Arc: Minoan Crete → Mycenaean bronze-age palaces (c. 1600–1100 BC) → the dark age → the polis emerging (c. 800 BC) — the city-state: a walled town, its countryside, its citizen body, its gods, laws and independence (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes — hundreds of them; colonization spreading the form across the Mediterranean and Black seas).
The two models:
1. Athens — the democratic polis: from aristocracy through Draco's harsh written law (c. 621 BC — "draconian") and Solon's reforms (debt relief, class-graded citizenship, citizen courts) to Cleisthenes (508 BC) — democracy proper: the Assembly (all citizens legislating), the Council of 500, jury courts (mass juries, paid — justice by lot), ostracism; the age of Pericles' "power to the many." The exclusion: citizens only — women, slaves and resident foreigners (metics) outside the demos (Political Thoughts Unit 1.3's Aristotle frame).
2. Sparta — the military polis: dual kings, the ephors, the gerousia; the agoge's total military training; helot labour beneath citizen equals — order as the opposite pole. The Greek legacy(close with it): philosophy (Plato/Aristotle — Political Thoughts U1), drama and history-writing, the Olympic games, and above all for this course: the idea that a community maybe governed by its own laws and its own debate — citizenship, jury, legislation — exported via Rome into every modern constitution (including Nepal's).