page_title: Polis
hierarchical_section_title: Polis
caption_attribution_description: English: View from Philopappos Hill in Athens (Attica, Greece) — Acropolis of Athens Français&#160;: La colline de l'Acropole d'Athènes, en Grèce, vue depuis la colline des Muses. De gauche à droite, en haut, on peut voir les Propylées, l'Érechthéion et le Parthénon, et en bas l'Odéon d'Hérode Atticus. Русский: Вид с холма Филопаппос в Афинах (Аттика, Греция) — Афинский акрополь
context_page_description: Polis, plural poleis literally means "city" in Greek. It defined the administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. It can also signify a body of citizens. In modern historiography, polis is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, such as Classical Athens and its contemporaries, and thus is often translated as "city-state". These cities consisted of a fortified city centre built on an acropolis or harbor and controlled surrounding territories of land.
  The Ancient Greek city-state developed during the Archaic period as the ancestor of city, state, and citizenship and persisted well into Roman times, when the equivalent Latin word was civitas, also meaning "citizenhood", while municipium applied to a non-sovereign local entity. The term "city-state", which originated in English, does not fully translate the Greek term. The poleis were not like other primordial ancient city-states like Tyre or Sidon, which were ruled by a king or a small oligarchy, but rather political entities ruled by their bodies of citizens.
context_section_description: Polis (/ˈpɒlɪs/; Greek: πόλις [pólis]), plural poleis (/ˈpɒleɪz/, πόλεις [póleːs]) literally means "city" in Greek. It defined the administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. It can also signify a body of citizens. In modern historiography, polis is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, such as Classical Athens and its contemporaries, and thus is often translated as "city-state". These cities consisted of a fortified city centre (asty) built on an acropolis or harbor and controlled surrounding territories of land (khôra).
  The Ancient Greek city-state developed during the Archaic period as the ancestor of city, state, and citizenship and persisted (though with decreasing influence) well into Roman times, when the equivalent Latin word was civitas, also meaning "citizenhood", while municipium applied to a non-sovereign local entity. The term "city-state", which originated in English (alongside the German Stadtstaat), does not fully translate the Greek term. The poleis were not like other primordial ancient city-states like Tyre or Sidon, which were ruled by a king or a small oligarchy, but rather political entities ruled by their bodies of citizens. The traditional view of archaeologists—that the appearance of urbanization at excavation sites could be read as a sufficient index for the development of a polis—was criticised by François Polignac in 1984 and has not been taken for granted in recent decades: the polis of Sparta, for example, was established in a network of villages. The term polis, which in archaic Greece meant "city", changed with the development of the governance center in the city to signify "state" (which included its surrounding villages). Finally, with the emergence of a notion of citizenship among landowners, it came to describe the entire body of citizens. The ancient Greeks did not always refer to Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and other poleis as such; they often spoke instead of the Athenians, Lacedaemonians, Thebans and so on. The body of citizens came to be the most important meaning of the term polis in ancient Greece.
  The Greek term that specifically meant the totality of urban buildings and spaces is asty (ἄστυ).
caption: Acropolis of Athens, a noted polis of classical Greece
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