The Old Assyrian City-State Mogens Trolle Larsen (Respondent: Jean-Jacques Glassner) In the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s original research program written by Mogens Herman Hansen, one finds the claim that “at the beginning of the 2nd mill- ennium B.C. Assur was hardly a ‘city-state’ but the capital of an empire which controlled a cluster of dependent colonies around Kanesh i

The City-States of the Early Neo-Babylonian Period Mogens Trolle Larsen (Respondent: Jean-Jacques Glassner) The classic Mesopotamian pattern of political organi- sation is the city-state. The very earliest developments on the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia during the fourth and third millennia B.C. were characterised by an unmistakable example of a city-state culture, a p