God-Kings and City-States: The Ancient East and Greece

Tribal chieftaincy was only the opening chapter. Once settlement took hold along the world’s great river systems, the state’s evolution accelerated into forms that would have been unrecognizable to a wandering tribe – god-kings ruling from river valleys, and, later, small independent city-states that would end up shaping Western political thought more than almost anything that came before or after them.

God-Kings of the River Valleys

Archaeological and anthropological research – work associated with scholars such as R. Rendel and Cambridge’s Ancient Civilization surveys from the 1930s – traces organized human settlement back several hundred thousand years, with some of the earliest evidence found in South Asia’s Sohan river valley. But it was the world’s other great river systems that produced the first true kingdoms: the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, the Indus and Ganges in South Asia, and the great rivers of ancient China. Out of these valleys grew the earliest large kingdoms and empires in Iran, India, and China, ruled by kings the population regarded as divine or semi-divine, which gave royal authority a religious weight that went well beyond mere political control.

These kingdoms achieved real social organization, stability, and even considerable prosperity, developing genuine skill in craft, culture, and administration despite governmental machinery that remained comparatively loose by later standards. Rulers held the full weight of state authority in their own hands, using it both to maintain internal order and to meet constant external military threats – and that concentration of power meant force and outright oppression were never far from the surface of daily governance. Broadly autocratic and despotic in structure, this style of ancient kingship persisted across much of Asia and Africa for a very long stretch of history, surviving the rise and fall of individual dynasties even as the empires built on top of it kept changing hands.

Greece’s City-States: Small, Independent, and Enormously Influential

As the ancient Eastern empires eventually declined, a very different model took shape in Greece, where loose tribal groupings gradually consolidated, over centuries, into city-states: politically self-contained units that shared a common culture and customary practices with their neighbors while remaining completely independent of them in matters of government. Each city-state ran its own affairs under its own particular constitution – Athens’s system of government being the most extensively studied example even today – and it was the Greeks who became the first people in recorded political thought to study and compare different forms of government systematically, rather than simply inheriting whichever system their ancestors happened to use.

Greek political philosophy grew directly out of this comparative habit, and it grounded itself firmly in ethics: law, in the Greek understanding, was never merely a set of positional rules handed down by whoever held power, but something that deserved genuine respect and moral standing in its own right. Plato, writing his Republic in the fourth century BC, gave that tradition its most enduring text. Whatever the practical flaws of Greek city-state society – and there were real ones – the intellectual legacy has proven remarkably durable: Western political thought remains shaped by Greek categories and Greek questions well over two thousand years later, a testament to how much a handful of small, quarrelsome city-states managed to work out about the nature of government in the process of governing themselves.

That intellectual achievement, though, never translated into political unity. Greek city-states tended to regard their own culture as superior to that of the peoples around them, viewing outsiders as comparatively uncivilized, and while something resembling diplomatic contact existed between individual city-states, it rarely amounted to real, lasting friendship. Constant rivalry and warfare between them was the norm rather than the exception, and it steadily wore down the collective strength that might otherwise have let Greece stand as a single great power. No unified Greek empire ever emerged from that infighting. Instead, it left the city-states vulnerable to conquest first by Philip and Alexander of Macedon, and afterward by an expanding Rome – bringing the age of the independent Greek city-state to a permanent close.