Small nations, sometimes achieved more than Empires and are usually more dinamic. Nations like Athens and Venice developed and influenced the world with a strenght out of proportion to theirs sizes. Even more, tribes sometimes produced quite a lot of things interesting for its own. For instance, boomerangs, harpoons and horse riding were developed by nomads and not inside "Empires", all of the Pacific Ocean (half the surface of the planet) was conquered by small bands of Polynesians, and the most important monoteistic religions has roots in believes and a book developed by a people (the Hebrews) that was marginal to the superpowers of theirs time, and a group of merchants weak in military power, the phoenicians, not only spread old civilization throught the Mediterranean sea but developed a key invention for the West: the alphabet.

 

So, I agree, comparing civilizations and cultures against each other doesn't make much sense if we just compare numbers and statistics. It is better to compare the legacy that people leaved to us.

 

 

 

"all of the Pacific Ocean (half the surface of the planet) was conquered by small bands of Polynesians"

 

"the most important monotheistic religions have roots in beliefs and a book developed by a people (the Hebrews)who were marginal to the superpowers of their time."

 

To "conquer" you must have prior inhabitants with a claim to the territory in question. The dispersal of populations through the Pacific fails to meet that criteria and other defining terms are available so as to explain conditions (e.g. Hawaii). Likewise, the "Bible" conquered nothing, in fact its conception as understood today had little to do with the spread of any religion. If you understand an empire in terms of a centripetal force, you would grasp why religion will normally act as a centrifugal force in terms of imperial cohesion.