This book targets the problems of emergence and stabilization of the earliest state bodies in the pristine statehood foci of the Old World - Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. Charvát takes his readers through the essential economic, political and intellectual transformations induced in those societies by their transformations into early states. The author also provides a comprehensive view over the entire range of the discussed problems, attempting to perceive the process of establishment of the earliest states of the Old World in its complexity. The book gives the word to ancient statesmen, as well as to men of religion and letters of yore, voicing their alarm in crisis situations of their states, when they feared collapse of what they understood as "civilized society". Addressing their admonitions to kings, managers, generals and, where possible, the widest circles of society, such thinkers urged their contemporaries to defend the ideals on which their civilizations wer e built. The book is addressed to