A Correction About City-Counties Over Coffee
Metro Nashville is technically, I've spent the day learning, neither a city nor a county
Good morning! Here's some light municipal civics reading for your Sunday morning coffee.
I got a text from a friend yesterday which threw me through a loop. The gist was:
I’ve been reading your articles about Nashville and the Metro Council, and I like them. But PLEASE stop calling it a “City” Council and a “City” Charter, Nashville is not a city, it’s a city-county.
My initial reaction was: wait, huh?
I was aware that Nashville was merged with Davidson County in the not-so-distant past. That’s why Metro Nashville turned 60 last year, despite it being clear this place existed before 1963.
But the precise meaning of this sublimation of being both a city and county hadn’t really struck me. “Yeah,” I had thought, “they did some kind of marriage ceremony with the county back in the ‘60s, but I live in a city. There’s a ‘downtown’ and a vague semblance of public transit. And the people who oversee that are the ‘City Council’, right?”
And as someone who does give folks like the Metro Council a lot of flack, calling them by the proper name makes a lot of sense. I’m surprised I never got this feedback from anyone on the Metro Council! Maybe they were too embarrassed to say anything.
To be glib about it, it is Pride Month, and deadnaming the Metro Council and not acknowledging that Nashville is neither a city nor a county, but is a non-binary “city-county”, seems like a good lesson to learn in June!
After Googling to confirm she was right, my first impulse was, obviously, to shamefully go back and covertly Ctrl+F for my mistakes and fix them without anyone noticing.
But my second impulse was a better one: share my correction with you, and do some homework on the subject as penance and give you a report on what I learned.
I do like to publish my corrections and not hide my mistakes — once my shame spiral cools off. I think it's good to do because it reinforces to my readers that I am just a guy with a blog. You shouldn't take my final word on anything (I don't think you should take anyone's final word on anything if I'm honest).
If there’s any throughline in my work and general vibe, it’s that if we all had the chutzpah to try to learn things for ourselves, admit when we’re wrong, and ask authorities to fact-check themselves, we’d have a better world.
A past correction post as proof it’s a thing I’m into
So the the correction, which I’ll apply as footnotes to my past writing (but leave my mistakes for posterity) is this:
Nashville’s government structure is technically speaking a “city-county”, and its institutions are collective referred to as “Metroplitan Government of Nashville.” Entities such as “City Council” could be called a “City-County Council”, but is known officially as the “Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County,” but most often just called the “Metro Council.”
As a city-county, Nashville it has powers and duties reserved in Tennessee for both a city and a county. Though prior examples of this structure existed in the US, Nashville’s consolidation of the City of Nashville and Davidson County in 1963 was a landmark for 20th century government mergers and was a model for other municipalities across the country. A brief history of this government consolidation can be found at nashville.gov.
That’s my correction as best I can put it right now. Open to feedback on corrections to my correction!
Let’s think too much about this
This whole city and county thing — It’s not something I previously knew much about.
I think in my head there’s a chart from my high school civics books that looks something like this:
But that chart is fake and not really accurate. It has more to do with explaining geography than it does the separation of powers. It’s especially not true in Virginia.
I'm from Virginia, where our public school curriculum was a little different. For one, we had Sex Ed. Also, in Civics class we learned about Virginia's strange city-county relationship wherein cities are not parts of counties. This weird system creates maps of counties with holes where a city exists (often with the same name).
Here’s a map of my home county, Fairfax, VA. There’s a black spot right in the middle, that’s Fairfax City. Weird!
I knew this as a factoid, but growing up it really didn’t matter to me. It didn’t really matter to me that living in Oakton I was technically inside of the “Providence Magisterial District” (I literally never heard the phrase “Magisterial District” until today and had no idea I grew up in a place called “Providence”).
Virginia, technically a “Commonwealth” and not a state as we like to tell people, is extra weird because it’s so influenced by the British. Virginia’s named, after all, after the English queen who had a body count (as the kids say) of zero — so there’s lots of oddness there. If you want to make the US’s government structure seem basic, go try to parse through government nesting dolls in The UK/The Commonwealth/Britain/England.
But let’s be honest, the vast majority of people in a given area don’t know much and care little about how their government works. Until your trash isn’t being picked up or there are gunshots on your block or you’re really thirsty for a bunch of tall and skinnies on your tiny lot, most people don’t bother learning this stuff. To our own detriment, I’d say.
