Contents: F. de Polignac: Repenser la �cit��? Rituels et soci�t� en Gr�ce archa�que � M. H. Hansen: The �Autonomous City-State�. Ancient Fact or Modern Fiction? � M. H. Hansen: Kome. A Study in How the Greeks Designated and Classified Settlements which were not Poleis � T. H. Nielsen: Was Eutaia a Polis? A Note on Xenophon�s Use of the Term Polis in the Hellenika � P. Flensted-Jensen: The Bottiaians and their Poleis � S. G. Miller: Old Metroon and Old Bouleuterion in the Classical Agora of Athens � T. L. Shear, Jr.: Bouleuterion, Metroon and the Archives at Athens � A. Avram: Poleis und Nicht-Poleis im Ersten und Zweiten Attischen Seebund � W. Burkert: Greek Poleis and Civic Cults. Some Further Thoughts � L. Rubinstein: Pausanias as a Source for the Classical Greek Polis

In this, the first comprehensive study of city-states in medieval Europe, Tom Scott analyzes reasons for cities' aquisitions of territory and how they were governed. He argues that city-states did not wither after 1500, but survived by transformation and adaption.

The state is a concept surrounded with much dispute. What exactly is the state? Does it act impartially? What changes has it undergone? These three volumes provide a reliable and comprehensive guide to these questions.

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.

"This book presents a new model for the cluster of ancient kingdoms that clustered around the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the Iron age, ca. 1200-600 BCE. Rather than presenting them as ancient versions of the modern nation-state, characterized by homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like "the Aramaeans" or "the Luwians" living in neatly bounded territories, this book sees these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. This conclusion is reached via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence lead to the awareness that this time and place consists of a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book thus proposes a new term to encapsulate that diversity: the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex"--