http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City-state#The_Middle_Ages_and_the_early-modern_era
So...your suggestion is that in the creation of a larger structure than the city state you create the conditions for major advances in human knowledge?
Here is what I have been told: In Egypt (the prototype?) "nation without walls" as opposed to the walled city--birth of systematic knowledge (but what about the indians? I don't know enough to know); then you had the greek-persian peace (not that I know much about that at all)...then...the romans...(on wikipedia there is a page called greek inventors; no page for roman inventors...; and then the collapse of Rome--lo those many years after...so there be dark ages...science-wise. Applied sciences maybe.
...and christianity was (according to the gospel of Thomas--the twin) an idea conceived by John the Baptist to link all the "working classes" together, because they were the poor indigenous, but the jews had a policy of separation (chosen people), so...
cough cough cough cough!
...so then we move forward a couple of hundred yeares and islam is constituted and becomes an empire, one language, peace in the lands--but an empire...boom! Knowledge.
Then the atrophying of that empire...well...I did a search and maybe it was the Mongols that ended the peace love and understanding.
The Muslims inflicted their first defeat on the Mongols in 1221 at the Battle of Parwan, in present-day Afghanistan, under the leadership of Jalal al-Din, son of a Central Asian Muslim ruler. The victory provided a temporary morale boost for the Muslim army, but the Mongols soon regrouped and devastated Jalal's troops later that year. After that initial setback, the Mongols swept through Central Asia into Persia and Iraq. The Persian city of Isfahan fell in 1237, and the Mongols gradually moved closer to Baghdad, the centre of the Abbasid caliphate.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/islam/mongols/ilkhanate.html
...and to tie up the strange knot....
Whether or not this hypothesis is accurate, it is clear that several pre-existing conditions such as war, famine, and weather contributed to the severity of the Black Death. A devastating civil war in China between the established Chinese population and the Mongol hordes raged between 1205 and 1353. This war disrupted farming and trading patterns, and led to episodes of widespread famine. The so-called "Little Ice Age" had begun at the end of the thirteenth century. The disastrous weather reached a peak in the first half of the fourteenth century with severe results worldwide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Boom!
Good to read your words, Linca. Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
After the Renaissance, the city slowly lost its political independence, but by that time it was ruling the world : in the middle age the nobility was living in its castle in the countryside ; in the 18th century it was living in luxurious hostels in the city.
Indeed the first intellectual evolutions appeared in Mesopotamia, at the time of the Sumerians which seems to have been of the city state ; Greeks were organized along city-state lines but the Hellenistic period (i.e. empires left over after the death of Alexander the Great) had the emperor-as-deity, yet saw the summits of Greek thoughts.
Romans are boring, have little litterature and next to no philosophy and science. It's not amazing the Roman intelligentsia spoke in Greek, not in Latin.
As for the mongols, because they had destroyed the Arab middleman between Europe and China, and instituted peace in Central Asia, they made possible the coming of Europeans in Cambaluk ; i.e. Marco Polo. Europeans who brought back the plague when coming back... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(architecture)#Dome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqueduct
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#History
(Hey, you got me thinking...) Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
