This chapter critically reassesses the entrenched narrative that classical Athens and the Roman Republic were the singular origins of democracy. While acknowledging the historical significance of reforms enacted by Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in Athens, and by plebeian institutions in the Roman Republic, the chapter situates these developments within a far older and broader human tradition of collective self-rule. Drawing on democratic theory from Rousseau, Habermas, and Manin, it defines democracy as the direct participation of all affected in the lawmaking process and demonstrates that such practices long predated Greece and Rome. Comparative evidence from Phoenician city states, ancient India and China, prehistoric Crete, and egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies reveals that deliberative assemblies and mechanisms to limit elite dominance have deep historical roots across diverse cultures. The chapter also interrogates the Eurocentric and racialized historiography that elevated classical Greece as the sole “birthplace of democracy,” erasing older non-European democratic traditions. It concludes that Athens and Rome should be understood not as democracy’s beginning but as late, historically contingent instances of a much older and more geographically diverse democratic heritage.