The Emergence of the City-State.

The word "city-state" is a translation of the Greek word polis from which we derive the word "politics." It was the political unit that arose out of the ruins of the Mycenaean world, and had a social and economic structure closer to that of Babylon and ancient Egypt than to the later world of classical Greece. The palaces where the Mycenaean wanaktes—a word meaning something like "godkings"—had their seats were also bureaucratic centers where clerks kept records and dispatched memoranda to lower-ranking officials. Among them were the head-men of the various villages with the title pa-si-reu, a word that evolves into the classical Greek basileus, a king with a legitimate claim to the throne based on heredity and the favor of the gods. When the Mycenaean civilization was destroyed in the century of...