Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years | Hacker News Reader

Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

openculture.com

237 pointsdangtony98203 comments

It didn't really survive though, in the end. In January 2006 the company was bought out. Per Wikipedia: "The old Kongō Construction remained only in the real estate division and changed its name to KJ Construction Co., Ltd. The over-1,400-year-old Kongō family's management structure essentially closed its doors. In July 2006, KJ Construction filed for bankruptcy due to insufficient funds." Nevertheless, very impressive track record!

It got killed by financial engineering in the end. No sanely run company can survive competition from a company structured to take advantage of low interest rates and public/private partnerships

> It got killed by financial engineering in the end

Real interest rates in Japan were on par with in the US in the mid-2000s [0], and only entered the negative range when the US began dropping interest rates to near 0 during the GFC [0].

The bigger issue in was the hangover of the 1990s Japanese bust which lead to larger players tightening their belts at the expense of smaller players [1]

The big players in Japan are also similarly old (usually 300-500 year old guilds converted into corporations/zaibatsus in the 19th century)

There is also a succession crisis brewing in plenty of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese businesses. One person in my network is leaving American Tech PE/VC to concentrate on buying out Korean and a Japanese companies facing issues around succession now - just like American SMEs businesses faced in the 1970s-2000s.

Ik people like to shoehorn the Japanese experience to extrapolate American and Western policy, but the Japanese economy is structured very differently from Western economies with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed), welfare (highly supportive), inflation (keep it as low as possible), and state intervention (highly supportive).

The only developed countries that can safely be compared to the Japanese economy are South Korea and Taiwan (maybe Dirigisme-era France and Italy pre-1990s, but they had the benefits of the EC/EU which made stuff significantly different).

I recommend reading "The Japanese Economy" by Takatoshi Ito and Takeo Hoshi [2] and "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap [3]

[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=2013&lo...

[1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/execs-...

[2] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-economy/

[3] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...

The Japanese bust (well, the bubble that lead to the bust) was itself partially engineered, as a clever bit of American protectionism. The Plaza Accord prompted the BoJ to cut interest rates, leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war (sounds familiar?).

>with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed)

Post-war, Japan (with the American occupation's "help") did what would be unthinkable to American businesses, taxing the personal wealth of company heads up to ~85% and purging them from their companies. This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government.

I like Richard Werner's take on the matter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_of_the_Yen

Even Richard Werner puts the onus on the Window Guidance policies the BoJ followed (which I allude to in my own comments).

Sure, but the 'onus onus' per RW was geopolitical pressure from the power that defeated Japan in WW2. They were forced. What is remarkable about RW's analysis is the runaway success of the planned economy that catapulted post war Japan to a position of economic power before the changed were forced on Japan's policy makers.

> What is remarkable about RW's analysis is the runaway success of the planned economy that catapulted post war Japan to a position of economic power before the changed were forced on Japan's policy makers.

Not really.

There were similar works barely 20 years before Werner about the role MITI played in the Japanese miracle and how the US should emulate it (Chalmer Johnson's "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" played a significant role in seeding what became the CHIPS and IRA, as it was required reading in 80s and 90s era policy circles)

Werner's major contribution was his argument that the policies he ended up coining as QE could have resolved Japan's malaise in the 90s (and he absolutely was correct looking at Abe-era Japan's performance compared to before).

And Japan's planned economy is overstated, as Seong-ik Oh's recently published "Overseas Energy Investment of Korea and Japan" investigates

I hope that exVC guy in your network is considering getting adopted (or playing matchmaker), my personal anecdata tells me they are open to adopting gai(koku)jin as heirs, it is not even just a movie trope these days, surprise!

I recommend reading the sources I listed in my initial comment (they are written by senior leadership and advisors at the BoJ from that era).

Furthermore, these are all texts that are expected reading in any upper level Asian Economics class.

> leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war

The biggest cause was bad loan issues caused by lack of auditing and due dilligence. [0]

In that era, the BoJ would set a quota on loan origination (called a window guidance) that Japanese banks needed to meet (p.s. China used to do the same thing til 2015 which is a major reason for China's current real estate crisis)

The Plaza Accord would not have had as severe an impact if Japan's Window Guidance policy didn't incentivize business loans with minimal due diligence.

> Post-war ... purging them from their companies

And they completely reconstituted themselves in the 1950s by adopting the Keiretsu corporate structure where a single asset management firm controls all the broken off assets of the initial zaibatsu.

This is what Mitsui, Sumimito, Mitsubishi, Fuyo, etc did.

Take a look at NYT reporting about this from 1954 [1]

Japan also does not have a wealth tax.

> This left much of Japan's industry essentially controlled by the government

Japan always had a high amount of government intervention in it's economy.

MITI was the driver of Japanese industrial policy.

I recommend reading "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" (1982) by Chalmers Johnson to dig deeper into the history of interventionism in the Japanese model [2]

-------------

While the Plaza Accord did have a significant impact on the Japanese economy, the recent politically driven "pop econ" Plaza Accord view needs to die [3]

Like anything else that's pop-anything, it's so broadstrokes that it's bordering on misinformation.

[0] - https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/me19-s1-1...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1954/07/17/archives/japan-again-plan...

[2] - https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2791

[3] - https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-flagship-i...

Heh, guessing the new management structure led to a bout of volatility in funding?

Survived nearly 1500 -> Nearly survived 1500

I think it's an exaggeration to say this event was the end of the company. E.g. we don't say GM ended because it went through a bankruptcy.

Kongo gumi still continued operating even though it went through a restructuring, so it's fair to say it's still the oldest company in the world.

Just it's no longer the oldest family business in the world - that ended when direct Kongo control of it ended, although I hear they still have a ceremonial involvement with the company.

Its not that much of an exaggeration if you consider that the original Construction purpose is gone. E.g. Ford no longer making cars but still trading shares of Car companies would not be itself considered a continuation of Henry Ford’s original setup.

Do you have a source that they're no longer in construction?

