servants and scribes assigned to many specialist tasks was an 
antithetic and countervailing force to the Egyptian priesthood. 
The library could serve the political organization of empire in a 
way that did not interest the priesthood at all. A not-dissimilar 
rivalry is developing today between the atomic scientists and 
those who are mainly concerned with power.

     If we realize that the city as centre was in the first 
instance an aggregate of threatened villagers, it is then easier 
for us to grasp how such harassed companies of refugees 
might fan out into an empire. The city-state as a form was not 
a response to peaceful commercial development, but a huddling 
for security amidst anarchy and dissolution. Thus the Greek 
city-state was a tribal form of inclusive and integral 
community, quite unlike the specialist cities that grew up as 
extensions of Roman military expansion. The Greek city-states