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Flags are one of the oldest and most successful systems of visual communication ever devised.
Long before they became symbols of countries, flags and flag-like objects identified armies, ships, military units, and rulers.
However, their modern role as symbols of entire nations is actually a relatively recent development.
Learn more about flags and why we even have them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Every single country on Earth has a flag. Most subnational units, such as states and provinces, also have flags. In fact, most cities have flags, and many schools, companies, and organizations do, too.
So, why did we settle on a piece of cloth with a design to represent something?
Originally, there were no flags. The earliest ancestors of flags were not pieces of cloth at all. Ancient armies needed a visible object around which soldiers could rally and which commanders could use to identify units across a chaotic battlefield.
Many early civilizations mounted symbols on poles. Egyptians used standards topped with representations of gods, animals, or royal symbols. Mesopotamian armies carried similar objects. Persian armies used standards, including famously elaborate royal standards.
The Romans developed an extraordinarily elaborate system of military standards. Perhaps the best known was the aquila, or eagle, carried by every legion. Losing a legion’s eagle was considered a catastrophe and a profound disgrace.
The Romans also used something called a vexillum, which more closely resembled a flag. It consisted of a rectangular piece of cloth hanging vertically from a horizontal crossbar attached to a pole. The modern word vexillology comes from this object.
Roman standards served several purposes simultaneously. They identified units, communicated orders, gave soldiers a point to rally around, represented military honor, and symbolized the authority of Rome.
That combination of practical identification and emotional symbolism has remained central to flags ever since.
China appears to have been one of the earliest civilizations to make extensive use of cloth banners resembling modern flags. Chinese sources describe banners associated with armies and rulers as early as the Zhou period, beginning in the 11th century BC.
The key technological development was lightweight fabric. A rigid symbol on a pole could be seen, but a large piece of silk or other cloth could flutter above troops, making it much more visible.
This basic advantage, the ability to be easily seen on a battlefield, explains much of the flag’s success.
Flag traditions developed independently across much of Asia.
Chinese military banners became increasingly sophisticated, with different colors, shapes, characters, and symbols identifying commanders and units. Similar traditions developed in Korea, Japan, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Japanese warfare eventually produced an especially elaborate flag culture. Samurai armies used banners such as the hata-jirushi, and later the long vertical nobori. During the medieval and early modern periods, soldiers sometimes carried small identifying flags called sashimono on their backs.
Islamic armies also placed enormous symbolic importance on banners. The Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community were traditionally associated with black and white standards. Later Islamic dynasties became strongly associated with particular colors. The Abbasids, for example, famously adopted black.
As Islamic states spread from Spain to Central Asia, banners became symbols not only of military units but of dynasties, religious authority, and political legitimacy. Colors consequently acquired political associations that survive in many modern flags.
The European flag tradition changed dramatically during the Middle Ages. As feudal society developed, rulers and noble families needed recognizable visual symbols. Beginning particularly in the 12th century, European heraldry developed into a systematic language of coats of arms.
A knight might display the same basic design on his shield, his armor, his horse equipment, and on a banner. This produced the heraldic banner, essentially a coat of arms transformed into a rectangular flag.
A medieval flag therefore usually represented a person, especially a nobleman or monarch, rather than a country in the modern sense. A French soldier might fight beneath the banner of his lord, who fought beneath another nobleman’s banner, who ultimately served the king.
For example, there was not necessarily a single French national flag recognizable to everyone in France until the French Revolution.
The Crusades helped popularize another extraordinarily important detail found on many modern national flags: the cross.
Christian armies used crosses as both religious symbols and practical identifiers. Different forms and colors eventually became associated with particular territories and rulers. There was a Maltese cross, a Jerusalem Cross, a Greek cross, and many other variants.
The most important surviving family of these designs is the Nordic cross. It eventually inspired the flags of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.
Denmark’s Dannebrog, a white cross on a red field, emerged during the Middle Ages. Danish tradition dates it to the Battle of Lindanise in Estonia in 1219, where legend claims it descended from heaven. The design itself is firmly documented as early as the 14th century. It is considered the world’s oldest continuously used national flag.
A major conceptual change occurred when flags gradually stopped representing individual rulers and began representing territories and governments.
However, this process was slow.
Cities were important pioneers. Medieval trading cities often needed easily recognizable symbols independent of whichever ruler governed them. Merchant communities, guilds, city governments, and republics therefore developed their own banners.
The Italian maritime republics were especially important.
By the 13th century, cities such as Genoa and Venice were using distinctive maritime flags. Genoese ships famously flew the red Cross of St. George on white, while Venice developed its Lion of St. Mark banner.
These flags represented political communities rather than individual rulers.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the first places to use flags to represent a community were seafaring city-states. The development of modern flags cannot really be understood without maritime history.
