The Dawn of Everything - Cities (Part 1)
Is there a causal relationship between scale and hierarchy in human societies?
In chapters eight and nine of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow take a look at a number of early cities to argue that there is no intrinsic link between scale and hierarchy in human societies, nor do large numbers of people necessarily require a leadership class to organize and control everything.
Instead, they inform us, many of the earliest cities appear to have been fairly egalitarian, with all citizens participating in government. Resources were owned and managed collectively rather than monopolized by elites in a top-down fashion. Democratic systems of governance which developed in smaller communities were successfully scaled up to meet the demands of large urban agglomerations. People democratically managed their own affairs and established systems of mutual aid. Rather than beginning in cities, monarchy was a later, alien imposition that originated in smaller aristocratic warrior societies.
Graeber and Wengrow describe the conventional theory this way:
It is simply assumed...that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, 'chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to'; or as Jared Diamond says, 'large populations can't function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.
In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly over coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost universally assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process. (419)
The latest archaeological evidence, they say, disproves these assumptions. Let's take a look.
River Valleys
In earlier chapters, Graeber and Wengrow described how flood retreat agriculture, or décrue farming, caused large numbers of people to settle down near rivers and waterways while retaining a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle.
At the outset of the Holocene, these environments were still wild and unpredictable. Then, starting around 5000 BCE, flood regimes stabilized making river basins more habitable. Glaciers stopped melting, stabilizing sea levels around the world. Rising sea levels no longer pushed back the large amounts of silt that were deposited at the mouths of these rivers, allowing the development of the great, fan-like deltas seen at the head of the Nile, the Yellow River, the Mississippi, and other rivers. These deltas and floodplains became the home to large, diverse settlements, leading to economic changes in turn:
Comprising well-watered soils, annually sifted by river action, and rich wetland and waterside habitats favoured by migratory game and waterfowl, such deltaic environments were major attractors for human populations. Neolithic farmers gravitated to them, along with their crops and livestock. Hardly surprising, considering these were effectively scaled-up versions of the kind of river, spring and lakeside environments in which Neolithic horticulture first began, but with one other major difference: just over the horizon lay the open sea, and before it expansive marshlands supplying aquatic resources to buffer the risks of farming, as well as a perennial source of organic materials (reeds, fibres, silt) to support construction and manufacturing.
All this combined with the fertility of alluvial soils further inland, promoted the growth of more specialized forms of farming in Eurasia, including the use of animal-drawn plows (also adopted in Egypt by 3000 BC), and the breeding of sheep for wool. Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, or urbanization.
Choices about which crops and animals to farm often had less to do with brute subsistence than the burgeoning industries of early cities, notably textile production, as well as popular forms of urban cuisine such as alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products. Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds. Peasantries, on the other hand, were a later, secondary development. (286-287)
The Davids look at a number of case studies from around the world and find that many of the earliest cities showed no signs of elites or hierarchy for the first several hundred years of their existence (as we saw previously with Çatalhöyük). Nor was there any evidence that scaling up and surpluses were associated with the emergence of a monarchy, managers, elites, or a ruling class. The places they look at are Ukrainian mega-sites, Uruk in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and (in a separate chapter) the Mesoamerican city-state of Teotihuacán.
Ukrainian Mega-Sites
The first place they look at are the large-scale settlements of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture in modern-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, including Taljanki, Nebelivka, and Maidenetske. These sites were occupied for eight centuries, from 4500 BCE to 3300 BCE, "considerably longer than most urban traditions." (290) This region around the Black Sea was home to the deep, rich soils of Eurasia known as chermozem, making it an ideal location for farming. This culture was considered part of "Old Europe" by Marija Gimbutas whose work we looked at last time.
The largest of these settlements contained 1000 houses and may have been occupied by up to 10,000 people at its height—larger than the earliest phases of Uruk in Mesopotamia which is often considered the first city. It was also larger in area than Uruk at 300 hectares. Despite these facts, these settlements are usually referred to by archaeologists as "mega-sites" as opposed to cities, which the Davids argue "is kind of a euphemism, signalling to a wider audience that these should not be thought of as proper cities but as something more like villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size." (289)
The reason these sites are not typically referred to as cities, they surmise, is because they present no evidence of hierarchy, bureaucracy or centralized management such as storehouses, temples and fortifications, which are considered to be the hallmarks of "true" cities. Therefore, they are considered by archaeologists to be the product of 'simple' societies as opposed to ‘complex’ ones.
