A state is a politically organized society that is regarded by those who live in it as sovereign or politically independent and has leaders who control its social, political, legal, economic, and cultural activities. Two sorts of state appear to have been associated with early civilizations: city-states and territorial states.

The term ‘city-state’ has long been employed to describe the polities of Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy, and parts of ancient Southwest Asia (Griffeth and Thomas 1981). J. Eric Thompson (1954: 81–82) designated Classic Maya polities as city-states in the mid-twentieth century. More recently, city-states have been identified as the normal form of early state (Nichols and Charlton 1997) or as one of two types of state that prevailed from antiquity until the nineteenth century (Hansen 2000). City-states were relatively small polities, each consisting of an urban core surrounded by farmland containing smaller units of settlement. In territorial states a ruler governed a larger region through a multilevelled hierarchy of provincial and local administrators in a corresponding hierarchy of administrative centres. The distinction between these two types of states, as they are associated with early civilizations, rests not only on the size of territories but also on differences in the nature of their urban centres and in their economic and political organization. Each of the civilizations being studied consisted of city-states or territorial states but not both.

The distinction was foreshadowed when Childe (1928; 1934) first contrasted the development of civilization in Egypt and in southern Mesopotamia.