This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An empire or polity entry records a historical political entity, an empire, caliphate, kingdom or other polity, considered specifically for how it structured its relationship to religious authority, whether it claimed direct divine sanction for its rule, maintained a formal state religion, or governed a religiously diverse population under some other arrangement. Max Weber's sociological study of religion treats this relationship as a documentable institutional fact, traceable through law, administration and succession, rather than a vague matter of a ruler's private belief.
An entry records a polity's span, its founding and its end where both are documented, and its formal religious arrangement, an established state church, a ruling dynasty's claimed religious legitimacy, or a documented policy toward minority traditions within its territory, since these arrangements frequently changed over a polity's own lifespan rather than staying fixed from founding to end.
Many polities recorded here justified their rule through an explicit religious claim, a ruler's descent from a sacred lineage, a title claiming succession from a religious founder, and the entry records that claim as a documented historical fact about how the polity presented its own legitimacy, distinct from any modern judgment about whether the claim was true.