In Nashville, I’ve heard a casual estimate that there are only about 3,500 people who are actively involved in politics and determine how the city operates. I hope the real number is higher, but these byzantine concepts self-select who shows up to make decisions, and there’s tremendous gatekeeping against those who don’t know these things already.
My friend was very friendly about this correction, and her message inspired me to learn more. Usually though, people feel shut out when they don’t innately know this stuff, as if there was a meeting where it was all explained and it’s their fault they missed.
As someone who worked for a former governor, studied the history of Western Society, and got a job in a Mayor’s Office — unless you go to school specifically for this kind of thing, there’s no onboarding where they explain how it all works.
Most of it is on-the-job learning, which might be alarming. If your take away is I wasn’t qualified for the work I did, I wouldn’t knock you for saying that. But I hope it it’s a bit inspiring. I’m a big believer in autodidactism, self-learning, but, to paraphrase Socrates, the first step to wisdom is to admit what you don’t know.
So, what’s the relationship between cities, and counties, and why does it matter that Nashville technically is both? Let’s find out!
It’s Sunday morning, you’re not doing much. Let’s do an absurdly deep dive on the topic. I mean like, absurdly deep.
All Roads Lead Way Further Back Than Rome
Here’s what I put together doing some research.1 This was just some cursory Googling and whatever we decide to call ChatGPT-ing. I think it’s fairly sound political anthropology, but humanity still seems to be trying to figure out “how we got here” when it comes to these socio-political structures.
I wasn’t searching with no framework, I think that’s an important thing to talk about my methodology with things like this. I was guided in a lot of my searching by themes and concepts I got from reading Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order”, a 600+ page tome about, well, the title kinda tells you.
As Fukuyama made clear to me, for most of recorded global history, from South America to Mesopotamia to East Asia, some versions of cities and counties have existed. In fact, the whole “recording of history” thing is very tied to the existence of these political entities. Throughout history, there was consistently a distinction between wide areas of rural land called counties or provinces, and what we'd call cities. And they usually operated fairly differently, with different types of governance and services they gave their residents.
Counties Are Ancient
Counties or provinces have always had similar functions: to provide regional governance, manage agricultural production, implement policies, and collect taxes.
They existed more or less to solve a problem: the rulers of civilizations tended to live in cities. How do you oversee people who don’t live close to you in your city?
The solution was usually to split the land up into smaller geographical units and to put someone in charge of it. Around the world, the titles and units of land were always different, but across world history, we see similar structures emerge.
Daimyos ruled over Hans in medieval Japan, Beys oversaw Sanjaks in the Ottoman Empire, Subahdar governed Subdahs in the Mughal Empire, and Stategos lorded over Themes in the Byzantine Empire.
These similar patterns were what we’d call “emergent phenomena”, similar to convergent evolution in biology. When disparate organisms are faced with similar pressures, they tend to evolve strikingly similar adaptations. Bats and birds both developed wings independently because both used to be organisms faced with the need to travel easily through the air.
The emergence of these different levels of governance, cities and counties, goes back to recorded history, and before.
As early as 3300 BCE in South America, in what is now called Peru, a civilization called Notre Chico may have divided up its vast land empire into something like provinces. Not long later in 3100 BCE, Egypt was divided into administrative regions called nomes. In China and Japan, provinces were called zhou (first recorded around 1046 BCE) and kuni (first recorded around 701 CE) respectively.
Cities Are More Ancient
Cities, however, date back even further in human history. Eridu and Ur in Mesopotamia date back to at least 5,400 BCE. Cities seem to be an emergent form of society that were only possible after the agricultural revolution (~10,000 BCE). There have been no documented examples of humans living in large numbers before the domestication of plants and animals.
The Natufian culture in the Levant lived roughly around 12,500 to 9,500 BCE, several thousand years before agriculture. Their semi-permanent settlements housed the largest groups of humans recorded to live together without growing their own food or domesticating animals. It’s estimated they capped out at 300 people at a time.
Farming and animal domestication provided humans the ability to store excess resources, and it dramatically impacted our social roles, leading the world over to new concentrations of people in dense, urban settings. If we define cities as having more infrastructure and strict social roles, things less prevalent in what we’d call a village or town, these began to emerge about 4,600 years after agriculture emerged in the world. Cities around the world shared a lot of attributes.
