Re: [tied] House and City

The Greek word polis has a modest history.
You can go back to forts in Latvia, pils. You have temples in India,
palli. Why on Earth would you assume that Hurrian borrowed the word
from Egyptian? There were houses in Europe and the Middle East earlier
than in Egypt. Your seafarer idea doesn't hold water. How do you explain
Mongolian balagun? Words for house go back very far. Every culture has
a word for house, or the equivalent. The Mongolian yurt is a cognate
of yard and the -grad in Belgrade. The Sumerians had a cognate of this
word, as did Semites and Indians. (-garh) This root covers everything
from a barnyard to a megacity. There is Hebrew and Arabic qiryat
(village). For the Sumerians it was a merchant area of a town. Over and
over we see a root that once meant a modest dwelling transformed into a
city. Why not *par?

Mongolian hhot (city) is probably related to our words house and hut.
There are cognates with "hut" all over the place too. Some of them mean
"fort". People from Greece were boating to islands in 8,000 BC, long
before there were boats in Egypt.
Does anyone know the origin of "palace"?
Think of palli, palisade. Think of Greek and Etruscan "pyrgos" , tower.
The names of towns in India end in -pur. In Germany they end in
-berg. There is a natural progression from hut to house to fort to
palace to town to city. Look at Swedish Göteborg. At one time a borg
was just a fort. Early forts were small wooden affairs. What do you
suppose a Lithuanian pilis looked like in 500 AD? It probably wasn't
very impressive. What about the acropolis? Wasn't the first acropolis
a very modest wooden building? Basically about the same as a palace or a
house. Look at London, from Lundunum. A Celtic dun was just a small
wooden fort, wasn't it? Don't you think it might be related to to
Indo-European "dom" for house or building? Look at Russian dom (house).
Then, you get domicile, dun, town and so on.
Armenian tun means house.