Kent-devlet

(İng. city-state)

Göndermeler

Aristotales

The political nature of Stagira’s “place” is equally ambiguous. Mogens H. Hansen (1995, 75) describes it as “the borderland” between city-state and municipality, an entity that transgresses conventional (oppositional) principles of territorial identification, bearing characteristics of both an independent entity (polis) in Hellas and a dependent entity (ko̅me̅) associated with barbarian habitations in Macedon. Stagira, Aristotales'in doğduğu kenttir. (DrOS)

Diğer

All three foci of high culture depended on the condition of agriculture. The basis of temple and court was agrarian in that their wealth and power presupposed chiefly arrangements concerning agricultural production. The market depended on agriculture less directly than did temple or court, for the traders brought goods from afar subject to other hazards than that of the local weather, and (provided there were sufficient stored savings) sold their goods in lean years as in fat. Yet, in the long run, the merchants too depended on the state of agriculture and their profits presupposed the peasants' surplus. Even when, as in Syria, mercantile city-states arose which depended primarily on distant trading by sea and land, their trade depended so intimately on the agrarian societies about them that both morally and materially they too lived ultimately from the peasants. Even the pastoralists, including the desert nomads, who depended on the agriculturists for much of their food and goods, were part of the same social complex. Accordingly, the type of social order which was introduced into the agricultural regions (and the areas dependent on them) with the rise of cities may be called agrarian-based or (to be more comprehensive) agrarianate citied society. (I say 'citied', not 'urban', because the society included the peasants, who were not urban though their life reflected the presence of cities.)

Furthermore, in contrast to Greece, where civic identities could be subsumed into wider regional ones (for instance, citizens of Athens could define themselves by their deme, city or nationality – e.g. Archarnian, Athenian, Greek), in Phoenicia there was no concept of a common or shared identity beyond the level of the city state.

Herodotus (4.16) provides an insight into the operation of Phoenician barter when he recounts a story that was supposedly told to him by some Carthaginian merchants. According to this account, when exchanging with a primitive North African tribe, the Carthaginians would deposit their wares on the beach for the natives to inspect. The indigenous traders would then set out a quantity of gold. Once both parties were satisfied, they would collect their goods and depart. Although this is likely to be a fictitious incident, it nevertheless reveals the Greek perception of how Phoenician barter functioned.