Published in Mogens H. Hansen, A Comparative Study of Six City-State Cultures, Copenhagen: The Danish Royal Academy, 2002, 125-138. WHY CITY-STATES EXISTED? RIDDLES AND CLUES OF URBANIZATION AND FORTIFICATIONS

Why city-states existed in a pre-industrial society, where some eighty to ninety percent of the population, at least, were necessarily engaged in food production, is a mystery, which scholars have seldom addressed or even recognized. City-states neither had low rates of urbanism, nor, as a rule, relied heavily on imported food, as some scholars have assumed. Most of the city-states’ populace consisted of peasants who lived in the city and walked to work their land outside it, in the city’s near vicinity. Rather than massive industrial and commercial concentration, which only existed in a few, high-profile, historical cases, it was defensive coalescence that mostly accounts for the fact that city-states generally appeared in clusters of tens and hundreds. City-states emerged where large-scale territorial unification did not take place early in political evolution, and the peasant population of petty-polities coalesced to seek protection against raids from neighboring such polities. Hence the problems that scholars have regularly encountered with the concepts of ‘city’ and even ‘urbanism’ as applied to these often miniscule ‘town’-polities, which should be more adequately described as denselyand centrally nucleated petty-polities. A central refuge/cultic/chiefly enclosure, sometimes supplemented by more extensive ditches and earth and timber works at strategically and topographically exposed directions, as well as the sheer size of the nucleated settlement provided defense against raiding hosts. In took centuries of early urban evolution until continuous circuit brick and stone walls replaced more limited fortifications. How Urban Was the City-State? Pre-Industrial Society, Urbanism, and Defense The city-state phenomenon raises some truly fundamental questions, which while surfacing here and there in the scholarly literature with reference to particular cases, have rarely been posed systematically, let alone answered. Although most of the evidence – and some of the more general insights – presented in this article are not new, they have not been put together into a broad theoretical framework. For example, how urban was the city-state? Comparative studies of city-state systems barely address this question (Griffeth and Thomas 1981; Burke 1986). In recent studies, non-urban petty-polities have been conflated with city-states as a matter of course, as such a distinction seems to have been barely recognized by the authors (Nichols and Charlton 1997; also Feinman and Marcus 1998; but see Wilson 1997 and mine in manuscript). In this they have been following a growing skeptical trend in the study of some city-states systems particularly the ancient Greek poleis – which, suggesting that the city-state is a misnomer, questions that it was either urban or, indeed, a state. This trend has recently been stemmed by Hansen’s exemplary work, culminating in his comparative study of thirty city-state cultures (2000). The present article agrees with Hansen that the city-state was indeed highly urban (as well as