A town meeting is usually held at town hall. Some towns have them once a month
The answer for the bundles of wood wrapped around an ox handle in ancient rome is fasces
They were too large and expensive - typically a computer would fill a room and would have to have its own power supply.
The Sahel was the last area in the northern parts of Africa, where vegetation can survive and where people were living at the time. Following the Sahel to the North one can find the Sahara desert which is a natural barrier that no invading force could trespass.