In contemplating the possible social structure of these settlements, the Davids reference the Ursula Le Guin short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, to argue that there is no reason to presume that societies which rejected things like monumental architecture, storehouses, or centralized management were any 'simpler' than societies which had those things, other than our own preconceptions:
[Taljanki] presents no evidence of of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic centre; no equivalent to Uruk's raised public district...or the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro...(291)...No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration—or indeed, any form of ruling class In other words, these enormous settlements had all the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a 'simple', not a 'complex' society. (289)
But...why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for large populations to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications...are somehow less complex that those who have not? (290)
This way of life was by no means 'simple'. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from the springs in the eastern Carpathian and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans.
A surplus was definitely produced, and with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things. (294)
They compare the layout of these mega-sites to the rings of a tree, with each concentric circle comprised of timber houses built on stone foundations with wattle-and-daub infill. At the center of the rings was a vast open space whose purpose is unknown. It is thought that these spaces were used for popular assemblies, or possibly religious ceremonies or the seasonal penning of animals.
Each house had it own attached garden, and small-scale gardening was practiced alongside the keeping of livestock and cultivation of orchards, with additional plant and animal foods harvested from the surrounding countryside: "It was 'play farming' on a grand scale: an urban populus [sic] supporting itself through small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods." (293)
Although based on a standard template, each house was slightly different, with its own quirky character and unique artistic style as as reflected by the trippy, spiralized designs seen on pottery vessels and other handmade artifacts. Each residential district featured a large assembly house (pictured above) which could have been used for political, religious, or ceremonial purposes. This leads the Davids to claim that the residents of these sites were "self consciously" egalitarian, comparing them to a hippie commune or artists' colony. (294)
How did these mega-sites function in the absence of top-down management or a centralized government? There is no way to know for sure, but the circular layout of the sites leads the Davids to speculate that they may have functioned in a similar manner to the Basque communities of the highlands of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
Residents of these French Basque villages conceptualized their community as a circle of equal households ringed by a circle of mountains—a clear analogy to the semi-circular form of the Trypollye mega-sites. They developed a system where small-scale goods rotated in a clockwise fashion with the neighboring households which provided the template for all sorts of other forms of mutual aid. If one household could not meet its obligations, a substitute would take its place according to a prearranged pattern: "The same system of 'first neighbors' and substitution, the same serial model of reciprocity, is used to call up anything that requires more than a single family can provide: from planting and harvesting to cheese-making and slaughtering pigs." (296) They speculate that mega-sites may have functioned much the same way, with each household supporting their immediate neighbors in cooperative systems of mutual aid.
Mesopotamia
One of the earliest and most influential theories for the emergence of centralized states was proposed by Karl August Wittfogel, who argued that what he called "hydraulic empires" such as Egypt, Mesopotamia and China required a powerful bureaucracy in order to coordinate and manage the canals upon which agriculture and commerce depended. This need for centralized authority, therefore, culminated in what he called "Oriental Despotism"—an autocratic, bureaucratic system of government with an absolute ruler at the helm. This idea was influenced by Karl Marx, who believed that every society's political system was ultimately derived from its mode of production. Marx designated this the "Asiatic mode of production" and connected it to the beginnings of hierarchy, despotism, bureaucracy, and class conflict.
However, the Davids present evidence that this was not the case: "There is no reason to think that monarchy—ceremonial or otherwise—played any significant role in the earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia. Quite the opposite, in fact." (309)
They argue that more recent archaeological evidence shows that early Mesopotamian cities were hetarchies1 governed by an assortment of neighborhood wards, citizen assemblies and town councils rather than absolute rulers who wielded exclusive political power. Furthermore, they retained this system of governance for centuries. A system of corvée labor, wherein each household was obliged to supply labor for a fixed amount of time, was sufficient to maintain the city's infrastructure without the need for slavery or top-down management. It's thought that these popular assemblies were modeled on those of the small rural villages of the countryside where households regularly met to deliberate political issues, dispense justice, and resolve disputes.
