DarkRange55
I am Skynet
- Oct 15, 2023
- 1,964
How old is the oldest money? What family today traces back lineage to ancient times? And by my definition of "ancient times," I'm referring to pre-500 AD which is shortly after the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. So I'm talking about ancient cultures in places such as China, India, Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome and ancient Mesoamerica. If you look back at it, there is really not very many people left who have a valid claim to descent from antiquity. In genealogy circles decent from antiquity means that you have proven family members before 500 AD in one of those ancient civilizations. The three main reasons why we don't see very many families if any from this period. The first one is just due to the lack of last names. Last names as we know them today didn't really become a thing until the 14th century. It was actually Spain that first adopted a modern system of surnames, England took a few hundred years more to do so. And outside Europe, China was the first to adopt a modern system of surnames that is still in use today.
Last names started in China a very long before Europe. Though they were often bestowed by an Emperor, but other examples also existed. The modern day UK, medieval England started adopting modern last names for the nobility in the 11th century. But really before that people only had one name or they would make their surname just son of whoever their father or mother was and or have their last name based on a place or an affiliation to a place or particular king and these would constantly change by the generations. So last names were not consistent from generation to generation.
A lot of Spanish surnames are just like the Scandinavian ones (Hansson) or Slavic ones (Ivanovich), the son of... Rodriguez, Hernandez, Ramirez, Sanchez, etc. The others are from crafts and professions (like Zapatero), or villages and farm names. Really fix and official the surnames only became in the 17th and 18th century during Absolutism, when the state started to keep civil registries and step by step took away this competence from the church and local parishes.
Another reason is ancient nobility were often targets for rival clans or rival kings and emperors. They would basically take out one set of nobility in a region and replace them with their own. It was very common for children and grandchildren and even distant cousins of previous kings and emperors to get routinely slaughtered when there was a new regime in town. Because just the existence of a potential heir was enough to challenge the legitimacy of the new invading ruler and could provide a source of unity or a leader to unify opposition behind. So it was very politically dangerous to keep rival nobility alive. So many of these families didn't last very long. All these mentioned civilizations or their incarnation of them back in those periods all fell to either to barbarian invasion or to another empire taking them over.
Another reason was men of nobility would have affairs and thus undocumented descendants. And lastly just lack of or poor recording keeping.
So what are some of the most ancient records that we do have that imply some sort of continuous line of family being recored?
It is very common among regular east asian families to be able to trace their family lineage back to antiquity. Most Chinese surnames date back to the Zhou dynasty, and they have very complex conventions for naming each generation, family relationships. There are about another 20 Chinese last names a that can compete with Confucius.
The Confucius family itself claims ancestry of 500 years before Confucius, he was already a very ancient noble in 500BC. Confucius was a scholar, not known for his money. An upper middle class, not associated to wealth. But his descendants became associated with wealth and power due to hisphilosophical influence. The 79th generation, the current patriarch of the family, Kung Tsui-chang is a Taiwanese politician and advisor to the government. He holds the ceremonial role of Official of Confucius. His son is currently a Taiwanese high school student. And Kung Tsui-chang's father was also a politician and political advisor in Taiwan. Thats just the main line of Confucius descendants. Descendants have split off the family tree but are not part of the main line. So distant cousins of the current mainline who still have ancestry from Confucius, are leading politicians in the Chinese Communist Party in mainland China. So basically both sides of the Taiwanese Straight the two big governments that run the Sino world, there are descendants of Confucius that are involved in both governments, which I find fascinating. I think that is the answer for who is the oldest of the oldest money.
Outside of Confucius's descendants, some people can trace their ancestry to certain Byzantine emperors who married into the Georgian royal family, which in turn was descended from Parthian and Hellenic rulers.
Japan and Netherlands seem to have a lot of long lasting wealth.
Among Jews the Abravanel family is traditionally considered to descend from King David.
In India, you can see some genetic continuity between the elites of the old and now due to the endogamous nature of the caste system.
The Federici family has a claim to Augusta and the Colonna and Cologna similarly claim Julia family membership.
Technically though, at least in the West monarchs, and (even more so) emperors, are not considered nobility. They are distinct. The kings at least are supposed to have 'royal blood' and/or 'divine right' by relative primogeniture from Adam, depending on the country and on who you ask. The Roman emperors didn't even claim royal blood or divine right by lineage (at most only divine right on behalf of the Roman people, who are, as a people, destined to conquer the world, according to both pagan myth and the self-conception of denominations of Christianity with origins in the Western or Eastern Roman Empire).
