in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves, not in the idiom of kinship or ethnic ties, but simply as ‘the people’ of a given city (or often its ‘sons and daughters’), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar, which always
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