Rather than bastions of "Oriental Despotism" as Marx and Wittfogel had imagined, it turns out that early Mesopotamian cities were largely self-governing:
Popular councils and citizen assemblies (Sumerian: ukkin; Akkadian puhrum) were stable features of government, not just in Mesopotamian cities, but also their colonial offshoots (like the old Assyrian karum of Kanesh, in Anatolia), and in the urban societies of neighbouring peoples such as the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines and Israelites. In fact, it is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the ancient Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly—or often several assemblies (for instance, different ones representing the interests of the 'the young' and 'the old'). (301)...Participatory government in ancient Mesopotamian cities was organized at multiple levels, from wards—sometimes defined on ethnic lines or in terms of professional affiliations—up to larger urban districts, and ultimately the city as a whole (303)
Neighborhood wards (Akkadian: bābtum, after the world for 'gate') were active in local administration, and sometimes appear to have replicated certain aspects of village or tribal governance in an urban setting. Murder trials, divorce and property disputes seem to have been mostly in the hands of town councils. (303)…in the early phases of Mesopotamian urban life, what we would normally imagine as the state sector (e.g. public works, international relations) was managed largely by local or city-wide assemblies; while top-down bureaucratic procedures were limited to what we would now think of as the economic or commodity sphere. (308)
Town councils were deeply involved in political affairs even after kings came to power. In fact, there are several instances of kings having to politically negotiate with such councils:
Even the most autocratic rulers of later city-states were answerable to a panoply of town councils, neighborhood wards and assemblies—in all of which women often participated alongside men. The 'sons and daughters' of a city could make their voices heard, influencing everything from taxation to foreign policy. (300)...So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely. (304)
The overall depiction we get from written records of places like Uruk and surrounding communities is that of a benevolent theocracy. Houses of the gods were modeled on ordinary households, and coordinated the manufacture and distribution of provisions using sophisticated recordkeeping techniques: "a primary economic function of this temple sector was to co-ordinate labour at key times of the year, and to provide quality control for processed goods that differed form those made in ordinary households." (308) The Davids speculate that these bureaucratic rationing systems may have originally developed in earlier village settings in order to prevent large disparities of wealth from arising due to specialization and trade:
"…this entire [‘Ubaid] period [which preceded the Uruk period]…was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction…intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world's first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening." (423)
Houses of the gods were administered by scribes who learned their trade in a system of education that is still followed to this day: rote memorization and repetition in groups under the instruction of a single headmaster. Debts incurred were periodically forgiven, and vulnerable populations such as widows and orphans were looked after, including being employed in the earliest large-scale workshops which undertook production of standardized commodities for export. Uruk established multiple trading colonies throughout the surrounding highlands (the ‘Uruk expansion’) in order to trade for resources such as wood, precious stones and metals which were not available in the lowland river valleys.
All of which raises the question, if hierarchy and kingship didn't begin in cities, where did it originate?
Heroic Societies
The Davids highlight what scholars have dubbed 'heroic societies':"a hurly-burly of petty lords, whose pre-eminance was founded on dramatic contests of war, feasting, boasting, duelling, games, gifts and sacrifice." (445) These types of 'heroic societies', they tell us, "[appear] time and time again around the fringes of urban life, often in strikingly similar forms, over the course of the Eurasian Bronze Age." (312)
Heroic societies shared a similar pattern. They were parceled out among rival warlords and their retainers who competed against one another for glory by raiding and distributing booty to their followers. They threw lavish feasts featuring prodigious amounts of alcohol and roast meat. They rejected writing in favor of oral traditions, and eschewed commercial values. Loyalty and honor took the place of formal laws and contracts. You can recognize these qualities from the Homeric epics, the Beowulf, the Norse sagas, and the Táin Bó Cúailnge (and Conan the Barbarian). These types of societies existed all over the world, including the Māori chiefs of New Zealand and the aristocratic ‘house societies’ of the Pacific Northwest Coast, whose behavior resembled “those of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations.” (183)
All of these cultures were aristocracies, without any centralized authority or principle of sovereignty. Instead of a single centre, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. 'Politics', in such societies, was comprised of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests of as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life.
Often massive amounts of loot or wealth were squandered, sacrificed or given away in such theatrical performances. Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures. (312-313)
According to the Davids, aristocracy began in these societies which developed on the fringes of urban settlements during the Bronze Age. Note that this is an inversion of the conventional wisdom of city dwellers living under hierarchy and oppression while societies outside the boundaries of civilization were universally peaceful and egalitarian: “Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains." (312). Note also that it subverts the presumed link between hierarchy and scale: "Hereditary aristocracies were just as likely to exist among demographically small or modest-size groups, such as the 'heroic societies' of the Anatolian highlands, which took form on the margins of the first Mesopotamian cities and traded extensively with them." (517)
The most striking evidence for this comes from a place called Arslantepe, or "Hill of the Lion", a trading colony established by Uruk in 3300 BCE and occupied full-time by a few hundred people. Within a few generations its temple was razed and what has been dubbed "the earliest known palace" was erected on its ruins. (310) Unmistakable signs of a warrior elite such as bronze weapons and armor, fortifications, and elaborate burials show up for the first time. A short time later we see the first signs of monarchy emerge in the urban centers of the Mesopotamian lowlands:
From 3100 BC, across the hilly country of what's now eastern Turkey, and in other places on the edge of urban civilization, we see evidence for the rise of a warrior aristocracy, heavily armed with metal spears and swords, living in what appear to be hill forts or small palaces. All traces of bureaucracy disappear.