Chinese Emperors claimed right, similarly, on the basis of the 'Mandate of Heaven', on behalf of the Chinese people and provided that they fulfilled their duty to protect their subjects and uphold justice. That's why we call the Chinese
'emperors' in the West, instead of 'monarchs', since their justification for ruling was more similar to the justifications given by Roman emperors than to the justifications given by Western monarchs. Japan though is more complicated, because there actually is a continuous 'imperial' line of descent going all the way back, unlike in China where the emperors were often from totally different families over the centuries, and where everyone was okay with that as long as the Chinese Emperor fulfilled their duty to be just and protective. In Japan the
'Emperor' instead derived (and among some, derives) authority from alleged first-born descent from the Goddess Amaterasu, and therefore mainly by 'imperial' blood and 'divine right' rather than because they as an individual happen to succeed at upholding justice or security in Japan. The Japanese 'Emperor' is therefore really a monarch who just traditionally called themselves 'Emperor' in order to claim an equivalently prestigious title as the Emperor that ruled in the historically usually far more powerful, economically developed and internationally culturally influential nearby country of China (before the 19th century, at least). Either way, though, the Japanese Imperial family are monarchs, emperors, or a hybrid of the two, which means they are not nobles — well, the family isn't just the Ruling emperor, it includes the dukes of the Yamato house, the princes of the other branches, so the house Yamato does indeed include nobles, being therefore both a royal and a noble house.
All the shinnoke technically inherit the throne in rare circumstances though, at least historically, before 19th and 20th century laws which there is discussion now in the Diet about changing back if the circumstances made it useful to do so. That makes them just minor royalty (if the laws get changed back). Currently they are legally considered just commoners, although everyone knows who they are and informally they still have special status in society. There's also the women who along with their descendants were excluded due to marrying out into noble but non-royal families (therefore becoming nobles and ceasing to belong to the royal family), and the men who were similarly excluded and ceased to legally belong to the royal family due to becoming Buddhist priests (usually before then marrying out), which caused them to descend to subject status, at which point they were considered nobles and no longer royalty, until the nobility was abolished at least legally-speaking after WWII, at which point they too became technically considered just commoners, and are a lot less likely than the cadet branches of the royal family proper to get any of their hereditary rights and privileges back, at least any time soon, since there is no pressure to do so, in the way there is pressure on the royal line of succession due to lack of enough currently eligible candidates, combined with the continued cultural and legal status of the throne. I admit that there are definitely a lot of nobles who are known to be descended from people who were born royals (but were no longer considered royals at the time they had children).
Those former-royal descended nobles definitely derived a lot of rights, privileges, prestige, high-status noble marriage eligibility and wealth from their former-royal descent for hundreds of years, some of which they still have, so I guess it may be somewhat moot for many purposes that they aren't considered 'part of the royal family. The old money is still there, if they've invested it and kept it safe during the war at least. The prestige and knowledge of their line of descent is definitely still there too.
The Japanese dynasty traces its lineage back to antiquity. The Japanese royal family has verifiable records dating back to 539 AD extremely long ago, 1,485 years. But still 1,000 years after Confucius. But according to myth their family dates back to 660 BC. That's legendary territory though with Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC traditionally held to be a descendant of the gods. So according to tradition that would make the Japanese royal family 2,684 years old.
Some families today in Iran are legitimate and verifiable descendants of the the royal Persian House of Sassan, which took the Persian throne in 224 AD. The Bavandid (and its offshoot Baduspanid) branch of the Sassanian family ruled Gilan and Mazandaran, in northern Iran, as independent and semi-independent rulers after the Arab conquest of Iran, and continued to serve as rulers of that region for almost the next thousand years. Incidentally, the House of Baduspan is recognized as the second-longest ruling dynasty in history after the House of Yamato.
Formal Baduspanid rule in northern Iran was only disestablished in 1598, by the Safavid Shahs of Iran, but the family itself continued to exist and exert influence as minor landlords and governors in Gilan and Mazandaran, as well as the Iranian government itself, until the last days of Qajar rule in late 19th century. One notable 19th-century figure from the house of Baduspan was Mirza Abbas-e Nuri, the father of Baha'ullah, founder of the Baha'i faith.
