As for the 'culture never changes' part.. well, a recent book with alt-Romans had a modicum of success in France, and frankly it was so awful that it got me enraged enough to write all that stuff
The terminology is but a sad shadow of the baroque extravaganza that were Byzantine court titles, really... Though, to be honest, modern corporate life comes close.
Re: the Bush reference... The funny thing is, if we Westerners think of ourselves as continuators of the Romans (which we are) then we've been fighting pretty much the same war in Iraq for two millenia now. And we're still at war with the Persians / Iran. Pretty sobering.
"Byzantine court titles". I wish I could get a lexicon full of them some time. That sounds great. I never heard of that. And something interesting in Ancient Greek. I had Liddel and Scott once before and I remember it well. I study mostly the oldest writings in hieroglyphic writing systems, and then epigraphic, small corpus languages, so I am more into prehistory than civilization and its unnecessarily complexities. I get some into c 500 BC and later Chinese government offices and wardrobe, though. I like to look out over prehistory by studying myths.
Hey, did you know I'm also one of the only people who's studied the oldest written language of Iran, called Elamite? It's like a mix between an Indo-European language and a Semitic language, though it's a language isolate. It actually has some overlap for phonology and vocabulary and everything with Sumerian. So it's like the understudied, unsuspected brother language.
It's not a core logographic script but I really like ancient polyglot texts like The Behistun Inscription and its most exotic language is that Elamite. Akkadian, Old Persian, and Elamite. Some scholars say it's related to Dravidian Languages but I can't see it. Still, I've been having fun on and off the last two years studying Elamite and Old Tamil and a bit more Akkadian and Sumerian than usual.
Emesal is more studied among Sumerian scholars than Elamite! And it's not studied much. They're not all into linguistics that much, so it's just a side thing.
