Ancient Government
for kids - monarchies, oligarchies, democracy, republics, and tyrannies. How
did people choose their leaders, back then?
Ancient Government
In the beginning, people didn't need any government, because there
were so few people. Mostly people lived just with their own
family
or with one or two other families, and the older men and women decided
what to do, without any system for deciding. If you didn't like
how
things were being done, you could always go out on your own, or
join another family nearby. During the
Old
Stone Age and the
Middle
Stone Age, everyone lived this way.
But as there got to be more people, they began to live in larger groups.
It became difficult to decide what to do without anybody in charge.
At this time, probably during the New
Stone Age, people first began to have governments. Basically a government
is a way for a large group of people to make decisions. Because some
places got crowded sooner than other
places, people began to have governments sooner in some places than
in others.
People have had many different types of governments. Anthropologists
(scientists who study people) like to divide governments into five groups:
"big man"government, chiefdoms,
complex chiefdoms, states,
and empires. This kind of grouping makes it
easier to understand how people are doing things.
To find out more about these different kinds of governments, choose
here:
Or, to find out more about the governments that people had in certain
places and times, choose here:
