Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.Societal collapse broadly includes both quite abrupt societal failures typified by the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the Mayan Civilization collapse and others of the type, as well as more extended grinding declines of superpowers like the Roman empire in Western Europe and the Han Dynasty in East Asia. The great irony expressed by these and others like them is that civilizations that seem ideally designed to creatively solve problems find themselves doing so self-destructively. What distinguishes these more dramatic failures of human societies, seeming to deserve the term "collapse", from less dramatic long term decline is not widely agreed on. The subject also then generally includes any other long term decline of a culture, its civil institutions or other major characteristics of it as a society or a civilization, generally permanent.