Looking back across the yawning chasm of time, there are recursive patterns - what Mark Twain referred as history's habit of "rhyming" as opposed to outright repeating, generating endless variations on a theme rather than just rehashing the same cliches forever and ever. Here are the 20 that occur most immediately to me.
1. Social irrelevance is the #1 killer of gods.
2. Peninsulas always end up being the most interesting places.
3. Russia: Not worth invading, and you'll lose anyway.
4. Artists leading government: BAD IDEA.
5. Americans will believe anything. And that's not always a bad thing.
6. Don't bother trying to understand China.
7. Bitter winters make great drinking cultures.
8. Deserts make people insane.
9. Tyrants and messiahs grow on the hard fringes of Empire.
10. Archipelagos breed epic adventures.
11. Military dictatorship is only capable of two results: Chaos or stagnation.
12. Societies who've forgotten how to change would rather die than remember.
13. Democracy is a fact, not a system. Democratic governance merely acknowledges reality.
14. Masters of logistics are the masters of the world.
15. Afghanistan does not exist. Its borders are wherever its neighbors lose control.
16. Evil douchebags have an affinity for mustaches.
17. Soft people in hard places become either victims or monsters. Hard people in soft places become either parasites or visionaries.
18. Mental illness, altitude sickness, and fraud: How religions are born.
19. Frontiers enliven the active society, are ignored by declining ones, and frighten the degenerate.
20. Capitalists and warlords operate on the same instincts, and are always in tension with the shared instincts of priests/bureaucrats.