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>> I'm no historian, but I'll toss out China, India, Rome, Persia, the Aztecs, the Incas, Egypt, the Ottomans, the Huns.

All of these have either met their complete demise, or, in the case of China, India and Egypt have brand new governments since World War II.

Prior to World War II, India was controlled, politically, by one outsider after another from about the 8th century on, the last being the British. Egypt had a similar history to India; but outsider control started much earlier, before Christ. The British left Egypt after WWII. China had one of the leading civilizations for centuries, but it started to unravel in the 19th century. The communists took over after WWII.

The Ottoman empire was a force to be reckoned with at one time. The height of its culture was around the 16th and 17th century. It fell apart after the secularization of Turkey after WWII.

Rome was a long-standing civilization. Gibbon blamed its decline on the effects of Christianity. But modern-day historians dispute that, blaiming it on factors such as disease, invasion, famine, etc.. The major factor seemed to be the creation of a welfare state (or, more to to the point, the transfer of wealth from the countryside to the cities). Socialism, not Christianity, was the primary cause of the fall of Rome.

The Huns were more more nomadic than civilized. The Persian civilization was destroyed by Alexander before Christ. I don't recall much about the Aztecs, except for human sacrifice. The Incas had a fine civilization.

Most of those civilizations were long-lived due to isolation, or rather, the lack of competition for the resources and the people. The same for the American Indian.

Any high school kid could have named those (although they would have probably omitted the Huns, and added Japan). Now go back to my original statement and list a successful, self-sustaining secular nation with reasonable longevity.