Confucius lived about 2,500 years ago. There are 3 Confucian disciples whose family trees have been maintained in the same consistency and with the same vigor as Confucius' own. Together they are the 4 Saints of Confucianism.
A lot of people from Qufu (Confucius' hometown) have the surname Kong as it's their traditional clan name. They all claim to be descendants. Plus China, like most cultures, is patrilineal so female descendants wouldn't have kept the surname.
You can tell who they are because they will have the last name Kong then they'll have a placement name showing what generation descendant they are, then they'll have their first name. Confucius (551-479 BCE) himself did not use generation names, neither did his early descendants. The formal adoption of generation names for Confucius' lineage began much later, under imperial China.
There has to be a Noble Byzantine family that can trace itself back to the ild Roman Senatorial class that escaped to the west after the fall of Constantinople and married into nobility in Greece or Crete or Italy or Spain or something...
Supposedly the Kalergis calim it that way, that they are a branch of the older Doukas family in Byzantium that itself descended from some of the Patrician families. I know that the Paleologi did marry into the Russian house of Rurik Dynasty. I know that the house of Osman married into Byzantine nobility. Ottoman marriages to Roman princesses never produced a Sultan, perhaps they did produce children but those children never won the throne so they died out through fratricide. A lot of them mixed with the Osmanoglu Ottoman dynasty.
In Britain there aren a lot of families from 1066, some still own the same ancient castles which is incredible.
The descendants of Dante who wrote the Divine Comedy still own the same house in Florence 700 years later. Wild.
The Colonna family is about 1000 years old and may go back to Rome, but not under the same name.
In Spain, half the noble families there were 400 to 500 years ago in the imperial period are gone, and that with only 6 years of the 2nd Republic of anti-noble ambient.
The Italian Carrandini family can go back past 500AD
The de Medici family are from the late Middle Ages/Renaissance, which is too contemporary for this
The Egyptian crown: They were not all the same family. There's nearly a dozen dynasties between ~ 1500 BC when the new kingdom starts and ~500 BC when the Persians conquer Egypt. There's also more than a dozen attested to before this time and several dynasties after the Persians were driven out.
The oldest Christian dynasty in the world are the Ghassanids and they can trace back their ancestry 1,800 years
Based on the ancient records there really are no remaining descendants of nobility or rulers or the wealthy in societies such as ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia or India. When it comes to ancient Rome, the last proven descendant of one of the Patrician Roman families was Pope Gregory I who was born 540 and died 604. Really only about 130 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that the last of Patrician and noble families of Rome were effectively extinct from the historical record. There is one modern family that claims to have Rome descent, but they're not able to completely verify it. It's more of a legend within the family.
Last names started in China a very long before Europe. Though they were often bestowed by an Emperor, but other examples also existed. The modern day UK, medieval England started adopting modern last names for the nobility in the 11th century. But really before that people only had one name or they would make their surname just son of whoever their father or mother was and or have their last name based on a place or an affiliation to a place or particular king and these would constantly change by the generations. So last names were not consistent from generation to generation.
A lot of Spanish surnames are just like the Scandinavian ones (Hansson) or Slavic ones (Ivanovich), the son of... Rodriguez, Hernandez, Ramirez, Sanchez, etc. The others are from crafts and professions (like Zapatero), or villages and farm names. Really fix and official the surnames only became in the 17th and 18th century during Absolutism, when the state started to keep civil registries and step by step took away this competence from the church and local parishes.
Another reason is ancient nobility were often targets for rival clans or rival kings and emperors. They would basically take out one set of nobility in a region and replace them with their own. It was very common for children and grandchildren and even distant cousins of previous kings and emperors to get routinely slaughtered when there was a new regime in town. Because just the existence of a potential heir was enough to challenge the legitimacy of the new invading ruler and could provide a source of unity or a leader to unify opposition behind. So it was very politically dangerous to keep rival nobility alive. So many of these families didn't last very long. All these mentioned civilizations or their incarnation of them back in those periods all fell to either to barbarian invasion or to another empire taking them over.
Another reason was men of nobility would have affairs and thus undocumented descendants. And lastly just lack of or poor recording keeping.
So what are some of the most ancient records that we do have that imply some sort of continuous line of family being recored?
It is very common among regular east asian families to be able to trace their family lineage back to antiquity. Most Chinese surnames date back to the Zhou dynasty, and they have very complex conventions for naming each generation, family relationships. There are about another 20 Chinese last names a that can compete with Confucius.