In their place we find not just aristocratic households—reminiscent of Beowulf's mead hall, or indeed the Pacific Northwest Coast in the nineteenth century—but for the first time also tombs of men who, in life, were clearly considered heroic individuals of some sort, accompanied to the afterlife by prodigious quantities of metal weaponry, treasures, elaborate textiles and drinking gear. (310-311)
In later chapters, they hypothesize that this may have been how the earliest of what we refer to as ‘states’ formed: with the merging of charismatic and bureaucratic systems of power. Thus, the ‘state’ is not really an entity, they argue, but rather a combination of factors which can appear together or separately, and therefore looking for its origins is "chasing a phantasm." (427)
Early Uruk...does not appear to have been a 'state' in any meaningful sense of the word; what's more, when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it's not in the 'complex' metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, 'heroic' societies of the surrounding foothills, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don't seem to qualify as 'states' either. (361)
In later chapters, they hypothesize that systems of domination tend to start out as relations of care—for people and gods—which become subverted over time, and ponder whether this is where "everything begins to get confused." (519). For example, Mesopotamian temples were originally organized around economic production and caring for the poor, sick and elderly, but later they became the locus of centralized power, autocracy and bureaucracy:
Sumerian temples had always organized their economic existence around the nurturing and feeding of the gods, embodied in their cult statues, which became surrounded by a whole industry of bureaucracy and welfare...The first charismatic war-kings attached themselves to such spaces, quite literally moving in next door to the residence of the city's leading deity. In such ways, Sumerian monarchs were able to insert themselves into the institutional spaces once reserved for the care of the gods, and thus removed from the realm of ordinary human relationships. This makes sense because kings, as the Malagasy proverb puts it, 'have no relatives'—or they shouldn't, since they are rulers equally of all their subjects. (518)
In summary, aristocracy, hierarchy, and despotism didn't begin in cities—with their dense concentrations of people, occupational specialization and economic surplus—and spread out from there like an amoeba. Rather, it seems to have been the other way around. Highland mountain bandits subjugated the peaceful inhabitants of the river valleys, setting themselves and their followers up as a ruling class and declaring themselves agents of the gods, erecting palaces alongside temples. They adopted the systems of bureaucracy and standardization which were developed in the lowlands to ration public goods and used them to centralize power, secure their territory, and wage war on their neighbors.
This idea actually has an old vintage. Franz Oppenheimer argued over a century ago in The State that centralized states were the outcome of one group conquering another. Furthermore, he hypothesized that it was aristocratic, class-stratified warrior societies (herdsmen) who subjugated petty agriculturalists (peasants or ‘grubbers’). Mancur Olson proposed that rulers were, in effect, ‘stationary bandits’—as opposed to roving bandits—who decided that settling down and taxing the inhabitants of urban settlements was easier and more effective then perennially looting them and demanding tribute. Michael Mann, in The Sources of Social Power, saw the origins of the first empires in "marcher lords" who ruled over the the lawless border regions at the fringes of emergent urban civilizations. As we’ve seen, Marija Gimbutas proposed that the highly mobile warrior bands of the kurgan culture overran the peaceful farming communities of Central Europe during the late Bronze and early Iron Age, erecting hillforts to secure their territory. There is plenty of historical evidence for barbarians menacing and subjugating urban agricultural civilizations down through the ages, from the Scythians to the Huns to the Mongols.
In the end, the Davids conclude that the typical story about elites and hierarchy emerging out of the need for centralized management and economic coordination does not hold up when compared with the actual evidence. Nor is top-down management the only solution to successfully coordinate the efforts of large groups of people:
It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there's little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters.
Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite 'egalitarian', were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile, most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn't care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained the drainage ditches. (419)
Next: The Indus River Valley and Mesoamerica.
Hetarchy: Power distributed amongst different groups and hierarchies within the city. The relative power between different groups often is flexible.
I've never "simply assumed" that top-down, centralized government instantly appeared as soon as people began farming & living together in large numbers. Early farmers must still have been profoundly marked by hundreds of thousands of years just spent as egalitarian hunter-gatherer.
The key point, in my view, is: "more participatory (then) than almost any urban government today". Yes, whatever may have pertained back in the mists of the earlier Holocene, the fact is that more recent civilization is very much top-down wherever one looks.
Indeed, top-down is so pervasive that there must be a fundamental cause for the transformation. In "Civilized to Death", Christopher Ryan compares modern humans to locusts, noting that no locust ever existed that had not once been a grasshopper. The two are the same species. But when conditions change sufficiently, the latter becomes the former, & the creature's behaviour changes radically.
The Holocene must have represented the new environment that would eventually trigger such a change in the way humans live together.
If I'm understanding the historical scenarios laid out correctly: social hierarchy arose either from:
1) The people of densely populated urban centers themselves
2) The people in outlying societies neighboring densely populated urban centers
Either way, social hierarchy seems to come as a reaction to densely populated urban centers; the outcome is the same, correct? It seems perfectly possible to have large urban populations of humans without the need of social hierarchy, but inevitably, it will arise either way.