If we are dreaming of Eden it is probable that we are dreaming of community. Anthropologists tell us that the group antedates the family and that the human capacity for living in community stems from the fact that only through communal efforts can they survive. Because the hunter gatherer way of life lasted several hundred thousand years, argues René Dubos, it has left an indelible stamp on human behaviour. Since the genetic determinants of human behaviour have evolved in small groups, ‘modern man still has a biological need to be part of community’. If there is truth in these claims, it would explain why the search for workable forms of community occupies such a large role in human history. A community is a group of people who have something in common, but what? Throughout history this has included the idea of territory, and territory, I will argue, remains important, even in an age of migration and of identity politics. However, territorially based notions of community are challenged by class, caste, gender, and ethnic divisions because community is also rooted in religion, culture, language, ethnicity, work or ideas. That idea that it is not territory which has primacy but shared interests and values is not an invention of the twentieth century but was alive in first century Galatia, and indeed in Egypt under the Pharaohs.