Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/547

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY. XII

PART III. GENERAL STRUCTURE OF SOCIETIES CHAPTER VII. THE SOCIAL FRONTIERS (CONTINUED)

SECTION IV. BELIEFS, FACTS, AND INSTITUTIONS RELATIVE TO THE

SOCIAL FRONTIERS IN THE GREAT EMPIRES OF HISTORIC

ANTIQUITY

The great historic civilizations of antiquity are known to us not only by their customs, their actions, and their institutions, but in general by writings and inscriptions, and even by the both religious and social Bibles or encyclopaedias, which set forth the first co-ordinated conceptions of the physical, organic, and super- organic world.

Among these civilizations, those of Egypt and China seem the most ancient. The Egyptians were conquering tribes that gradu- ally became intermixed by conquest. At first independent of each other, these tribes successively formed principalities, then great kingdoms (High and Low Egypt), and finally a single empire under the Pharaohs. However, the forms, and especially the original political frontiers, remained always recognizable. They became again still more so when the imperial unity tended to dis- solve. At that time they reappeared like the first layers upon a painting when the superficial layers are effaced. The nomes, or administrative divisions, under the empire, were the old princi- palities which were themselves also composed of a principal city with its territory consisting of cultivated land, pastures, swamps, and ponds, just as the empire with its capital and its varied terri- tories. Why did these frontiers persist and reappear at the close of the empire, which had transformed the frontiers from nomes indicating boundaries into administrative and religious circum- scriptions? Why did these old divisions, although modified by several reconquests, persist still for a long time, even up to the Arab conquest ? Evidently for the reason that they corresponded, not to arbitrary limits, but to social divisions at once territorial, genetic, economic, religious, moral, juridic, and political, which