By Country
Where each ending was told: the regions and nations that carried an eschatology.
Albania
An oral mountain culture whose native cosmology explains origins and continuity, not a final reckoning; no assembled end of the world.
Armenia
The first Christian kingdom became a mountain keep of apocalyptic literature, preserving Enoch and Peter in Armenian and penning Gog and Magog behind the Caucasus gates.
Brazil
Tupi-Guarani prophets led migrations toward Yvy marã e'ỹ, the land without evil, a real destination reached on foot: an eschatology of departure rather than of destruction.
Canada
Inuit cosmology holds the world in repair rather than driving it toward a last day: order is maintained by observance, broken by transgression, and restored by the shaman's journey to the woman at the sea bottom.
Chile
The Mapuche flood pits Caicai Vilu, serpent of the sea, against Trentren Vilu, serpent of the land, who raises the hills as the water rises so that some of the people are carried clear.
China
Two schemes ran in parallel: the mandate of heaven, which replaces dynasties without ending the world, and the Daoist expectation of Li Hong, a savior who arrives to select the seed people and purify the age.
Denmark
Ragnarök was shared across the Norse world, and Denmark's witness is archaeological and euhemerised: Saxo's rationalised gods, and picture-stones and amulets showing the bound wolf and the fishing of the serpent.
Egypt
Egyptian eschatology is administered one soul at a time: the heart weighed against the feather of Ma'at, the serpent Apophis turned back each night, and a creator who foresees the dissolution of even his own order.
Ethiopia
A Christian kingdom that made the Kebra Nagast a charter of election and blended it with Enochic expectation under constant siege.
Finland
The Kalevala carries the theft and shattering of the Sampo, the loss of the sun and moon, and Väinämöinen's departure, but it closes without ending the world.
Georgia
A Christian Caucasus kingdom that received the Enochic and Petrine apocalyptic inheritance early and bound its own history to the gates of Alexander in the north.
Germany
A German end of the world built twice over: the medieval Last Emperor laid under the Kyffhäuser, and Wagner's Götterdämmerung remaking Norse Ragnarök as a moral finale.
Greece
Greece supplies both an impersonal cycle and a revealed ending: Hesiod's declining races, the Stoic conflagration that consumes and reproduces the cosmos, and the Patmos vision written in Greek.
Guatemala
The Popol Vuh records the failed creations before the present world: humans of mud that dissolved, humans of wood that were destroyed, and only the maize-made fourth people who survived, a Mesoamerican counterpart to the Five Suns.
Hawaii
Pele's migration down the island chain destroys and creates the same ground, a cosmology in which the land is understood as the ongoing record of a goddess's quarrels and departures.
Iceland
Iceland preserved the Norse end of the world in writing: the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, Snorri's Gylfaginning, and the Codex Regius, copied and kept after the conversion of the mainland had moved on.
India
Hindu time runs in kalpas of 4.32 billion years, withdrawn and projected again, with four yugas inside each; the present Kali Yuga closes when Kalki descends on a white horse to end the wicked and restore the age.
Iran
Zoroastrian frashokereti is the first clear religion of a future end: a finite cosmic struggle finishing in a savior, a resurrection, a judgment, and a world made wonderful, passed from Persia into Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Iraq
Mesopotamia produced the oldest surviving flood narrative and the oldest surviving account of gods resolving to destroy their own creation, in cuneiform texts recovered from Nineveh and Sippar.
Ireland
Medieval Irish literature built the most populated otherworld in Europe and a pseudo-history of successive invasions, but no native last day; the final judgment arrives with the Latin apocalypses.
Israel
The Hebrew prophets turned oracles of judgment into the Day of the Lord, and under Persian rule the Book of Daniel and Enoch added resurrection, a universal judgment, and a son-of-man who receives the kingdom.
Italy
Rome is the city Revelation encodes as Babylon, and the seat from which the last days were later administered: Joachim's ages, Dante's afterlife, and a papacy that managed the timetable it inherited.
Japan
Mappō dated the loss of the Buddha's teaching to 1052, and the response was not resignation but a wave of new schools built for an age in which self-powered practice was held to be impossible.
Korea
The Jeonggamnok, a prophecy of dynastic collapse circulating in manuscript from the Joseon period, schedules the fall of the ruling house and names both the refuges and the king who follows.
Lithuania
The Baltic song corpus preserves a sun with a household and a fate, a sea that rises over the land, and an age that wears out, but no final battle, judge or date.
Mali
Dogon cosmology, recorded on the Bandiagara escarpment by Griaule and Dieterlen, builds the world in stages through the Nommo and the spoken word, and remains the most disputed ethnographic record in the corpus.
Mexico
The Mexica held that four suns had already been destroyed and that the fifth, set moving by sacrifice at Teotihuacan, is named for the earthquake that will end it.
Mongolia
A steppe Buddhism that received the Kālacakra war and the Shambhala myth with the Tibetan orders, and an older shamanic weather-cosmology of renewal.
New Zealand
Māori cosmogony makes the world by force, prising Ranginui and Papatūānuku apart, and keeps Rūaumoko unborn beneath the earth, whose movement is felt as earthquake.
Nigeria
The Yoruba hold that the world runs through successive aòn, ages that are created, lived and dissolved, and that their pattern is knowable through Ifá divination.
Norway
The poems that narrate Ragnarök were composed and sung across the North, and the figures survive in stone from the British Isles to Uppland; the written record is Icelandic but the tradition is Norwegian soil.
Peru
Pachakuti, the turning-over of the world, is the Andean name for a cosmic era ended by flood, quake or social collapse and remade, and the ninth Inca took the name from it as "he who overturns the world."
Saudi Arabia
The Quranic Hour is a certainty without a date, and the hadith built on it a sequence of signs, the Dajjal, the return of Isa, Gog and Magog, and the Mahdi, drawn from the same goal-directed shape as the older Abrahamic ends.
South Africa
The Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–57, a millenarian movement in which a people destroyed their own herds and crops, and tens of thousands died when the promised day arrived and passed.
Sweden
Sweden holds the runic record of the end: the Rök stone's prophecy of a great conflict, and the Ledberg stone's bound-beast motif read as Fenrir, both carved before the poems reached vellum.
The Modern World
Physical cosmology supplies endings with no author and no addressee: heat death, the Big Rip, the Big Crunch, and a schedule of cosmic ages running to 10^100 years.
Tibet
The Kalachakra tantra, transmitted to Tibet in the eleventh century, holds that a hidden kingdom preserves the dharma intact and that its last king will ride out against the barbarians when the age has decayed far enough.
United Kingdom
Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English (c. 1014) read the Danish raids as signs of the last age, fusing the North Germanic fated end with a Christian frame and an English politics.
United States
Two end-of-the-world families share this soil: the Hopi and Lakota moral cycles of the land, and a modern industry that manufactures dated final days from other peoples' calendars and renegotiates the date when nothing happens.