Greek and Sumerian city-states shared some similarities, as well as glaring differences. A city-state can be explained as a political city made up of an independent city with hegemony over a particular encircling area. It acts as an specialist in political, cultural, religious and financial life. Hansen construes the city-state as “An extremely centralized and institutionalized micro-state composed of one town (more often than not walled) with its immediate surroundings and occupied with a stratified population.” The populace of city-states consisted of citizens, slaves, and foreigners.
The place of Greek and Sumerian city-states were so small that the metropolitan middle could be reached in only a few hours’ walk. The word city state1 was initially used in the 19th hundred years to chronicle historic Phoenician and Greek settlements which got glaring differences in their makeup. They differed in patriotism, size, reclusiveness and the capability to resist incorporation by other civilizations. They could have been created when the prior tribal setups disintegrated, and the individual splinter groups entrenched themselves as self-employed entities2.
The city-states numbered in their hundreds by the 5th hundred years BC, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes were the most populous and consequently were considered to be the most important. Sumerians settled between 4500 and 4000 BC first. These were a non-Semitic people who did not speak nor understand the Sumerian language. Sumerian city-states were among the initial forms of civilization; they were spread out across the southern part of the region. Following the classical age, which happened between 800 and 500 BC3, Greece underwent significant improvements in technology, poetry, and artwork. It is during this time period that the city-state was conceived.
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It became a defining characteristic of the Greek political arena for centuries4. Greek city-states progressed from small farming villages. They built wall space around themselves and built communal meeting places and marketplaces also. Greek city-states created governments and categorized their inhabitants predicated on a set of laws or a constitution. They collected taxes and built armies.
Each and everyone one of the city-states was guarded by a specific god or goddess. The residents of the city-state owed a high level of respect, sacrifice, and reverence to their protective god. For example, Athens’ god was Athena. In the Greek city-state of Sparta, there were two hereditary kings; they offered as religious heads and commanders of the city’s army.
There existed a council of elders and a body known as the gerousia, this made up of both kings and twenty-eight users who were purely men elected from a privileged clique of households. In addition to this, there is an assembly which got the billed power of decision making. Greek city-states had an array of interesting characteristics; these cut across the; political, artistic and religious interactions. The city-state was the guts of the exercise of political power. In the beginning, this was a king, later, it was through democratic assemblies.
They acquired one communal industry for holding political assemblies, with the residents being expected to avail themselves in these areas for participation in public areas issue and voting. This essentially meant that the polis cannot be a big territorial nation because, if a journey was taken by the citizens of more than a couple of days, this form of civic participation would be broken.
The populations of the city-states ranged from only 1000 residents, e.g. in the tiny city-state of Plataea, up to one hundred thousand residents in a significant city-state like Athens. Greek city-state culture was very huge and fragmented5 quite. The Greek city-states divided their residents into four tribes that have been further divided into three and subsequently into smaller units in which every citizen belonged to. Greek city expresses were guarded by stout rock walls.