backing of village elders or other cooperative forms of government. This becomes more complex on a larger scale, such as when the village and city are examined more broadly as political communities. All other forms of rule – including monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, and oligarchy – have flourished in more urban centers, often those with concentrated populations. The concepts (and name) of democracy and constitution as a form of government originated in ancient Athens circa 508 BCE. In ancient Greece, where there were many city-states with different forms of government, democracy was contrasted with governance by elites (aristocracy), by one person (monarchy), by tyrants (tyranny), etc. Potential Proto-Democratic societies Although fifth-century BC Athens is widely considered to have been the first state to develop a sophisticated system of rule that we today call democracy, in recent decades scholars have explored the possibility that advancements toward democratic government occurred independently in the Near East, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere before this. Phoenicia The practice of "governing by assembly" was at least part of how ancient Phoenicians made important decisions. One source is the story of Wen-Amon, an Egyptian trader who travelled north to the Phoenician city of Byblos around 1100 BCE to trade for Phoenician lumber. After loading his lumber, a group of pirates surrounded Wen-Amon and his cargo ship. The Phoenician prince of Byblos was called in to fix the problem, whereupon he summoned his mw-'dwt, an old Semitic word meaning assembly, to reach a decision. The details from there are irrelevant; what is germane to the history of democracy is that Byblos was ruled in part by a popular assembly (drawn from what subpopulation and equipped with exactly what power we cannot know exactly). Mesopotamia Studying pre-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Thorkild Jacobsen used Sumerian epic, myth, and historical records to identify what he has called primitive democracy. By this, Jacobsen means a government in which ultimate power rests with the mass of free (non-slave) male citizens, although "the various functions of government are as yet little specialised [and] the power structure is loose". In early Sumer, kings like Gilgamesh did not hold the autocratic power that later Mesopotamian rulers wielded. Rather, major city-states functioned with councils of elders and "young men" (likely free men bearing arms) that possessed the final political authority, and had to be consulted on all major issues such as war. The work has gained little outright acceptance. Scholars