> Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time. To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether

> Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time. To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether to become sedentary (vs being enslaved by the larger sedentary populations), the reduction of autonomy (for both individuals and groups) for sedentary lifestyle behind fortifications has to be worth the benefits. That said, sedentarism vs nomadism is a spectrum, and it's not clear that the nomads would have seen themselves as fundamentally different than sedentarists. It was probably much later that terms related to being "civilized" vs "wild" came into existence - probably courtesy of agriculturalists' organized religion. Even as late as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, it wasn't necessarily inimical as king Gilgamesh's best friend was the wild man Enkidu. I would guess that nomads/hunters thought of sedentarists just as people who just had bigger and more permanent settlements than they did.