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development of city life was made possible through the adoption of a common religion. Community of religious worship consti- tuted the basic civic bond. " The tribes that united to form a city never failed to light a sacred fire and to adopt a common religion." Another and more recent interpretation is that advanced by Ihering.' According to this view the city was originally the fortified place which served as a refuge for the sur- rounding agricultural population in periods of danger.
From our present knowledge of the conditions of life in primitive communities, it is evident that the latter explanation strikes closer to the root of the problem. Community of reli- gious worship was the result of certain definite economic and social needs ; a necessity incident to the closer cooperation which city life demands. While common religious ties accom- panied the founding of the city, it is not the cause to which the aggregation of population is to be ascribed.
The early history of the Semites furnishes abundant testi- mony — most of which is cited by Ihering — that the fortified center always accompanied increasing density of population, and that in a great many instances it was within the walls of the fortified inclosure that the city first developed. Just as the towns of the tenth and eleventh centuries grouped themselves under the protection of some fortified castle, so the cities of the early Semites were nothing more than walled inclosures to which men, women, and children fled, and in which household goods were stored and cattle collected at the signal of an approaching foe. From a mere place of refuge this walled inclosure gradually became a place of residence ; at first for a few artisans, then for those whose estates were nearest the fortifications.
It required many centuries to make fully apparent the radi- cal changes which this new form of association was destined to work in the conditions of national life and thought. The funda- mental political ideas upon which modern governmental organi- zation rests, the characteristic features of our economic activity, the higher standards of social intercourse which distinguish modern from primitive society — all rest upon conditions for
^Evolution of the Aryan (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1898).
