The same processes that obliged human beings to group themselves in semisettled, warring and trading tribal communities also obliged some of them, in historically distinct times and places, to settle down in cities and to develop the state out of their political behaviors.
Under pressure to reap new resources from crowded, often degraded habitat, and reacting to a more complicated internal social structure and to competition from nearby groups, certain horticulturalists develop more intensive gardening in appropriate habitats – always river valleys.
Internally, their tribal politics and competitive feasting gave way to priestly rule followed by military rule and the rise of dynasties.
Cities are accompanied by the greater factoring out of the array of human institutions into full time specialization. Rural, food producing communities fall into satellite arrangements around urban centers, two forms of such traditional civilizations are possible: one, the green city, has decentralized urban institutions and dispersed populations; the other the nucleated, walled city, has centralized cities and aggregated populations.
That is, in the one form a monarch may inhibit an isolated palace, his council may convene someplace else, his army may be scattered in barracks around the realm, and collective royal ceremonies may be performed at yet some other place – a shrine or royal tomb perhaps.
The rural population of food producers is spread more or less evenly over the cultivable land. In the other kind of city the central institutions of state, army, religion, and trade are all concentrated in a single settlement, side by side in usually distinct architecture.
Moreover, the population is densely packed around the urban center, usually defended by strong wall. The food producing population lives in village scattered around, but there is strong tendency, encouraged by defense in warfare, to bring the villagers inside the city and settle each one in an urban ward.
At this level of community, ritual becomes a full time specialty of priests at shrines, which are at once the intellectual, economic, and often – especially in start-up phases of civilization – political centers of civilization. Temples and their plazas form the stage-drop for the dialogue of civilization, that communication taking place between particular local “folk” peoples and the elites – full time leaders specializing in the emerging institutions.
Traditional Civilizations
