Social structure: Did you mean...?

The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a...

The Arthashastra is an Indian treatise on politics, economics, military strategy, the function of the state, and social organization attributed to the philosopher and Prime Minister Kautilya (also known as Chanakya, Vishnugupta...

Early medieval Icelandic government, or Viking Iceland, has been termed an incipient form of democracy or democratic parliamentarism, however, the system was actually nothing like its European counterparts, be they...

Hunter-gatherer societies are – true to their astoundingly descriptive name – cultures in which human beings obtain their food by hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering wild plants and other edibles. Although...

Authority in ancient Rome was complex, and as one can expect from Rome, full of tradition, myth, and awareness of their own storied history. Perhaps the ultimate authority was...

The state of nature is an idea which became especially popular with certain philosophers during the Enlightenment, notably Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). It refers to...

For centuries, Lucius Cornelius Sulla has been reviled as a maniacal tyrant who defiled the Roman constitution and instituted bloody purges, but some modern historians assert that he has...

Society in the Kingdom of France in the period of the Ancien Regime was broken up into three separate estates, or social classes: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. These classes and their accompanying...

The Three Kingdoms Period of ancient Korea (57 BCE – 668 CE) is so-called because it was dominated by the three kingdoms of Baekje (Paekche), Goguryeo (Koguryo), and Silla. There was also, though, a fourth entity...

Ancient Maya government was formed on the basis that rulers were thought to have been god-like, which to some might suggest one unified state. However, the consensus amongst anthropologists supports that each major Maya city remained...