Cities across space and time have a few things in common. They were economic hubs and cultural centers. They also had advanced infrastructure, social stratification, and, most important for our story, centralized governance.
The advent of cities necessitated governance over increasingly diverse populations, people that had previously been more loosely organized as hunter-gatherers or nomadic tribes. This often led to the rise of unifying structures such as mass religions and theocratic rulerships, which connected people under a singular identity (and created types of problems and discord that didn’t exist before).
The advent of cities also led to the emergence and formalization of concepts of “property” and ownership worldwide (with many important cultural differences). Cities led to boundaries delineating what was and wasn’t within the city limits, and who owned what pieces of it.
Different cultures settled the questions of who owned what differently, and how to solve disputes around this, But from what I can tell, no society that gave up being nomadic hunter-gatherers seems to have done so without dividing up the world based on concepts of “ownership.”
It’s worth noting that just because some people around the world became city dwellers and their values and culture changed, not everyone did. This created conflict between these value sets around the world, with the “civilized” city dwellers often coming into violent conflict with those who hadn’t changed their lifestyles and values.
During the Yuan Dynasty (1271 CE - 1368 CE), the city-dwelling Han Chinese combated the nomadic Mongol hordes with a process called Sinification or Hanhua (汉化) where they would de-culture captured Mongols and re-educate the egalitarian nomadic culture and values out of them. Similar cultural genocidal tactics were used in the United States and Canada against their indigenous populations deep into the 20th century.
Notably, even though cities led to the advent of “property”, some cultures defined that land and property would be held “collectively.” The Incan Empire divided its land into three parcels: one for the state (sapa inca), one for the religious establishments, and one for the community (ayllu). Each ayllu managed its portion of land communally.
With standing warrior forces, cities variously waged war on one another or voluntarily federated, and this created a new type of space between adjoining cities. Less densely populated, often with less access to natural resources, the merging of cities across time and space led to the advent of something like “counties” or “provinces” to divide up and control land and resources in management units.
So, the history of cities and counties seems to go something like this: migratory clans and tribes tended to merge into villages, that sometimes grew into cities, which sometimes merged with other cities, which created spaces between them that needed to be split into manageable units, units that we can call provinces or counties.
Larger groups of cities sometimes merged, they became things like leagues, confederacies, kingdoms, or empires. There was inevitably a lot of murder and genocide and salting of the earth I skipped over, but that’s the evolution of human society in a nutshell.
All of that is quite interesting and none of it is helpful for understanding how Nashville works.
The Script Was Flipped on Counties
The origins Nashville’s government structure can be traced back to England and the “counties” that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period (5th to 11th century CE). That’s when tribes invaded the British isles from Germany, namely the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes (who didn’t get to be part of the name for some reason!)
The Anglo-Saxons established several kingdoms across what was later called England, dividing it into provinces called “scirs” in Old English, eventually pronounced “shires”. Each shire was governed by an ealdorman (later known as an earl) and had a sheriff (from "shire-reeve") appointed to oversee law and order.
King Æthelstan, a name I’ve never heard of and don’t know how to pronounce, is considered the first person to rule over all of England. But we don’t really count him as the first ruler of all of England for some reason, we give this credit to the aptly named William the Conquerer. William was from Normandy in what’s now France (that’s what the Norman invasion was about). Since he spoke “old French”, “shires” became “counties” (from the French “conté” which is what a “count” rules over).
From WtC onwards, counties remained key administrative units for tax collection, dispensing justice, and military recruitment. Sheriffs retained significant local power, reporting directly to the king.
Cities had a somewhat special status though, different from what happened in mere counties. Cities were granted charters giving them certain rights, including setting up marketplaces (both for goods and financial exchange) and most importantly, they political autonomy. They could make their own laws (so long as they didn’t usurp the King’s authority). Monarchs gave cities these privileges for a few reasons.
To put it simply, strong cities made strong kingdoms. They give you industries and trades and production abilities you’re just not going to get from counties. But also, cities tended to have powerful people within them, and sharing some of your authority with those leaders via a “charter” was a good way to appease a feudal lord who might think they could do a better job than you as king.
But you may have noticed something weird.