OP was quoting wikipedia which also says that business+chief+employees were transferred to a new company Shin-Kongo (ie “New Kongo”).

So it depends on what you mean by “they”, the company with the old name Kongo Gumi is no longer in construction, but otherwise the company with the new name Shin Kongo is, as a subsidiary of another conglomerate.

Bloomberg also had an article https://archive.is/rLnnH

If I may be flippant, "Killing a 1400-year-old institution," is quite a feather in capitalism's hat.

I think this is just due to the slow death of organized religion. There was no way for a temple builder to survive in their primary business. Otherwise, they had an extraordinary run. Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies.

> Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies.

I feel like the core of the company – led as a family business, earning real money – would be lost if it was suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go with it.

The support doesn't have to be a financial subsidy; it can be the creation of a regulatory framework that advantages companies of this type. That is surely unexceptional, after all it's done in many countries all the time. It just happens that it is large corporations that are state supported rather than those with multi-century continuity or support for the local community in mind.

Thankfully religions have never meddled in affairs of business, state, war, or culture.

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Temple construction happens also to be concern of the world’s 10th oldest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

(Of course, since wiki page hasn’t been updated for the first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)

It looks like it is still a going concern - the company website and phone line both seem to be active.

https://nakamurasyaji.co.jp/

A recent SMBC* explores "what if religion was freemium?", but the existence of temples and sacrifices suggest that, whatever model deities may have had in mind, their worshippers have always been eager to sign up for a premium plan.

* https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-3

I love SMBC so much that i once suggested a joke idea to Weinersmith. Sad day for me and my ideas lol. In particular, to discover that my heroes Rao and Weinersmith selfidentify as hypernormies T_T

[Cue yada yada the batman snowclone “live long enough”, eg you either die a batman or live long enough to become Batman)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)]

[another source of hypernormie pro weirdos, from my personal anecdata, are psychiatrists, im guessing the sibboleth is the high neuroticism to __ ratio, which comes off as wisdom (after discounting for age).. weird pronormies would then be econs profs? This is prob why both trigger the So[Ha]Ri(veign/vian) Taleb lol]

Also should have replied to alephnerd in a more timely fashion

Finally someone who pronounces sibboleth properly!

At one point I ran across a US book which noted that children of psychiatrists tend to wind up in treatment themselves, with the exception having been just after WWII (when the army's need for psychiatrists meant they retrained many people who had studied as regular GPs), and concluded that it may be a field many people pursue due to the attraction of self-diagnosis.

Sorry to disappoint if you didnt already guess i picked that up from you. However, its probably not a spelling i would practise elsewhere — too memorable.

Yes, I also appreciated the busniess manager mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442464 .

Had the Athenians been speaking to the Melians on the subject of signal/call-sign analysis, would they have said "the boring are anonymous in their masses for they can, while the novel leak identity as they must"?

(Novelty not referring to semantic goodness; I'm afraid just with the purely syntactic category of "number* of distinct code-points employed" my 'hand' would be extremal, both here and in Persia)

* I think I owe the notion to you that as long as one has been given summation, recovering multilinearity from linear elements is easy?

This doesn't really say anything about religions. Constructions company can build a lot of thing. Temples are just happen to be good business at that time.

But temples are almost uniquely good for construction companies.

- the more ornate, the better

- unlike palaces, every town needs at least one, and if you're polytheistic, so much the better

- extremely price-insensitive clients who are content to wait generations

- you can probably easily bulldoze both structures and local opinions that get in the way of construction because you're building for a cause everyone's supposed to worship

There aren’t any examples of state run businesses this old, right? It seems like at 1,500 years governments aren’t robust enough to survive. So any business run by a government would not survive the political upheavals.

The Church of Sinai has operated Saint Catherine's Monastery for nearly 1500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery

St Catherine's Monastery is not a business

I mean, if you want to argue it's a Non Profit, not a business, go ahead, but I'm not particularly interested in fitting modern tax code and business rules to an entity that has existed for 1500 years.

The organization has existed and has had a need to find funding for it's activities. Since the question was about 'state' run entities, the goal of "making a profit" seemed not particular salient.

Honestly, I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state.

> I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state

That is not as contentious, because it's basically autocephalous/self governing.

It's always been a couple dozen loners in the Sinai peninsula maintaining self sufficiency, which is why I don't find it a good example - as there are plenty of similarly old and continuous organizations, but never truly scaled.

Oh well, guess there's nothing you can learn from it then

But they would; temples aren't destroyed unless there's a religious revolution, if the religion stops they become heritage sites and the work remains. Like modern day churches and cathedrals being repurposed as upmarket housing.

If you look up the history of the temples mentioned in the article, they were more often destroyed by non-religious conflicts, fires, and earthquakes.

Yes. I was surprised to see the castle of Hiroshima was still there. It was obviously rebuilt.

Also AFAIK most of these constructions are made of wood, which also mean they need to be rebuilt over time. I think I also remember it is even part of the Buddhist tradition (at least for temples), a way to emphasis the impermanence of things.

See for instance this long but fascinating video on one of the most famous temple of Kyoto: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o

Found another reference, but for a shrine: [2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shri...

My impression is that Japan's temples are regularly destroyed. They're giant wooden structures with zero fire suppression and basically tinder boxes just waiting for a spark. Lo and behold, the Great ____ Earthquake/Fire or war occurs every few hundred years and there she goes.

In fact, many Japanese temples are designed to be torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis.

As they say: fires and fights are the flowers of Edo.

Ise Jingu in Japan is perhaps the marquee exception, ritually torn down and rebuilt every 20 years in a tradition at least 1300 years old. I think it stands to reason that if ritual reconstruction and maintenance of temple facilities is part of the religious tradition, then temple builders will see regular work.

We shouldn't assume that all of the world's faiths follow the tradition of building temples as permanent monuments of stone and gold.

Aren’t a bunch of Japanese temples already heritage sites?

The big problem with these temples is not religion it’s deforestation. The spine is made of old growth timber. So some of these temples survived over a thousand years until the central pillars were deemed unsound and needed to be replaced. Problem is that the new pillars are estimated to need replacement again in 400 years. They are made of less sturdy stuff.

