[towaway15463]

I’m sure it was difficult but I wouldn’t put it in the category of improbable given that cities were reinvented many times around the globe in hugely varying climates and cultures.

I’m also not convinced that people would leave a city for a subsistence life in the country en masse. There are several factors working against that like lack of knowledge and skills needed, the good cleared land already being inhabited, and moving too far would put you in a region where you don’t speak the same dialect and would be seen as an interloper by the local people.

[fsloth]

The fun thing is these early city states were _really tiny_.

Apparently distance wise at least it wasn't very hard to escape from the grasp of earliest cities and the place where you went - a days walk away - likely was not that different - "Assuming draft animals and carts on a flat alluvial plain, the reach of the earliest states for grain requisitions is unlikely to have extended much beyond a radius of roughly forty-eight kilometers"

Of course leaving ones home is probably a burden if you've used to sedentary life.

[eloff]

It's unlikely they had carts or draft animals yet. Domestication and the wheel were later inventions.

But there may have been primitive agrarian communities.

[ncmncm]

At the time it was very common to flee the city to escape debts that would put you into effective slavery.

The origin of the Jubilee was an occasion when all personal debts were forgiven and people could come out of hiding. These would happen every 10 to 20 years, and were necessary to keep the cities populated enough to function.

Actual currency would not be invented until thousands of years later, so money was all about ledger entries recording assets and debts.

The English Queen's recent Jubilee was weak sauce.