ABSTRACT
The ancient civilisations had existed around the Mediterranean littoral, ranging in anti-clockwise fashion from Egypt, via the 'Fertile Crescent', watered by the Tigris-Euphrates, and Greece, to Rome. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, however, the pulsations of the ancient world, its heart firmly fixed in the Mediterranean, faded. A new location, in north-west Europe, and a new set of circumstances were to give rise to a novel concept of social provision. Social provision is geared to its administrative format, and the administrative and political reorganisation within this watershed involved the erection of nation-states. The system of administration was to be ruled by the dictates of the national core. During the phase of predatory tribalism, the communalistic element was strong enough to limit the inequalities between richest and poorest, to define crime very much in community terms, and, together with the rigours of prehistoric existence, even managed to reduce the difficulty of ill-health to a communal level.