People (incl. Japanese who have a overtly rosy picture of Europe) underestimate how important Tokugawa's Sakoku was for the survival of all this.

Indeed, by the time Europe had f*ed up all of Asia in the mid-1800s and reached Japan again, Japan had very high levels of literacy which was perfect for selectively taking of high-culture/industrial-technology of Europe.

From the 1600s, Japanese scholars had an entire field of study dedicated to absorbing western knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangaku

Any sources on this ?

Shogun, by James Clavell.

The whole Asia series is great. Personally I think Noble House and Tai-Pan are the best.

By God.

The TV series based on that book which was released this year is extremely good.

Better than the one with Richard Chamberlain in the lead, from... Uh, whenever it was?

The very old buildings the article talks about have long continuity but aren’t actually that old.

Article doesn’t seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

Most construction businesses don’t have this recurring revenue model, tied to religious rebuilding.

No, that's only Ise Shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years using what's basically a blue/green deployment: build new exact copy next to active site, switch over, tear down the old one, repeat.

The reason there are few really old buildings in Japan is that earthquakes and WW2 destroyed almost all of them. That said, Kyoto and Nara do have numerous 300+ year old buildings like Todaiji, which also remains the world's largest wooden structure.

Not to mention various other wars and random fires, such as the Ōnin War 応仁の乱 in the 1400s, a civil war between many feudal lords, which destroyed much of Kyoto among other areas.

The world's oldest extant wooden structure is the Kondō (main hall) of the temple Hōryū-ji 法隆寺 in Ikaruga, in the Nara Prefecture of Japan. It was initially built in 607 but completely burned down due to lightning. It was rebuilt in 670, but again nearly burned down by accident in 1949 [1].

It's interesting to contemplate how across these timescales war, disasters, and accidents make it so difficult for structures to survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji

And fire. The thing with buildings made out of kindling is that they tend to burn down after a while whether that's intentional or simply because lightning happened to strike in the wrong place, or these days the man-made equivalent: electrical faults.

I'm no expert but I think this is Shintō tradition (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri...) rather than Buddhist. But, (Buddhist) temples are sometimes destroyed (war, natural disasters) and are rebuilt as a result (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji).

That is belief in constancy only of form. There is constancy of concept as well. Is your copy of `cat` different because it is composed of different electrons even if `diff` would report no difference? It is still an old program.

What is old? These companies have differing memberships, different corporate structures, and make different things. Yet we call them the same company.

Constancy need not be only of form. It can also be of concept.

> Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

I think this is more the exception than the rule, isn't it?

Is it? Chinese buildings are never old because China built in wood rather than stone. If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.

Wood is surprisingly long-lasting in reasonably dry environments as long as fire does not consume it.

Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we can count.

> If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.

I’m not sure how well that works when the ground keeps moving. Some places manage it to a degree, but the cultures that come to mind (Aztec) weren’t on land as shaky as Japan.

I'd reconsider that. The Aztec culture was spread over much of central and southern Mexico, a region known for having an abundance of tectonic and also even volcanic instability. Even the case of their capital is almost amusing in that it was built over sand and mud, on a lake, in the middle of a valley severely prone to very heavy earthquakes.

I saw a documentary about the forbidden city architecture, and despite the wood it’s really a great lasting one.

An interesting takeaway was that lightning strike fires have been a major "need to rebuild everything from scratch" trigger until very recently actually. I’m always amazed at how much time it took to come with things that are all in all rather trivial to build while bringing a major difference on the table.

The documentary also went through seismic tests, explaining how the architecture was so resilient to them, how the fact that all peaces are really just plugged in together and relatively easy to replace with a fresh new copy, even large steels and pillars. Truly amazing masterpiece.

Never old or were all the old buildings destroyed in the the Great Leap Forward?

Building pizza ovens to live in isn't always the brightest idea

Wood lasts as long as the roof.

It says something about the UK that of the 10 oldest companies, 5 of them are pubs (and two more are hotels with rather pub sounding names). Three share the name "The Old(e) Bell"

The UK does extremely well in oldest schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_schools

I could be mistaken but didn't pub kind of mean inn before it meant bar?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pub

A lot of the names of the pubs came from the depictions of highly recognisable objects (given that the population was illiterate) that they would use to attract customers.

Why does Japan have such a heavy presence on the list of oldest companies[1], compared to say, China or India or Egypt?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Couple posters have replied and attempted to answer, but the true reason is the concept of adult adoption.

These companies have survived because any time the family had only girls, one of the women would marry and their husband would be adopted. Thus making the husband the eldest man, and keeping the business in the family.

Japan having family businesses is not the factor, all businesses were good family businesses before the invention of the stock company. Instead what doomed most family businesses in the west was the eventual chance of getting unlucky with inheritance.

The general acceptance of adult adoption to continue a family line, kept those businesses in a single family and justified passing the business whole to the "eldest son".

From what I've read (but note that a Japanese could answer this much better), honor is an extremely important aspect of Japanese culture. As Karen Ma put it on a Quora answer:

> In some odd ways, you can view many of Japan's famous and historical companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui as having assumed the role of the lords from feudal Japan, and the employees working for these companies can be seen as the modern day warriors. They devote absolute loyalty to their companies/modern day lords, who in turn vow to take care of these warriors by providing life-time employment, etc.

> However, if these warriors tarnished the image of their companies somehow, e.g., involving in a scandal whereby their companies get blamed, or the reputation is severely damaged, then these corporate warriors would assume responsibility by kneeling down to apologize in public, and/or in some cases, jump off a building in an extreme expression of their deep regrets for failing to defend the honor of the company.

Historically, warriors who protected the feudal lords would also commit suicide when they failed their master. See the Bushido book for more information about Japanese culture in English terms. It's really hard to express the culture in English, I think, because some is lost in translation and some is just hard to put in words.

