2,000 years across every continent.

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1.4 billion people call themselves Han, named after an emperor who died in 195 BCE. Around 420 million Arabs share one language across 22 different states. The 1947 partition split roughly 300 million Bengali speakers between two countries overnight. The Phoenicians and Romans didn't vanish — they became Lebanese, Spanish, Italian, Romanian. The Etruscans, Sogdians and Sumerians dissolved into other peoples with no funeral, just a new name. And the Basques and the Jewish diaspora simply refused to transform at all.