Dude, me from the past, you're getting smart. Yeah, it could be, and some historians argue that it was. Nationhood is really hard to define. Like in James Joyce's Ulysses, the character Bloom famously says that a nation is the same people living in the same place, but then he remembers the Irish and Jewish diasporas and adds, or also living in different places. But let's ignore diasporas for the moment and focus on territorially bounded groups with a common heritage. Same people, same place. So how do you become a nation?