My understanding is that many of the oldest companies have lasted so long because they were/are family operations. Countries where “son takes over the business” is the norm will have more older businesses.

Japan is one such country and also happens to have been around a long time too.

AFAIK, in the case of the German company Robert Bosch GmbH, the founder was pretty sure his family would not do a good work of keeping the company running (he didn't even trusted himself), so he devised a somewhat complicated mechanism, where the family receives some money, but has little power over the direction of the company. Some other companies followed after that.

My guess it has something to do with Japanese culture constantly discouraging individualism. If you're raised to be a cog in the machine and make sure you children will be cogs in the machine then that machine can run for a very long time.

There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.

Also, for a group to be resilent, there actually needs to be a lot of creativity at in its members as otherwise it will collapse when it meets challenges.

> There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.

Could you elaborate on this some more? It was my understanding people were discouraged from even dressing different, for example.

There is a lot of individual creative energy in Japan, both in art and engineering. A great deal of care is taken to ensure the quality of products.

I think this may also come down to record keeping.

And keep in mind that China had the Cultural Revolution which reset the counter to zero.

Lack of colonialism.

Could it be because China had a communist revolution and privately owned companies where banned (for a while)?

Colonialism, probably?

In China there was this thing called revolution, maybe you have heard of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Looks like hospitality and foodservice make up the majority of the list, while very old construction companies are actually relatively rare.

I like how all Czech republic entries in this list are breweries (except for one hotel). There are some priorities of our people!

People who enjoy old European breweries may also enjoy The Drawing of the Dark

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheDrawing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drawing_of_the_Dark

Construction companies are very volatile but building temples is probably a steady business model

Japanese temples are rebuilt every 20-30 years, so steady business.

Not all temples, only richest ones. Lots of them are centuries old.

Interesting how Japan and Germany dominate that list.

Could be an artifact of record keeping culture, combined with eagerness to contribute to Wikipedia.

Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of starting a company that exists 1,000 years into the future is much more exciting than building a startup in a trendy industry, getting acquired for big bucks, and never being heard of again.

Of those two, of course one is preferrable. But. Either you have a company which does everything and anything, or you have a company which depends on solving a particular problem or set of problem. If your company solves a particular problem, the company depends on that problem persisting. I’d rather the problem be eliminated at some time by future developments, making the company defunct, rather than hoping for a 1000 year-old company. Hoping for a 1000 year-old company which solves one problem is really the same as hoping for humanity to keep having that specific problem for a 1000 years.

I think that’s a false dichotomy. Most of these old companies are addressing basic human activities, not problems. Unless you thinking eating good food and staying in hotels are problems that ought to be solved?

Most entertainment business are also not solving problems, and yet manage to be extremely successful businesses. See: Disney, Pokémon, video game companies, etc.

Yes, you’re right. (There’s also the “oldest profession”.) But I’d still like to think that many of these actually are problems to be solved, rather than unalterable facts of life. Look what happened to, for instance, secretaries. Or “computers” – i.e. the profession. Regarding entertainment, I don’t see how companies providing entertainment is an absolute necessity; people can be entertained by each other’s company, and have been for most of history and pre-history. Furthermore, the examples you give all rely heavily on copyright for their business models, a purely legal concept without a guaranteed future. If I had to bet on any entertainment company to survive for 1000 years, I would pick one which does things which can not be copied, like live performances, perhaps at specific historically important locations.

”Problems to be solved” is a narrow view of the mechanism of providing goods and services.

Is food a problem? Clothes? Housing? Historically societies that have lacked markets in these (grow your own food, make your own clothes etc) are not something I would call as aspirational models for our current civilization.

So a company that can pivot within their general domain is preferable

In this case, the company was providing a service that was needed for millennia - building temples.

Their structure seems to have been like a private corporation, with special rules and efforts to maintain their ideology and culture. They had the ability to expand outside the current leading families when necessary, though.

When they hit the recent hard patch, they pivoted, but didn’t scale back enough to survive until the next great leader showed up. They fell into the hands of modern corporations, and we all know how that turns out.

"Flourishing and and thrive in peace" can be a good starting point. Specifications will vary over time sure, but there are good chances humankind will still crave for this in a few thousand years if it managed to stay alive as a species.

I seize the opportunity to wish you a great satisfying and fulfilling life in harmony with the rest of your relatives, whoever you are.

So what would be the equivalent of building temples today, and for the next 1000 years?

When you look at these long-lasting companies, they are all slow-burning concepts with very little competition and little innovation, so you're not going to find suggestions of "technology" companies on this list. The innovator's dilemma cannot be an issue if you want your company lasting hundreds of years. Another problem here is that you need to financialize as little as possible, so you can't have a lot of competition. Investors don't have 500-year time horizons, so those are out (especially VCs). Debt on physical assets seems to be okay when used sparingly.

1. Datacenters or datacenter construction may be the most high-tech ones I would try. Not cloud services, but the literal physical buildings.

2. Musical instruments, art supplies, or other cultural/religious goods of some kind, possibly as high-tech as electric guitars or synthesizers (although those have not historically gone well).

3. Financialization businesses like insurance or securities packaging of some kind could work (if you don't get high on your own supply).

4. Food and hospitality never go out of style.

I assume that the way this sort of business would work is a 3-step process:

1. Start by becoming the best in the world at something very weird and specific.

2. Bootstrap your business with enough connections to start making sales without needing significant financing. Run as a completely bootstrapped business.

3. Convince your children to continue being the best in the world at that thing and maintain your values. If you don't have any suitable children, adopt one. Also, make sure to disinherit any children who are not both very competent and fully onboard with the plan - you need to keep the power concentrated in the one or two best successors.

It's no accident that a lot of these long-lived businesses in Japan, where all three of these are part of the culture.

Good question.

One answer would be focusing on basic human activities. People will still probably be eating and traveling in 500 years.

Another would be to figure out and/or develop the “temple” of whatever future belief system or religion one thinks will be necessary and popular in the future. And this could be a currently existing religion; Islam and Christianity will probably be around in some form or another for a long long time.

