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THE FIRST HISTORICAL OR ANCIENT SOCIETY
ANCIENT barbarism developed naturally 32 into Ancient Civilisation, which, as the name implies, took the form of city life. This development was furthered by the fact that, when the tribes began to settle, those dwellings throve most which were naturally protected by the lie of the land, so that the anxiety for the safeguarding of the wealth of the community was not constantly pressing. And these best protected and consequently most thriving places became the nuclei of the great cities of antiquity, such as Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Jerusalem, Corinth, Athens, Rome, etc. Babylon, by the way, if the 33 accepted measurements of its walls are anywhere near correctness, seems to have been rather a walled-round district than what we should now call a city, and may therefore be considered a very direct development from the stockaded home-field of the tribal group.
As the tribe or people settled, there as a tendency towards a further development of the cultus of the ancestor, which gradually fixed his imagined deeds and tomb in a certain locality. The sanctity of this place made it the centre of the life of the community, and the members of the groups, which were now increasing in numbers, flocked to it for common worship and intercourse, as well as for protection. This greater centralisation tended to obscure the lesser centres (the clan, tribe, etc.), and at last left them rudimentary, mere local names, sometimes with religious rites attached to them21