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Teotihuacan is often viewed as an impressive ancient city, but it must be understood as a regional phenomenon that included the city, its suburban periphery and surrounding countryside, as well as more distant rural settlements and populations as part of its sociospatial landscape. The urbanization of Teotihuacan was concurrently a process of ruralization of the surrounding region. This chapter explores Teotihuacan both internally and regionally, in an attempt to consider the social terrain of this early state from a holistic perspective. It discusses current conceptualizations, based on archaeological research, of Teotihuacan's political development and the organization of its rural and urban communities. Additional archaeological research at Teotihuacan period settlements across the Basin of Mexico is needed for fully comprehending the regional economic structure of this ancient state. Abundant research focused within the urban core continues to bring city life at Teotihuacan into focus, from its economic organization and socioeconomic disparities to the materialization of its governing institutions.
This chapter reviews current knowledge of the first period of South Asian urbanism, situating the Indus cities in their larger regional landscapes. It addressees the end of the Indus tradition and the cities that followed more than a millennium later. In conceptualizing the larger Indus phenomenon, questions of scale rise to the fore. The geographic extent of sites containing Indus material culture assemblages is enormous. The chapter explores two very different urban trajectories and urban landscapes of ancient South Asia. The first one is characterized by a small number of massive widely spaced cities that existed as islands of urbanism in a vast sea of villages. The other one is characterized by closely packed urban places in a landscape of cities. The duration of many Early Historic Indian cities continued much longer, many remaining vibrant centers of population long after the Mauryan Empire's fall and through numerous successive states and empires, and leaving a legacy that endures to the present.
The Coptic, Melkite, Nestorian and Jacobite communities possessed distinctive features, which set them apart from the other Orthodox churches studied in this volume. The first – and not the least important – was their establishment in countries which were under Muslim – and not Christian – rule. This was in complete contrast to the situation existing in the Byzantine Empire and in the kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia to the north, or in Nubia and Ethiopia to the south. A consequence of this was their juridically inferior status, known in Arabic as dhimma. This guaranteed members of the community rights of protection for themselves and their property, but in other ways discriminated against them. Their place in society cannot, however, just be reduced to a matter of juridical status, since there were marked variations according to time, place, social setting and reigning dynasty. In the first centuries of Islam Christianity, originally the dominant faith in most of the lands conquered by the Arabs, remained a majority faith, but by the eleventh century this was no longer so. Its progressive decline produced a new cultural outlook characterised by a reaffirmation of identity, which might require, depending on circumstance, accommodation with Islam or alliance with foreign powers.
Another distinctive feature of these Christian communities was their heterogeneity, which stemmed from the fact that there was no good reason for any Muslim power to impose on them one ecclesiastical obedience rather than another. It was not uncommon for several communities to congregate in the same place, which tended to be a source of conflict and weakness rather than strength.