I mean, modern cloud computing centers are the new temples of current digital religion. And graphics cards are the new chalices.

Is… Snowden Jesus? And Tim Berners Lee Moses? Or perhaps Jobs was Moses, and Xerox PARC was the burning bush?

There is no similarity whatsoever. Temples are places that people flock to, computing centers are places kept secret.

Building houses? Wooden furniture? Can't imagine this getting out of fashion anytime soon. Methods and materials may change, the mission not so much.

With wooden furniture you are (at least for some time) also blocking release of stored CO2 back into atmosphere, a fate all other wood faces.

Construction involves a lot of changing technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmjU-6tkEc8

The Mars Terraforming Company? Half-kidding.

ecosystems ? terraformed sustainability spots ..

Its just you.

I wonder if there were families or the equivalent of "companies" in the old Egyptian kingdom, which lasted for about 3000 years, longer than any modern-day civilization (although there may be some cultures that have existed for more than 3000 years)

Old money is really old.

I’m sure there are modern day rich people who can trace their way back to the Greek rulers of Egypt who intermarried with the Egyptians of antiquity.

You can trace power. Aristocracy used marriage as a political tool, but I doubt there are commercial entities that persisted - business was seen as dirty in those days in Western culture. Anywhere the Catholic Church was, lots of enterprises were laundered through them.

Berenberg_Bank, private bankers since 1590, and Beretta, making guns since 1526, are probably the oldest large companies. There are a few wineries, hotels, and religious goods makers that are older, but quite small. Berenberg remains a successful merchant bank today, and Beretta guns can be purchased wherever guns are sold.

[1] https://www.berenberg.de/

[2] https://www.beretta.com/

Stora Enso has 20000 employees and roots in the 13th century. In the 17th centry Stora produced two thirds of all copper in the world.

"The oldest preserved share in the Swedish copper mining company Stora Kopparberg (Falun Mine) in Falun was issued in 1288. It granted the Bishop of Västerås 1/8th (12.5%) ownership, and it is also the oldest known preserved share in any company in the world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso

From Wikipedia: “Some observers consider Stora Enso to be the oldest limited liability company in the world”.

Interesting, especially considering that Sweden didn’t have limited liability companies until 1st of January 1849 [1]. Any ideas how this worked?

1. https://www.foretagskallan.se/foretagskallan-nyheter/lektion...

> Interesting, especially considering that Sweden didn’t have limited liability companies until 1st of January 1849 [1]. Any ideas how this worked?

Legal personhood dates back to (at least) Ancient Rome:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

Medieval guilds, city charters, universities were all forms of such. Liability would be implicitly included in such structures.

It was likely created by an act of government/royalty/etc.

The UK law formalizing the structure of LLCs didn't really come around until the 1800s. Think of how many institutions in the UK are older than that (e.g., Bank of England is from 1694).

Or for something that is a little more distinct from the government itself--Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was formed in 1670. Canada didn't exist yet and the laws weren't on the books. It was created by royal charter. It's currently owned by an American private investment firm.

Back then if you pissed off the king he could revoke your charter.

So effectively we used to have the death penalty for companies that committed treason-adjacent acts, or killed customers.

Interesting idea - although wouldn't it have been the government that could, and still can, bring down the corporate death penalty if annoyed?

I think even back then the kings were losing power to the governments that ruled in their name.

It's also interesting to note that some of Europe's colonizing was actually done by companies which had armies, and definitely killed at least some of their customers (whether you think the customers were the colonizers or the colonized).

That was when Sweden got a more general law of limited liability cooperations. There existed limited liability cooperations before that but they were created on an ad hoc basis by the government.

I assume the charter issued by the king in 1347 declared limitations of liability for the owners of the company.

what is the difference between the Catholic Church and a business?

Roughly the same as the difference between a country and a business.

not really

Why not? The Vatican is its own country (and throughout history more a "real" country with lots of ordinary people living inside its borders).

Yes, the Papal States (the state that the Pope ruled over between ~800 and 1870) were to a large extent the successor to the Exarchate of Ravenna, the area that the Byzantine Empire reconquered in Italy from the mid-500s to the mid-700s. Ravenna had become the capital of the Western Roman Empire long before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was closer to the action on the frontiers of Central and Eastern Europe.

maybe historically, but the Vatican is barely a country. if it had any citizens beyond employees of the institution maybe it could count as a coontry

You’re the one who picked the only church that has its own country. Don’t shoot the messenger.

so does disney. it's irrelevant. neither of them have any real citizens other than employees of the institution.

a church is a completely different institution to a country. countries are not decentralised. they do not advertise. they are (usually) not selling an idea. you cannot just decide to become a member of a country. the catholic church is all of those things and so are businesses. the catholic church is essentially a very entrenched business with a weak facade of being a state.

maybe in terms of scale they're similar to a state, but then how many people do the biggest businesses have as customers? billions?

A business generally don’t threat its audience with post-life infinite burn in Hell if they don’t buy its product. Also they don’t impose celibacy to their employees. Oh, and tax exemptions, I guess.

Yeah, modern corporations tend to threat people with things like raising sea levels to make them buy electric cars or photovoltaic panels, or vegan food. They also impose their woke worldviews on their employees. And don't get me started on tax exemptions.

No, those threats come from scientists, the companies just change their products over time to give people those options.

The most interesting thing about these long lasting companies is how their governance changes over time considering how different society is from when they were originally founded. Countries have come and gone within the lifetime of these companies. There have been entire paradigm shifts in terms of how companies operate. And yet they still exist through it all.

It looks like most of this centuries-long companies are family owned which sort of explains why do they survive all sorts of extreme political and economic changes that would otherwise break most companies. But it would be interesting to see if there's an actual study to explain this.

Being family owned is still impressive. The founder of the company probably has many thousands of heir today so how the company lived without being split between heirs is surprising.

I wonder how many of these were considered semi benevolent either during their entire life span or lucky or wise enough to do so during times of turmoil.

