For the History Channel, I wrote about the challenges of identifying the world’s earliest democracy.
The term democracy, which means “rule by the people,” was coined by the Greeks of ancient Athens to describe their city-state’s system of self-rule, which reached its golden age around 430 B.C. under the skilled orator and politician Pericles. It is probable that the Athenians were not the first group of people to adopt such a system (a few places in India have traditions of local democracy that claim earlier origins) but because the Greeks named it, they have a good claim at being the “first” democracy, even though large portions of Athenian society—most notably women and slaves—could not participate.
The title of oldest continuously functioning democracy is more hotly contested. Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the Isle of Man all have local parliaments founded in the ninth and 10th centuries, when Vikings pillaged, plundered and set up legislative bodies on the sea-islands of far northern Europe. Iceland’s national parliament, the Althing, dates back to A.D. 930, but it spent centuries under Norwegian and Danish rule. Man and the Faroes, meanwhile, remain dependencies of the United Kingdom and Denmark, respectively.