The chicken or the egg problem is solved by the fact that all of the three major reasons for building a city occur at the same time with a little bit of unbalance in one of the three reasons.
1) you can't build a coherent city without a common culture or interest. Leading me to a belief that religion in early cities was a common form of glue holding the thing together.
2) If there is no trade, how could you support a religious cast or make a temporrary settlement into a permanant geographic node?
3) Security is based upon the fact that you have an understanding that others want what you have and are willing to take it by force.
It works this way:
1) As a common small group of people (tribe) acquire knowledge to survive, they acquire extra.
2) Having contact with others, stories are traded and the other tribe applies knowledge in new form.
3) Next time they interact, they have extras of what they need but different from the other.
4) Enough is acquired, meaning they do not move constantly, an "urban area" is born. They have shared goals & culture from the start, a system of trade is in place, and they now must maintain a paramilitary function as they are now a fixed TARGET for others with less.
It all happened at the same time. NOT a then b or c or any other order
In modern terms, the north americans could put less into the security function, and the religious function because of three factors.
a) Native Americans were no match for europeans in military terms. After european diseases wiped out 90% of thier numbers, the rest were superfluous for serious security threats.
aa) European armies of the day in NA were small expiditionary forces. California was taken from mexico with fewer tha 600 men.
b) The continent being so big, and the religious personel being few in number, could not control a clever but non-urban population. This means they followed people and tamed them slowly rather than having tight reign on the populace and politics as in europe
c) This allowed the greatest majority of effort to be placed into the economic function of urban areas.
Thanks for getting this far