Some stores will have people willing to stick their neck out to defend them during riots. Some have good insurance and don’t care. Which ones get obliterated when the pitchforks and torches come out?

> Countries have come and gone within the lifetime of these companies.

Are there any that have existed as long as this company? Some sort of have if you are a bit vague and wave your hands a bit.

Depends entirely on how you define the parameters of the question. Egypt has been around for a very long time, but is the ~3000BC Egypt the same country as the 2024 Egypt? Did Egypt stop being Egypt during the period of Roman rule? What about during Macedonian rule? Did people 5000 years ago even have a concept of a “country” that would align with what we think makes a country in 2024? Do people in 2024 even have an agreed upon concept of what a country is today? (I would say evidently not) Does the country of ancient Persia still exist? If it’s longest contiguous self-sovereignty then probably Japan would be pretty high up the list. If its longest surviving constitution, then the USA and San Marino would also be two of the oldest countries in the world. But is San Marino even a country? Certainly not by every single metric you could possibly use to define one. Is the Magna Carta still in effect? Some of it is, but is that enough to make it the oldest surviving constitution?

To make the question meaningful you probably have to make it a lot more specific. Otherwise the answer is just a debate about what constitutes a country, and what constitutes it coming into and out of existence.

I once ate at a falafel restaurant in Jerusalem that was 1,000 years old.

I think there’s many restaurants that last a long time, but they aren’t what I’d consider a “large” company.

It has been speculated that its history may go back to Pharaonic Egypt.

However, the earliest written references to falafel from Egyptian sources date to the 19th century

-Wikipedia

I doubt there's a 1000 yr old falafel shop in Jerusalem, if you remember the name, pray tell

The restaurant, or the building it was in?

I’m thinking also of Canson (founded 1557), the paper manufacturer and Richard de Bas (1326). Even Monnaie de Paris dates back from 864. Actually there are many companies still alive today that are more than 400/500 years old.

Hmm, I thought the oldest bank was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banca_Monte_dei_Paschi_di_Sien... , which has its origin in 1472 (although not in the present form).

I had to go check whether they'd survived the 2008 financial crisis without being absorbed, and I think they did. A lot of the UK's oldest banks and building societies got absorbed in a consolidation wave immediately before (and partly causative of) the financial crisis.

There were many reorganizations, bankruptcies, government interventions, and other churn in the last 20 years. Something came out with the same name, but the primary owner is currently Italy's ministry of finance. Whether the company "survived" is a good question.

It's like the Hudson's Bay Company, which claims continuous existence since 1670. That's really a unit of US mall operator NRDC Equity Partners, which acquired Hudson's Bay and switched to using that name. They also own Saks Fifth Avenue and various other department store chains.[1]

[1] https://www.nrdcequity.com/timeline

I get the impression that the M&A ahead of the crisis was the crisis itself. The fever that marks the beginning of the illness, before the nastier symptoms present.

> There are a few wineries, hotels, and religious goods makers that are older, but quite small.

Wineries, hotels, and makers of ceremonial goods are indeed common among older companies listed on Wikipedia.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

I have an in-law from a family of temple carpenters in Nara. They're not finding people who want go through the rigorous training and the work load demanded of an apprentice.

Have they tried to make the deal more appealing? Apprentices certainly don't have to be treated like garbage, not even in Japan. So what if the apprenticeship takes a little bit longer than in the old days where you needed to basically live in your workplace and survive all the toxic behaviour directed towards you, and maybe you don't even have to master every single one of those ancient skills to become a professional. Attitude and willingness to negotiate matter.

This was fascinating and lead me down the "Oldest Companies" Wikipedia.

However, I was watching the second video linked in the article made by Endevr and it just sounds like it was made by and read by ChatGPT. The pauses are off and inflections are exactly the same on some words sounding unnatural. Is it me, or does anyone else feel that way about it? This isn't a new trend, is it?

AI-created voices do natural conversation pretty well, but many of the voices sold are developed from intentionally unnatural announcer speech. Online marketplaces became strong before the pandemic (and exploded during) and this meant many voice actors could get work and train themselves, and many of them tended toward a variety of unnatural announcer styles. This was partly because video narration was one of the largest (and lowest-paying) areas of work, and many of the buyers sought out inexpensive announcer styles.

When you buy an AI voice, there isn't (yet) much you can do to get it vary its read, and many of the least-expensive voices you can buy are from these early mostly self-taught voice talent. When I used to hire agents to train for one of the 78 Voice Acting Expo events we put on, they would tell me that most voice actors "lose their talent when they get an agent". Too many trainees feel that acting is not something you do, it something used to train them, and that once they are trained and graduate by getting an agent, they simply need to "open their mouth and gold will fall out". A similar reversion to the mean happens in other areas of training. People return to just "making an effort" after training. I remember my parents (father was an Army doctor) going to tennis camps, and being good for a few weeks afterwards, but not having much of what they learned "stick".

It's interesting to see AI immortalize this odd self-taught speech.

It's not just you. YouTube is littered with videos just like this one, with exactly the properties you describe. My guess is they are cheap to produce from stock footage, and the scripts rarely offer any deep insights but are mostly just regurgitated blurbs from Wikipedia. If narrated it's almost always by the same voice, presumably synthesized so no voice actors to pay.

I guess it's good business from the ad income sharing, and at the very least it's slightly more interesting than people posting reactions to reaction videos.

Sadly it does seem a trend, maybe produced with this kind of stuff https://invideo.io/make/youtube-video-editor/

This is something that is a question to modern organizations: Capitalism is how the world runs, but companies don't last. For eg: any bet on how many of the top 50 companies in the world will exist in 50 years -- probably single digit at best.

The institutions that endure seem to be religious, or family run institutions. One change in outlook is towards values/principles(/blind-faith?), as opposed to scaling/commercial aspects. Nation states and companies are broadly about a century old, and philosophers need to think and call out paths for current institutions and people for endurance.

Is endurance to be desired? If we would make a parallel with biological systems, it seems that death allows evolution, so I think it's good that nowadays companies don't last that long. Given the state of the world I think there are still a couple of things to improve...