The Confucius family itself claims ancestry of 500 years before Confucius, he was already a very ancient noble in 500BC. Confucius was a scholar, not known for his money. An upper middle class, not associated to wealth. But his descendants became associated with wealth and power due to hisphilosophical influence. The 79th generation, the current patriarch of the family, Kung Tsui-chang is a Taiwanese politician and advisor to the government. He holds the ceremonial role of Official of Confucius. His son is currently a Taiwanese high school student. And Kung Tsui-chang's father was also a politician and political advisor in Taiwan. Thats just the main line of Confucius descendants. Descendants have split off the family tree but are not part of the main line. So distant cousins of the current mainline who still have ancestry from Confucius, are leading politicians in the Chinese Communist Party in mainland China. So basically both sides of the Taiwanese Straight the two big governments that run the Sino world, there are descendants of Confucius that are involved in both governments, which I find fascinating. I think that is the answer for who is the oldest of the oldest money.
Outside of Confucius's descendants, some people can trace their ancestry to certain Byzantine emperors who married into the Georgian royal family, which in turn was descended from Parthian and Hellenic rulers.
Japan and Netherlands seem to have a lot of long lasting wealth.
Among Jews the Abravanel family is traditionally considered to descend from King David.
In India, you can see some genetic continuity between the elites of the old and now due to the endogamous nature of the caste system.
The Federici family has a claim to Augusta and the Colonna and Cologna similarly claim Julia family membership.
Technically though, at least in the West monarchs, and (even more so) emperors, are not considered nobility. They are distinct. The kings at least are supposed to have 'royal blood' and/or 'divine right' by relative primogeniture from Adam, depending on the country and on who you ask. The Roman emperors didn't even claim royal blood or divine right by lineage (at most only divine right on behalf of the Roman people, who are, as a people, destined to conquer the world, according to both pagan myth and the self-conception of denominations of Christianity with origins in the Western or Eastern Roman Empire).
Chinese Emperors claimed right, similarly, on the basis of the 'Mandate of Heaven', on behalf of the Chinese people and provided that they fulfilled their duty to protect their subjects and uphold justice. That's why we call the Chinese
'emperors' in the West, instead of 'monarchs', since their justification for ruling was more similar to the justifications given by Roman emperors than to the justifications given by Western monarchs. Japan though is more complicated, because there actually is a continuous 'imperial' line of descent going all the way back, unlike in China where the emperors were often from totally different families over the centuries, and where everyone was okay with that as long as the Chinese Emperor fulfilled their duty to be just and protective. In Japan the
'Emperor' instead derived (and among some, derives) authority from alleged first-born descent from the Goddess Amaterasu, and therefore mainly by 'imperial' blood and 'divine right' rather than because they as an individual happen to succeed at upholding justice or security in Japan. The Japanese 'Emperor' is therefore really a monarch who just traditionally called themselves 'Emperor' in order to claim an equivalently prestigious title as the Emperor that ruled in the historically usually far more powerful, economically developed and internationally culturally influential nearby country of China (before the 19th century, at least). Either way, though, the Japanese Imperial family are monarchs, emperors, or a hybrid of the two, which means they are not nobles — well, the family isn't just the Ruling emperor, it includes the dukes of the Yamato house, the princes of the other branches, so the house Yamato does indeed include nobles, being therefore both a royal and a noble house.
All the shinnoke technically inherit the throne in rare circumstances though, at least historically, before 19th and 20th century laws which there is discussion now in the Diet about changing back if the circumstances made it useful to do so. That makes them just minor royalty (if the laws get changed back). Currently they are legally considered just commoners, although everyone knows who they are and informally they still have special status in society. There's also the women who along with their descendants were excluded due to marrying out into noble but non-royal families (therefore becoming nobles and ceasing to belong to the royal family), and the men who were similarly excluded and ceased to legally belong to the royal family due to becoming Buddhist priests (usually before then marrying out), which caused them to descend to subject status, at which point they were considered nobles and no longer royalty, until the nobility was abolished at least legally-speaking after WWII, at which point they too became technically considered just commoners, and are a lot less likely than the cadet branches of the royal family proper to get any of their hereditary rights and privileges back, at least any time soon, since there is no pressure to do so, in the way there is pressure on the royal line of succession due to lack of enough currently eligible candidates, combined with the continued cultural and legal status of the throne. I admit that there are definitely a lot of nobles who are known to be descended from people who were born royals (but were no longer considered royals at the time they had children).
