Imagine No Countries?

The Phoenicians could still trade with Spartans, Athenians, and many of the other cities of Greece. They could trade with villages from Egypt to Iberia, which is probably what much of their early trade consisted of anyways.

You do realize that if the Greeks make cities, they are damn well going to make countries?
 
You do realize that if the Greeks make cities, they are damn well going to make countries?
Ancient Greeks never made countries that consisted of more then a few subjugated cities. It was the Hellenized Macedonians who first started any nation building.
 
Ancient Greeks never made countries that consisted of more then a few subjugated cities. It was the Hellenized Macedonians who first started any nation building.

And? As Greek warfare expanded in depth and destructiveness the move away from ritualization of the battle would continue, with or without the Macedonians.
 
And? As Greek warfare expanded in depth and destructiveness the move away from ritualization of the battle would continue, with or without the Macedonians.
A modern world without countries is not my idea. I simply stated some of the things that would be butterflied away in such a TL. Since the OP later mentioned that city states like the Maya would be acceptable, I brought up that the Greek city states would still be able to exist.
The Greeks where a fringe culture at the end of nowhere. They were lucky that they had good generals and terrain that the Persians weren't familiar with. They were also lucky that the Persian emperor was arrogant and did not let his generals modify their techniques, otherwise a future historian would be wondering why they counted pot shards.
It took a "barbarian" people the Macedonians who where learning from the Greeks to spread their culture and create a Hellenic Crusade throughout the Persian empire and beyond.

In OT the Romans a mixed breed of Greeks and others from the Apennine Peninsula were the ones who spread Hellenization west.
 
ImmortalImpi

That's exactly LofS's point. If you don't have agriculture you can't support any permanent cities.

Also if people are successfully hunting wildlife they will grow to exhaust the supply. So either you find an alternative source of sustenance [e.g. agriculture] or you have cycles of population surges and crashes as their food supply disappears.

Steve
See here and here for examples of urban hunter-gatherers (though to have anything much larger than this you would need agriculture.)
 
How's about the notion that nation-states came into being as a consequence of capitalism overtaking feudalism as the dominant means of organising a society. Of course the nation state is in the process of leaving the stage now being overtaken by confederations such as the EU.
 
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