Ships created a problem that land armies did not face to the same degree. From several miles away, sailors needed to determine: Who is that ship?
A Friend, an enemy, a merchant, or a pirate? Was it the Dutch, the English, the Spanish, or the Venetians?
A coat of arms painted on a ship was too small to see. A large flag was ideal. During the late Middle Ages and the Age of Exploration, European states increasingly required ships to display recognizable flags indicating nationality or allegiance.
Flags therefore became standardized much earlier at sea than they did on land. In many cases, what eventually became a country’s national flag began as a naval or merchant flag.
One of the most influential developments in flag history occurred during the Dutch struggle against Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Dutch forces used a horizontal orange-white-blue flag associated with William of Orange. Over time, orange was replaced by red, creating the familiar red, white, and blue of the Netherlands.
The Dutch flag became enormously influential partly because the Dutch Republic became one of the world’s leading maritime and commercial powers. A simple three-striped design was extremely useful at sea. It was recognizable from a distance, relatively easy to manufacture, and distinguishable even when partly obscured.
The red-white-blue design became firmly established as the Dutch national flag. More importantly, it helped establish the tricolor as a common template in flag design.
Flying flags from fixed flagpoles on land became common much later than the use of flags themselves. The big transition occurred mainly from the late 18th through the 19th century, with widespread civilian flagpole use becoming especially common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Before that, most land flags were not flown continuously from tall poles in the modern sense. Medieval and early modern flags were usually carried on staffs by soldiers, heralds, or officials, or temporarily mounted on castles, gates, and buildings.
Tall poles were much more characteristic of ships, which is one reason so much flag terminology, including mast, ensign, jack, and halyard, has maritime origins.
The first important land use of large fixed flagpoles was military. Fortresses and garrisons increasingly erected tall poles so that their colors could identify who was in control.
The 19th century was the great age of national flag creation. As nationalism spread across Europe and Latin America, political movements increasingly adopted flags before they even had countries.
A flag could therefore become an argument: “We are a people, and we should have a state.”
Italian nationalists rallied around the green-white-red tricolor before Italian unification. German nationalists adopted black, red, and gold. Pan-Slavic movements frequently used red, white, and blue.
The scholarly study of flags is known as Vexillology. As a formal field, it is surprisingly young. People had studied flags for centuries, especially heralds, naval officers, and military historians, but vexillology did not emerge as a distinct discipline until the 20th century.
The word itself was coined in 1957 by the American scholar Whitney Smith, who combined the Latin vexillum with the Greek-derived suffix -logy, meaning “study of.”
Smith became the central figure in establishing vexillology as a field. He founded the Flag Research Center in 1962 and helped create organizations and publications devoted specifically to the systematic study of flags.
In 1965, he helped organize the first International Congress of Vexillology, and in 1967, the International Federation of Vexillological Associations, or FIAV, was established. From that point onward, vexillology developed an international scholarly community with its own terminology, conventions, and journals.
One of the most basic concepts in vexillology is that a flag is not merely decorative cloth. It is a symbol designed to communicate identity at a distance.
That practical requirement explains much of flag design.
Flags have a terminology, and you are probably familiar with the parts of the flag, if not the actual words to describe them.
A flag has a particular orientation. The hoist is the side attached to the pole. The fly is the side extending away from the pole. The outermost edge of the flag is the fly end.
The canton is normally the upper corner nearest the hoist. The best-known example is the blue rectangle containing the stars on the United States flag.
The Union Jack occupies the canton of the Australian and New Zealand flags. Cantons are historically important because they often indicate political relationships. British colonial flags, for example, frequently placed the Union Flag in the canton.
A charge is a symbol placed upon the flag.
Common charges include: stars, crescents, suns, crosses, animals, plants, weapons, shields, and coats of arms.
The term comes from heraldry. A Canadian maple leaf is a charge. So is the cedar on Lebanon’s flag and the eagle on Mexico’s flag.
Flags aren’t just a means of identification. They have also turned into a competition. For decades, countries have been trying to outdo each other in the race to fly the biggest flag.
The tallest flagpole in the world is in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital near Cairo. Guinness Records records it at 201.952 meters (about 662.6 feet), and it was completed in December 2021. It was built to fly the Egyptian national flag
The largest flag flown measures 3,235.79 square meters, or about 34,829 square feet. The Seaside Boulevard Administration raised it in Baku, Azerbaijan on November 18, 2025.
This, however, is not the largest flag. In 2013, Qatar created a massive national flag measuring about 101,978 square meters, large enough to cover roughly 14 soccer fields, as part of National Day celebrations. Guinness World Records recognized it at the time as the largest flag ever made, although it was laid out on the ground rather than flown from a flagpole.
It is hard to think of a world without flags. Flags are the first thing many people think of when they think of countries. Yet all the flags of nations today stem from ancient battlefields, when everyone just wanted to know who was on which side.