1) There is definitely value in endurance. Examples abound: whether history, religion, etc.

2) Evolution is possible with endurance. Religions and these family business have adapted to changing requirements of the world (mostly). It's core principles that have perhaps stayed the same. There's also confirmation bias at play - theres plenty institutions that were at odds with evolution did die out for sure.

You raise a good point, but IMO we're giving close to zero thought on how our current institutions will endure. Perhaps one answer is don't do anything and some will anyway.. (I don't like that answer, personally)

> There is definitely value in endurance. Examples abound: whether history, religion, etc.

This is spurious. What about history or religion shows that for profit companies should last a long time?

For one, to ensure we're building our civilization for millennia rather than current short sighted thinking which has given us global warming and other problems. Profit motive solves for incentives, but isn't tuned for long term and community/overall betterment.

Look up Charlemagne Paradox and ship of Theseus to see that it's merely a name that survived, and maybe some old techniques.

City of London Corporation started trading around 1067. It's getting close to being 1000 years old.

That's not a corporation in the sense of a company, though. It's a corporation in the sense of a local government body: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_corporation

That's a local government rather than a private company, though.

Fun to find out that Japan's oldest temple builder company had Korean founding engineers.

The closest (presumed) black hole to the Earth is Gaia BH1, which is about 1500 light years away. The expanding shell of photons reflected from the Earth during this era are just now reaching it.

Some small percentage of those photons are going to approach the black hole at the perfect distance such that they will be slung back on a trajectory where our solar system will be 1500 years from now.

Suppose in a thousand years we decide to build a space telescope of tremendous proportion sufficient to peer into that tiny little window and it takes us 500 years to build it. We could watch opening day!

Well the photons leaving earth are scattered in almost all directions. So at 1500 light years there might not be any photons arriving from that exact moment and place on earth because you might be down to say 1 photon arriving per hour or even less. Then the photons coming back would be all mixed in with other photons from the black hole so even if the same photons did go to where earth will be, the picture would be mangled beyond repair, and the darkness of the data you’re trying to capture is so low that again it might be less than a photon an hour.

Easy. We just use AI to “augment” any photon that is missing and voila we’ll be able to watch opening day.

Enhance! - 2024 AI edition

at this point we can do it without the photon!

Homeopathic astronomy?

Those quack homeopathy treatments operate on the assumption that water has a "memory", and it's somehow enough that it's been in contact with some molecule in the past. The astronomy version would be that space has a memory, and you can observe anything if you know there was a relevant photon out there at some point.

Water has memory? We should build a homeopathic computer first of all.

Not homeopathic, but maybe close enough:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine

Hah that's where GNU Terry got it from then.

> you might be down to say 1 photon arriving per hour or even less

Have you calculated this or are you just speculating?

The quantization of light is a real physical limit that may make this impossible. The rest sounds more like engineering problems.

A pointy haired executive would say “silly engineers, did you forget to add an enhance button, the solution is so simple”.

Then let's put one of this well-positioned black hole in all photons' trajectories.

We can work out a ballpark value here. Suppose we're trying to see one square meter of Earth's surface on a sunny day, in the sense that we simply want to get our photons close enough to the black hole to be noticeably affected by it.

Under direct sunlight typical illumination at noon is on the order of 1 kW/m^2 (this is a slight overestimate, since Japan is in the mid-latitudes and not the tropics). Typical surfaces reflect roughly 10-20% of the light that strikes them; let's say 10% to make the math easy and to compensate for the previous overestimate. So 100 W of mostly visible light is reflected, i.e., 100 joules of energy per second.

A single photon of visible light has an energy of about 4 x 10^-19 J, so that's 2.5 x 10^20 photons reflected from our hypothetical square meter per second.

The black hole has a radius of around 30 km, or an apparent area in the sky equivalent to a plane of size pi * (30 km)^2 = 2800 km^2. It's actually a bit bigger than that because the "shadow" of a black hole is larger than the event horizon, and that's what we need to hit, not the horizon itself. So let's say 10,000 km^2 to make it nice and round. That's 10,000 km^2 of coverage on a "sphere" of radius 1500 ly and hence of area 4 * pi * (1500 ly)^2 = 2.5 x 10^33 km^2. So the shadow of the black hole occupies about 4 x 10^-30 of the sky.

If we spread out 2.5 x 10^20 photons across the sky evenly, we hit the black hole's shadow with about one-billionth of a photon from our square meter of Earth per second, or about one photon every 30 years. You hit it with a photon from somewhere on Earth at most roughly every ten seconds or so (when the geometry is such that Earth is close to "full" from the black hole's perspective).

The situation for actually lensing it properly to get it back to Earth is far worse, since not only do you have to hit the "shadow", you have to hit a particular point in the distorted image of the sky that corresponds to Earth, meaning you effectively have to thread this needle twice. Assuming you just want to hit Earth, which is bigger than the black hole's shadow, you're still trying to hit another 10^-26 or so shot. A single photon from Earth should make that shot roughly every 10^19 years, or about a billion times the current age of the Universe.

TLDR: ain't gonna work.

-----

In reality, none of this matters for a more fundamental reason: diffraction. The fact that light "smears out" as it travels poses a fundamental limit to resolution based on the size of your telescope, and the resolution we're trying to achieve here is orders of magnitude beyond it. For scale, Hubble is pretty close to the diffraction limit for visible light and a telescope of its size, and it already can't image planets within our own solar system at the resolution we're talking about here. So no reasonable telescope could even image Earth from the black hole, much less image a tiny portion of Earth.

...or that would be true, if you limited yourself to physical telescopes.

