Statisticians establishing the largest database about history

Seshat: The Global History Databank is a game-changing database construction project that may reveal there is actually one thing war is good for: historical statistics.

By publishing free-to-public data on historical societies, Seshat will soon become the world’s largest professional historical database.

The massive research effort has been far too much for any individual or a small team to work on alone. It is a collaborative project bringing together the expertise of historians, anthropologists, economists, and archaeologists from universities around the world.

The hope is that social science models, new, long-held, speculative and dogmatic alike will in future be submitted to the test of historical data: to let Seshat decide which ones are right and which are wrong.

With the amount of data accessible to anyone, Seshat will also change the way historians write books and revolutionize the teaching of history.

To date, progress has been made on over 100 polities. These include the period of the Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt. There are hundreds of polities still to code.

The scale is huge. For each polity Seshat has over 681 variables (and counting) on government, religion, economy and society. Seshat will also make available information on resources and agricultural productivity for natural geographic areas.

Due to the size and ambition of the database, however, there is one more area on the list for development: ancient warfare.

Warfare is a human behavior at the group-level which as discussed on SEF may have played a major role in the development of group-level cooperation. Can Seshat, in addition to everything else, also provide researchers with a database to test theories relating to warfare?