Over the course of the past five thousand years, thousands of city-states and hundreds of empires have come and gone, but the hallmarks of urban civilization have remained essentially the same until the emergence of industrial society two hundred years ago. A large but powerless agricultural population lived in the countryside and produced the food consumed by society as a whole. At the same time, a small but powerful ruling class—including an extensive bureaucracy, an exclusive priesthood, and an organized military force—lived inside the confines of an urban center that was protected by
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