The King, as the chief executive of the Kingdom, is giving permission for cities to exist. But the historical record shows us that kingdoms were only able to emerge from pre-existing cities.
This was the grand magic trick of divine right despots, giving the people permission to have power, when in fact it was the collective body of the people, the Leviathan (as Thomas Hobbes put it) which allowed the monarch to exist in the first place.
This retconning of the sovereign as the origin of political power (often justified because they were chosen by God or some version of that) wasn’t just a British or Western culture thing. I’d love to say “ain’t that some white people shit?” but such is not the case.
Mughal emperors issued “farmans” (royal decrees) that gave special status to cities, and in Medieval China emperors issued Imperial Edicts that could give cities administrative and tax authority.
As Francis Fukuyama talks about in “The Origins of Political Order” which covers the different ways that societies have tried to balance political power from pre-history up to the French Revolution, rulers were (and still are) forced to juggle a few political balls.
You can’t make every decision, you need to offload some of them.
There are powerful people you need to appease and make feel important.
You don’t want to give away too much power and get your head chopped off (figuratively if not literally).
The tension of these variables has led to some really strange forms of government.
From the mid-14th to 17th century, the Ottoman Empire solved this issue in a really weird way. The sultans needed highly educated trained bodyguards and bureaucrats to run their empire. But a problem with very highly educated military forces is they tend to start families and say “Hey, what if we were the royal family?” The solution?
Make all these militarized bureaucrats eunuchs (castrating them). That way, they ain’t starting no families and getting any ideas about preserving their legacy.
This idea wasn’t received well. Castrating fellow Muslims was not a way for a Sultan to keep his polling numbers high. The solution: kidnap Christians from outside the empire, castrate them, convert them to Islam, give them the best education that had existed in world history, and make them the Sultan’s personal bureaucratic army.
But I digress.
It was one thing to say, as a king or sultan, that you gave a city the right to exist. But you didn’t really have any power unless you flexed your right to say that it couldn’t exist — and that did happen sometimes.
In 1687, King James II revoked the charter of the city of Gloucester. The protestant citizens of Glocester were outspoken against James’ Catholic policies, and the monarch yanked their charter, stripping them of their right to self-governance. James II overplayed his hand, though.
The unrest over this contributed to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and the overthrow of James II. Gloucester's charter got its charter back. James lived the rest of his life in exile in France.
So it’s from this soup of power sharing and power hoarding tendencies that we get to Nashville.
Tennessee is Made of Counties
Like most of the early states, Tennessee adopted British Common Law almost wholesale, and that included the way it established counties and cities. Becoming the 16th state in the Union in 1796, “counties” were indivisible units that mattered for determining political “districts”. The free white men in a given county couldn’t be divided into different political districts.
Counties were allowed to collect taxes, and also had jobs that had to be filled, mandated by the TN Constitution.
There shall be appointed in each County by the County Court, one Sheriff, one Coroner, one Trustee and a Sufficient number of Constables who shall hold their offices for two years. They shall also have power to appoint one Register and Ranger for the County who shall hold their offices during good behavior. The Sheriff and Coroner shall be Commissioned by the Governor.
TN 1796 Constitution, Article 6, Section 1
The political rights of citizens and the services they were guaranteed in Tennessee’s original constitution were tied directly to the political unit of “counties.”
The term “County” (or “counties”) appears 39 times in the document, with the 55 signers divided by which of the 11 counties they represented.
The word “City” appears zero times.
Nashville — The First City in Tennessee
The Tennessee Constitution gave no instructions for chartering a city, and wouldn’t say anything about how an area could officially become a chartered city until Tennessee’s “Home Rule Amendment” of 1953. But that didn’t mean Tennessee didn’t have cities.
Nashville was founded in 1799 by James Robertson and John Donelson (THAT’S why everything is named after them!!) and in 1806 the TN legislature passed a bill that contained the Nashville’s charter. The charter gave Nashville the right to have a Mayor, a City Council, a police and court system, levy taxes, and provide water and sewage services.
Tennessee followed the pattern of Britain and other empires, where the state’s highest officeholders gave Nashville the right to exist (and, of course, can withdraw that right).
Even though the state constitution didn’t have specific instructions on how or why an area would become a “city”, it reserved the right to pass city charters one at a time. Nashville’s charter would serve as the template for TN cities moving forward.
