ABSTRACT
A city comes into being because each of us is not self-sufficient but needs many things. (Plato)
The earliest literature of most civilizations can be divided into two categories. First, there are devotional works, such as the Indian Rig Veda (composed sometime before the tenth century BC), the Book of Genesis, which was probably composed over a period of time leading up to the fifth century BC, or the earliest Egyptian papyri and tomb inscriptions such as the socalled Pyramid Texts (the oldest of which date to about the twenty-fourth century BC). These works and others like them attempt to establish a relationship between the civilization and its environment. They answer questions such as, why are we here? Who made us? They provide a cosmological explanation of how the world came to be and how it is meant to work. In doing so, they give the civilization a dominant ideology, and through this ideology, a sense of purpose and identity.1
