In 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.