See, the diffraction limit depends on the size of your telescope, or more properly, on the size of its lens. And the effective size of a gravitational lens can be very, very large indeed. It turns out that current technology is sufficient to reach a distance where the distortion of the Sun's own gravity focuses light - the required distance is a few times the distance to the Voyager probes. From that vantage point, you could theoretically use the Sun itself as a giant telescope. And the resolutions achievable are tight enough that, while you wouldn't be able to image individual square meters, you actually could image details of planets with a resolution of tens of km (the rough equivalent of looking at a globe from a distance of a couple of feet away) across galactic distances. [1]

The reason this works is that it's not hitting the gravitational shadow of the gravitationally-lensing object itself - it's hitting a focal "ring" with a very large radius around the object, effectively magnifying the imaged object by ~eleven orders of magnitude. At such magnification even a handful of square meters start hitting with meaningful numbers of photons, though diffraction is still (I think) the limiting factor on actually resolving anything.

The black hole here is not much more massive than the Sun, so it wouldn't achieve too much more power. But with careful observation, you could use the hole to image Earth to a scale that would let you map out our world and our civilization to reasonable accuracy - if not the details of our corporate endeavors.

-----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS for an example of this kind of lensing on the scale of galaxies, which allows us to see a single star (or possibly a binary) from literally halfway across the Universe.

The trick here would be getting your spacecraft to be exactly Sun-antipodal from the planet you want to view, right? At multiple times Voyager's distance, its orbital period would be thousands of years, and any thrusting would make for impossibly tiny changes to your solar-relative angle.

Doing the math: the Wikipedia article says the solar focal distance is 547 AU, which would be an orbital period of 547^1.5 = up to 12793 years to line up with any particular target along that plane.

One proposal I saw would be a series of spacecraft on a one way trip that pass through the focal point and image as much as they can while there before going off on their way forever.

This is a perfect pastiche of xkcd

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the oldest and prima facie most successful corporate enterprise in history: the Roman Catholic church.

Indeed the RCC even has something of a long history with the word corporate itself, which ultimately comes from Latin for body; as in, Corpus Christi, the body of Christ.

...or the English word "corpse".

It's interesting how there are a lot of jokes like this but not many about the other two Abrahamic religions.

They aren't as centrally and hierarchical organized as the RCC. Even most other Christian sects aren't organized like that. So this unique feature makes it distinctive.

That, and the fact that it's much nicer to poke fun at "higher ups" than at peers. So if you make your whole organization about "higher ups" there's a lot of fun to be poked, I guess.

State churches like Anglican church might be more apt comparison. And those often do look like corporations when squinting, with lot of state funding or even taxation instead of sales... You even get various managerial classes, which do need to perform slightly different corporate rituals.

Yeah, the Church of England is (ironically, given its origins) structurally not a million miles away from the Catholic Church.

Much newer, though, of course; there are (quite a few) pubs older than the CoE.

The Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons) are relatively young, but they're definitely one of the more, if not the most, organized Christian sect around.

I mean, I assume because there’s nothing you could plausibly call Judaism Incorporated, or Islam Limited, but the Catholic Church arguably does look like a corporate entity if you squint hard enough (though it's actually really the remnants of a _state_).

It would be impossible to make this joke about Judaism or Islam, or at least, if you did, it wouldn’t make any sense.

The Knights of Malta is a similar case, though newer; used to be a state, and kind of still pretends to be a state, but really a non-profit corporation of sorts.

> there’s nothing you could plausibly call Judaism Incorporated

I guess there's Mel Brooks.

  >> jokes like this
  > this joke

I think you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about and being disingenuous muddying my point.

No, I'm sorry, I've no idea. Unless you're claiming that no-one ever makes jokes of any sort about the other two big Abrahamic religions, but, I mean, er, they do. Perhaps you could be a bit clearer about what you're attempting to say?

For this particular joke, though, neither would make any sense.

  >>>>  A LOT of jokes like this but NOT MANY [...]
  > Unless you're claiming that NO-ONE EVER makes jokes OF ANY SORT about the other two big Abrahamic religions, but, I mean, er, THEY DO.

Again you change what I say and then you use it to blatantly lie. There are jokes on the other two but it is very, very rare and usually very, very mild. And you know exactly what I mean.

I'm done. I don't care about your answers out of cognitive dissonance or straight out malice.

And final note: I'm not even Christian.

Just because you know exactly what you mean (which in itself could be questioned), it's just ridiculous to expect anyone else to.

FWIW where I'm from and in my social circles, the other two religions get joked about way more.

You seem to be an English-speaker, so you're likely to be hearing jokes from people who, by and large, have a fair bit of cultural context on Christianity, but almost none on Judaism or Islam. So, naturally, the religious jokes you hear, particularly on the media, where jokes have to be comprehensible to a broad audience, are more likely to be about Christianity than about Judaism or Islam, because the average viewer/reader doesn't actually know anything about Judaism or Islam, but a fair bit of context on Christianity is part of majority English-speaking culture.

An example - in the Seinfeld episode 'The Bris', there's a bit of exposition where Kramer finds out what a bris is (and is disturbed by it). The reason for that exposition, presumably, is to explain it to the _audience_; the jokes wouldn't work if the audience don't know what it is. This just isn't work you have to do for the basics of Christianity, so making jokes about it for a wide audience is easier.

Is it because of church's structure?

"To think they started in a barn..."

This is a joke, but also it promulgates the conflation between the institution of Catholicism and the general religion of Christianity (much like the commenter above is doing). In truth Catholicism could be said to have started as conceptually far from a humble barn as possible: in the imperial palace of Constantine (or maybe Theodosius or Justinian, depending on who's counting).

The Roman Catholic Church is more of a country than an enterprise, given the Holy See.

If religious institutions count, there's plenty that are older than Catholicism.

Still extant? Do you have examples? The oldest Buddhist temples seem to be a few centuries older than it, but there's little reason to think that there's any organisational continuity there.

(Of course, if you want to get super-vague, one could semi-reasonably argue that the Catholic Church is just a successor state to the Roman Republic via the Empire anyway, which pushes it back to about 500BCE.)

Just curious, what did you have in mind? I cannot think of any extant religious institution with the kind of centralized singular organizational structure that the RCC has. Many “religions” (using quotes here because the concept of a religion is a bit of a complicated topic) are older than Catholicism but are or were more decentralized - like Hinduism.

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