Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 THE EVOLUTION OF A FACTOID
- 2 DIMENSIONS OF POWER IN THE EARLIEST STATES
- 3 THE MEANING OF CITIES IN THE EARLIEST STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS
- 4 WHEN COMPLEXITY WAS SIMPLIFIED
- 5 IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN EARLY STATES: CASE STUDIES
- 6 THE COLLAPSE OF ANCIENT STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS
- 7 SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORIES
- 8 NEW RULES OF THE GAME
- 9 ALTERED STATES: THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Index
3 - THE MEANING OF CITIES IN THE EARLIEST STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 THE EVOLUTION OF A FACTOID
- 2 DIMENSIONS OF POWER IN THE EARLIEST STATES
- 3 THE MEANING OF CITIES IN THE EARLIEST STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS
- 4 WHEN COMPLEXITY WAS SIMPLIFIED
- 5 IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN EARLY STATES: CASE STUDIES
- 6 THE COLLAPSE OF ANCIENT STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS
- 7 SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORIES
- 8 NEW RULES OF THE GAME
- 9 ALTERED STATES: THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Index
Summary
Numbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras, and four-dimensional space all have being, for if they were not entities of a kind, we could make no propositions about them.
bertrand russellIn the last chapter I argued that the evolution of the earliest states and civilizations (Figure 3.1) was marked by the development of semi-autonomous social groups, in each of which there were patrons and clients organized in hierarchies, and that there were struggles for power within groups and among leaders of groups. States emerged as part of the process in which these differentiated and stratified social groups were recombined under new kinds of centralized leadership. New ideologies were created that insisted that such leadership was not only possible, but the only possibility. The earliest states were made natural, that is, legitimized, through central symbols, expensively supported and maintained by inner elites who constituted the cultural and administrative core of the state. Ideologies of statecraft also set the rules for how leaders and would-be leaders must guard these symbols and perpetuate the knowledge of how to maintain, display, and reproduce them. In this chapter I explore the evolution of cities as central arenas in which these processes of differentiation, integration, and social struggle occurred.
The figures in this chapter illustrate the enormous size in area of the earliest cities, and Table 3.1 presents estimates of the large number of people who lived in them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Myths of the Archaic StateEvolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations, pp. 42 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005