Complex chiefdoms
Now even a very hardworking chief just can't manage to take care of all the decisions and arguments of thousands of people, and so he would begin to delegate, to choose some of his friends to take charge of this or that. One guy would take charge of distributing the water fairly, and another would be in charge of the army, and somebody else would negotiate trade agreements. Again, women were generally not able to get these powerful positions, though sometimes they did.
Another change was that sometimes one chief would use his army to conquer a bunch of other cities, and then there would be one super-chief who could boss around all the conquered chiefs. Or sometimes all the chiefs might just agree to choose one chief to lead them all. One example is the story of Agamemnon and the Trojan War, where Agamemnon is the king of a small town called Mycenae, and there are a lot of other kings like Menelaus and Odysseus, who are the kings of Sparta and Ithaca, but Agamemnon is in charge of all of them, especially when there is a big war.
Other examples of complex chiefdoms are some West African countries, the Visigoths before the time of Alaric, the Huns, and the Mongols.
From this list you can see (if you know the dates of these countries) that many people continued to live under complex chiefdoms for thousands of years after the first states got started. Some people still do today.
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