Democracy Dies With The Rifleman

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Zedong Halfway thru recorded history, Athens became the first state we're sure was a cracy, and inspiration to many later ones. Probably some existed earlier, and certainly some entities smaller than states were cratic, likely long before recorded history began. The next tenth of history saw the rise of the Roman Republic, which mixed cracy and aristocracy together to form a functional hybrid, and then it transitioned to the Roman Empire, which shifted the mix substantially towards aristocracy.