Highjohn wrote:n7axw
Yes the family does tend to be the basic unit of human groups. However. This can be changed. Examples, single people within larger societies. Tribal groups, these can turn into a larger family were basically everyone is your immediate family even if there are fifty of them. Some groups completely remove any loyalty to the immediate family. Religions, see monks/nuns in Catholicism. OR in modern times at least the entire Catholic priesthood.
Also you may want to look up fictive kinship with regards to the 'barbarians' who 'invaded' the Western Roman Empire. Those groups may have been called various names, but they could also have been completely artificial.
Louis R
Welcome to the forum.
However, you need to look up how the Spartans decided to go to war. The Spartans were not a democracy(Which Athens was) but they did have votes on some topics, make them at least a partial republic.
Note One: Athens was NOT a republic. It was a democracy.
Note Two: The word king gets misused allot. For instance after the Revolution of 1688 William the III was 'king' of England. However he actually had very little power and in was given too little money by parliament to run the kingdom and therefore had to ask parliament for new funds each year. So saying Sparta had kings doesn't automatically mean it was a traditional hereditary monarchy.
You are correct to note that none of this should be set in stone. However what I was seeking to express is how things evolve on a general level.
Tribal groupings tend to be clans who share a common culture who group together for purposes of mutual protection -- or perhaps even aggression. We might consider clan to be the equivalent of today's extended family although I'm not sure how equivalent that is. All of this can be very fluid. For example, the Saxons were a grouping of tribes rather than just one tribe. So also the Dakota and the Apache.
What I wonder about is how these groups, whatever terminology you want to use, is how they avoided interbreeding, or even if they did avoid interbreeding, although I imagine that to survive intact, they had to manage it to at least some extent.
Gonna have to study that sometime.
Don