Landscapes Fixed and Fluid: Politics, Religion, and the Development of Territoriality in Early China and Ancient Greece.

The development of territorial polities was one of the decisive factors in both early Chinese history and the history of Ancient Greece. However, these concepts were radi-cally different: Greek polities emerged from political-cultural dynamics that were funda-mentally local in outlook; consequently, issues of private land ownership were clearly visible in politics. Thus, the historical record, and the relationship and distinctions be-tween the concepts of community "territory," as justified in myths and private landhold-ing as upheld in law, was much more pronounced than among the polities of the Zhou Dynasty. Among the Zhou, issues of land use/ownership at the level of the local commu-nity were not as politicized. Zhou land ownership discourse occurred within larger polit-ical frameworks, and local "laws" of landholding are of lesser importance for the histor-ical record. The difference in composition and scale of sovereign political communities and ritual ideology between the Greeks and Zhou can be traced back to different notions of territorial legitimacy, as well as how territory was to be used. It shows that Greek conceptions of territoriality were static, while those of the Zhou were far more fluid and adaptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]