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In Hebrew history the point referred to in 323 the text may be remarked in the confusion of ideas between the mere Burg or hill fortress (Zion or Sihon) of the earlier days of Jerusalem and the later developed Holy City, schism from which was criminal in the eyes of the pious Hebrew, as the earliest seat of the federalised nation. The same thing is obvious in the genealogical history of Early Greece, of which we may take Athens as a type; the great tragedies, as the trilogies of Aeschylus, illustrate this, the actual city playing its part in the scenery as in the Eumenides. Here then we have three great cities—Troy, Jerusalem, Athens, proclaiming themselves obviously as centres of the new society and rising conspicuously above the welter of the tribes and the þeoð; but though these are obvious cases, the same thing was going on throughout the whole of the growing world of 324 ancient civilisation. The Oriental monarchies, when looked at closely, turn out to have been compressed confederacies of cities. These flourished so long as the cities composing them retained some individuality, but their life was at last crushed out by monarchical and despotic centralisation. As a consequence the system which they formed was either broken up by the surrounding uncivilised tribes, as Accadian Babylon by the Assyrians, and Assyria in its turn by the Medes, or stagnated into huge lifeless bureaucracies, as in the case of China or Egypt. The life of the latter existed in the emulation of the cities of Memphis, Thebes, etc., and lay in abeyance between the time of the Persian invasion and the rise under the Ptolemies of the Greek city of Alexandria.
Everywhere, in short, in the ancient world, one is struck by the preponderance of the city. Tyre is a mighty power, Carthage a great