Does Any Other Civ Have a Issue/Problem Similar to one Egypt Has?

[Zaarin]

I'm surprised noone yet has brought Mesopotamia/Iraq up. It's been represented by ancient empires only, and different too - Sumerian, Babylonian, in earlier iterations Assyrians, too - and lacks medieval and modern leaders. Ironically, two actua leaders from that region head two different civs: Saladin and Harun al-Rashid who represent the Arabs. The Arabs, instead have had their capitals in Mecca and Cairo. So Egypt actually has a medieval representation, just as the central region in the time of Saladin. Mesopotamia, similarly to Egypt, has been mostly ruled by foreigners: Persians, Macedonians, Arabs, Turkish, until the 20.c. You could argue that after a while the Abbasids can no longer be viewed as foreigners. But think about having an Abbasid caliph as a medieval leader for the, say, Babylonians. Nasir li-Din Allah leads the Babylonians in 1225!

First post, I literally mentioned equating Ancient Egypt with the Arab Republic of Egypt was equivalent to equating Babylon with Iraq. (And boy did the Iraqi Nationalists try. But that's another topic.) At any rate, had Civ5 followed Civ6's practice, Harun ar-Rashid's capital would have been Baghdad. At any rate, Mesopotamia was occupied chiefly by people who considered themselves either Aramaeans or Arabs by the beginning of the Common Era. They had been speaking Aramaic for hundreds of years by that point (the last Akkadian text dates to the early first century CE, but it was only a ritual language by that point). By the time of the Abbasid caliphs, the people of Mesopotamia considered themselves as belonging to one of three identities: Arabs, Jews, or Syriacs (simplified--I'm ignoring, for the moment, minorities like Kurds and Mandeans). These identities were religious as well as ethnolinguistic (though members of the small but influential Church of the East could be Arab or Syriac). In the twentieth century, many Syriacs took up an "Assyrian" identity, but that is an anachronism resulting from a confused Catholic priest (a Frenchman, I think?) whose grasp of Aramaic was less than perfect. This is around the same time that Iraqi Nationalists were also proclaiming themselves the New Babylon and their leader, Saddam Hussein, the second coming of Sargon or Akkad or Nebuchadnezzar II (he preferred the former--to the extent his belief may have been literal). So where Egypt at least had the Copts continuing some version of Egyptian identity, even if as a minority population, there was no such case in Mesopotamia. Babylon and Nineveh were already ruins in the time of Christ, and there were few if any left who considered themselves Babylonian or Assyrian at that time.