That wasn’t a terribly efficient way to run a 42,000 square mile state which, by the mid-20th century had a population of 3.4 million people. Without enumerated rights and a clear process for becoming chartered, cities and “unincorporated” areas (something city or village-esque but with no official status) were going to the state legislature to make relatively small and local legal changes. Quite annoying!
This limitation on local government powers had been formalized in 1868 in a court case, The City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids and the Missouri River Railroad. The city of Clinton, Iowa had issued bonds to the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad to build a rail line through Clinton. But nothing in the city’s charter, granted to the municipality by the state legislature, actually said they were allowed to do that.
The ruling became known as “Dillon’s Rule” after state Judge John F. Dillon ruled that cities, towns, and any government body with less authority than state governments, had few to no powers beyond what the state legislature had granted it in its charter. The City Charter of Clinton Iowa said nothing about issuing railroad bonds, so Clinton wouldn’t be getting a railroad through town (at least not on their taxpayer’s dime).
Dillon’s Rule was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and technically still stands in any state that hasn’t passed “home rule” legislation. Local governments technically have no power unless the state legislature specifically gives them power.
Dillon’s Rule codified into American law what was Common Law in England, and common across empires — local authorities only had the powers that higher authorities gave them. It also goes against the model of power delegation that the US Constitution puts forth called “Federalism.”
The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution states that 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' This means that the Federal Government does not grant states their powers; states, and ‘the people,’ have inherent sovereignty and self-determination. Unlike cities, which are chartered by states and can have their charters revoked for misbehavior, states retain their powers regardless of their actions.
This principle of federalism was not extended to cities after Dillon’s Rule became established. Under Dillon's Rule, local governments can only exercise powers expressly granted by the state, and they risk having their charters yanked if they misbehave. According to Judge Dillon, whatever cities are, they’re not “the people” referenced in the 10th Amendment.
Some states pretty quickly realized what a pain in the ass this was going to be. It’s hard enough getting legislation through a state congress on matters that affect the whole state — try getting a tweak to your city’s charter in any reasonable time. Missouri was the first to implement a “Home Rule” amendment in 1875. It enabled cities to draft and amend their own charters, manage local governance, impose taxes, regulate land use, and provide essential public services independently.
Other states followed, but it wasn’t until the post-WWII boom in cities that it became a necessity for most states to not manage every city’s charter one-by-one. In 1953, Tennessee joined those states and gave cities significant autonomy from state legislative control. They were now allowed to draft, adopt, and amend their own charters through local referendums.
Local municipalities would now be able to pass local ordinances, impose taxes, and manage their finances independently, reducing reliance on state approval for local matters. It was a big ass deal.
Quick tangent: WTF is a “municipality”? Well, technically, whenever I’ve been saying “cities”, I really should have been saying a “municipality”. In the Roman Empire, a municipium was a region that had some degree of self-rule. The word means “a thing that takes control of duties”. A municipality in America might be a village, a town, a borough or a city. When you become one of those you become an “incorporated municipality”. Depending on the state laws, you might be able to call yourself whatever you want, and you have some freedom about how you govern yourself. Do you want a Mayor or a City Executive? Choose your own municipal adventure!
But one thing you usually can’t choose to define yourself as when you’re a municipality is “a county”. A county is a different level of government which has different enumerated powers, borders, and responsibilities, you usually can’t get a charter to become one. Unless, of course, you’re in Tennessee.
The City That Became Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
I have a children’s book by Julio Torres called “I Want To Be A Vase”. It’s about a plunger that has an ambition to become a vase. It kind of seems like that’s what Nashville got to do.
Old Nashville, compared to what it is now, was small as hell. The above map from 1960 shows the city limits. Dipping across the Cumberland into East (but stopping before Inglewood), reaching up through the nations towards where the John Tune airport was later built, and bottoming out before Green Hills and Berry Hill, Nashville proper really was just an urbanized frontier town that had the Grand Ole Opry and some soon-to-be infamous soda counters.
The tax base was moving out of Nashville and into the surrounding region of Davidson County. The GI Bill was letting returning soldiers buy homes, and suburban sprawl was leading people out of concentrated city areas and into neighborhoods. It meant that school quality was lagging and services, in some ways duplicated by the county and the city, were inefficient and often poorly managed.