Those former-royal descended nobles definitely derived a lot of rights, privileges, prestige, high-status noble marriage eligibility and wealth from their former-royal descent for hundreds of years, some of which they still have, so I guess it may be somewhat moot for many purposes that they aren't considered 'part of the royal family. The old money is still there, if they've invested it and kept it safe during the war at least. The prestige and knowledge of their line of descent is definitely still there too.
The Japanese dynasty traces its lineage back to antiquity. The Japanese royal family has verifiable records dating back to 539 AD extremely long ago, 1,485 years. But still 1,000 years after Confucius. But according to myth their family dates back to 660 BC. That's legendary territory though with Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC traditionally held to be a descendant of the gods. So according to tradition that would make the Japanese royal family 2,684 years old.
Some families today in Iran are legitimate and verifiable descendants of the the royal Persian House of Sassan, which took the Persian throne in 224 AD. The Bavandid (and its offshoot Baduspanid) branch of the Sassanian family ruled Gilan and Mazandaran, in northern Iran, as independent and semi-independent rulers after the Arab conquest of Iran, and continued to serve as rulers of that region for almost the next thousand years. Incidentally, the House of Baduspan is recognized as the second-longest ruling dynasty in history after the House of Yamato.
Formal Baduspanid rule in northern Iran was only disestablished in 1598, by the Safavid Shahs of Iran, but the family itself continued to exist and exert influence as minor landlords and governors in Gilan and Mazandaran, as well as the Iranian government itself, until the last days of Qajar rule in late 19th century. One notable 19th-century figure from the house of Baduspan was Mirza Abbas-e Nuri, the father of Baha'ullah, founder of the Baha'i faith.
Confucius lived about 2,500 years ago. There are 3 Confucian disciples whose family trees have been maintained in the same consistency and with the same vigor as Confucius' own. Together they are the 4 Saints of Confucianism.
A lot of people from Qufu (Confucius' hometown) have the surname Kong as it's their traditional clan name. They all claim to be descendants. Plus China, like most cultures, is patrilineal so female descendants wouldn't have kept the surname.
You can tell who they are because they will have the last name Kong then they'll have a placement name showing what generation descendant they are, then they'll have their first name. Confucius (551-479 BCE) himself did not use generation names, neither did his early descendants. The formal adoption of generation names for Confucius' lineage began much later, under imperial China.
There has to be a Noble Byzantine family that can trace itself back to the ild Roman Senatorial class that escaped to the west after the fall of Constantinople and married into nobility in Greece or Crete or Italy or Spain or something...
Supposedly the Kalergis calim it that way, that they are a branch of the older Doukas family in Byzantium that itself descended from some of the Patrician families. I know that the Paleologi did marry into the Russian house of Rurik Dynasty. I know that the house of Osman married into Byzantine nobility. Ottoman marriages to Roman princesses never produced a Sultan, perhaps they did produce children but those children never won the throne so they died out through fratricide. A lot of them mixed with the Osmanoglu Ottoman dynasty.
In Britain there aren a lot of families from 1066, some still own the same ancient castles which is incredible.
The descendants of Dante who wrote the Divine Comedy still own the same house in Florence 700 years later. Wild.
The Colonna family is about 1000 years old and may go back to Rome, but not under the same name.
In Spain, half the noble families there were 400 to 500 years ago in the imperial period are gone, and that with only 6 years of the 2nd Republic of anti-noble ambient.
The Italian Carrandini family can go back past 500AD
The de Medici family are from the late Middle Ages/Renaissance, which is too contemporary for this
The Egyptian crown: They were not all the same family. There's nearly a dozen dynasties between ~ 1500 BC when the new kingdom starts and ~500 BC when the Persians conquer Egypt. There's also more than a dozen attested to before this time and several dynasties after the Persians were driven out.
The oldest Christian dynasty in the world are the Ghassanids and they can trace back their ancestry 1,800 years
Based on the ancient records there really are no remaining descendants of nobility or rulers or the wealthy in societies such as ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia or India. When it comes to ancient Rome, the last proven descendant of one of the Patrician Roman families was Pope Gregory I who was born 540 and died 604. Really only about 130 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that the last of Patrician and noble families of Rome were effectively extinct from the historical record. There is one modern family that claims to have Rome descent, but they're not able to completely verify it. It's more of a legend within the family.
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