As Nashville.gov explains it: “County residents enjoyed many city services such as the use of its public libraries and parks system without paying the city taxes which funded those services. The county was unable to provide such services as a sewer system and fire protection.”
The Tennessee State Capital was searching for capital to keep itself respectable, but a solution was found in the 1953 Home Rule Amendment.
The TN Home Rule Amendment allowed for the consolidation of a city and a county if a majority of constituents of each entity voted in favor of the proposal. They could then draft a charter for a “consolidated government,” a city-county government. This is what I got flagged for in the text message at the top. This is what Nashville actually is.
The idea was championed by Beverly Briley, the grandfather of Metro Nashville’s 8th Mayor David Briley. Briley was the County Judge of Davidson County, the big cheese of that level of government. It failed in its first bid for approval in 1958. Desperate for cash, the city started annexing new residents living in unincorporated parts of Davidson County without their consent. People were more or less waking up one morning and being told “Welcome to the City of Nashville! Here’s where you pay your property tax.” It wasn’t a popular solution.
Nashville.gov: “The annexation plan added 82,000 residents to the population of the city of Nashville. Other neighborhoods adjoining the city, but not inside Nashville’s city limits worried that their neighborhood could be annexed as well.”
From the state level, a new version of a consolidated charter was drawn up, this one giving concessions to the parts of Davidson County that weren’t excited to suddenly be part of a city they never moved to.
There would be two tax bases within Nashville-Davidson County: the Urban Services District, and the General Services District. The former would get more services, but pay a higher tax rate for the privilege.
Six incorporated municipalities within Davidson County would get to keep their autonomy. Belle Meade, Berry Hill, Forest Hills, Goodlettsville, Lakewood, and Oak Hill would keep their own mini governments within the county.
The City Council of Nashville-Davidson County would have 40 representatives, 5 at-large, and 35 representing relatively small districts to give voice to constituents who were weary of the consolidation plan harming them.
The last part was one of the most interesting outcomes. Nashville has, per capita, one of the largest Councils in America. New York City has the largest City Council in America at 51, with 1 Council Person for every 172,631 New Yorkers. Nashville has one Council Person for every 17,897 Nashvillian.
So with more than a bit if context, lets return to our correction:
Nashville’s government structure is technically speaking a “city-county”, and its institutions are collectively referred to as “Metroplitan Government of Nashville.” Entities such as “City Council” could be called a “City-County Council”, but is known officially as the “Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County,” but most often just called the “Metro Council.”
As a city-county, Nashville it has powers and duties reserved in Tennessee for both a city and a county. Though prior examples of this structure existed in the US, Nashville’s consolidation of the City of Nashville and Davidson County in 1963 was a landmark for 20th century government mergers and was a model for other municipalities across the country. A brief history of this government consolidation can be found at nashville.gov.
Fun what you can learn when you admit you don’t know something.
Sources
Britannica on Cities and Governance:
"Political system - Cities, Governance, Institutions." Britannica. Available at: Britannica
Harvard DASH on Social Stratification:
"Emergence of Social Stratification." Harvard DASH. Available at: Harvard DASH
Oxford Academic on Political Development:
"Political Development and the Formation of Empires." Oxford Academic. Available at: Oxford Academic
History of Cities:
"City." Britannica. Available at: History of Cities - Britannica
Agricultural Revolution:
"Agricultural Revolution." World History Encyclopedia. Available at: World History Encyclopedia
Code of Hammurabi:
"Code of Hammurabi." World History Encyclopedia. Available at: Code of Hammurabi - World History Encyclopedia
Pharaohs and Religion in Ancient Egypt:
"Pharaohs and Religion in Ancient Egypt." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Available at: Ancient History Encyclopedia
Administrative Divisions of China:
"Administrative Divisions of China." Britannica. Available at: Britannica
Valdivia culture:
"Valdivia culture." Wikipedia. Available at: Valdivia culture - Wikipedia
Norte Chico civilization:
"Norte Chico civilization." Wikipedia. Available at: Norte Chico civilization - Wikipedia
Indus Valley Civilization:
"Indus Valley Civilization." Wikipedia. Available at: Indus Valley Civilization - Wikipedia
Mesopotamian City-States:
"Mesopotamian City-States." Wikipedia. Available at: Mesopotamian City-States - Wikipedia