The Dawn of Everything - Cities (Part 2)

Urban democracies were not unusual or exceptional

The Indus River Valley

Mohenjo-Daro was a major urban site of the Indus Valley Civilization (also known as the Harappan civilization after the site of the same name). The Indus Valley Civilization emerged around 2600 BCE, about a thousand years after the Uruk expansion, and lasted for around 800 years.

Harappan cities showed no evidence for large-scale warfare such as weapons or fortifications throughout their entire existence, nor were there any depictions of warfare in art leading to the speculation it was free of conflict or even some kind of peaceful utopia. Houses featured a sophisticated plumbing systems made of clay pipes which diverted wastewater from all of the dwellings in what appeared to be the world's first universal infrastructure program.

The buildings and roads were made out of standardized bricks which were all made to uniform dimensions and standardized weights and measures were discovered in Harappan cities indicating the presence of some kind of centralized authority. Yet no evidence has turned up for any kind of charismatic authority figure—or any notable person, really—leading to Harappa being termed a 'faceless civilization'¹.

While there were no discernible palaces or temples at Mohenjo-Daro, there do appear to be certain precincts set apart from the others. The Upper Citadel was raised above the Lower Town and featured numerous bathhouses leading to the speculation that it was somehow connected with ritual purification. This suggests the possible existence of a priestly caste who may have wielded a degree of political authority.

This causes the Davids to speculate that this may be an instance where caste preceded kingship. In place of monarchs and aristocracy, Harappan cities may have have been governed by a priestly caste rather than any singular individual, which would explain the lack of authority figures despite evidence of standardization and central planning. They speculate that the city of Mohenjo-Daro may have featured some type of polycentric system of governance in which all castes may have participated on a more-or-less equal footing.

The model they propose for this is the Buddhist sangha, which originally referred to the town councils which governed South Asian cities for centuries before becoming the model for Buddhist monastic communities. Another example they cite are the Balinese task-oriented self-help groups known as seka. Balinese society today is divided along rigid caste lines yet, despite this, the seka system allows for participation of all castes on an equal footing in matters of governance :

Balinese are not only divided by caste: their society is conceived as a total hierarchy in which not just every group but every individual knows (or at least, should know) their exact position in relation to everyone else. In principle, then, there are no equals...At the same time, however, practical affairs such as the management of communities, temples and agricultural life are organized according to the seka system, in which everyone is expected to participate on equal terms and come to decisions by consensus. (320)

Such systems have the added benefit of allowing for "bottom up" control and management of shared resources where political centralization would be ineffective such as the management of fields, canals and waterways. Arrangements such as the Balinese seka subak have been proposed by some scholars as an analogy for the systems used to manage the canals in ancient Mesopotamia which would have been shared among a number of independent city-states. As in Mesopotamian cities, political governance would have been a separate sphere from the management of collective resources in a further blow to the notion that the need for centralized management was the basis for hierarchy.

For most of its history, Bali was divided into a series of kingdoms, endlessly squabbling over this or that...Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of 'water-temples', through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves. (321)

In the end, the Davids conclude that "each regional tradition was very different", but that each of these initial experiments in urbanism "appear to have developed an ethos of explicit egalitarianism" (321) in various cultures throughout the world.

One approach was the assertion that all individuals were fundamentally the same on some basic level and were equally deserving of dignity and respect. This was the Mesopotamian approach with its standardized commercial products, temples, regulations, and impersonal bureaucracy. At the other end of the spectrum, some cultures celebrated individual differences to such an extent that making any attempts at hierarchical ranking was conceptually impossible. This was the approach adopted by the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sizes, with their unique styles of houses and pottery. A third possibility was a hierarchical ranking system where nonetheless each group participated equally in matters of collective decision-making.

It is possible to express these differences at a purely formal level. A self-conscious ethos of egalitarianism, at any point in history, might take either of two diametrically opposing forms.

We can insist that everyone is, or should be, precisely the same (at least in the ways that we consider important); or alternatively, we can insist that everyone is so utterly different from each other that there re simply no criteria for competitions (for example, we are all unique individuals, and so there is no basis upon which any one of us can be considered better than another). Real life egalitarianism will normally tend to involve a bit of both.

...it could be argued that Mesopotamia—with its standardized household products, allocation of uniform payments to temple employees, and public assemblies—seems to have largely embraced the first version. Ukrainian mega-sites, in which each household seems to have developed its own unique artistic style and, idosyncratically, domestic rituals, embraced the second.

The Indus valley appears—if our interpretation is broadly correct—to represent yet a third possiblity, where rigorous equality in certain areas (even the bricks were all precisely the same size) was complemented by explicit hierarchy in others… (321-322)

Teotihuacan

The final site they examine is Teotihuacan in the central valley of modern-day Mexico. This was once the largest city in the Americas and started off as a religious site featuring some of the largest and most significant pyramids anywhere in the Americas (or the world), including the spectacular Temples of the Sun and the Moon. Up to ninety percent of the inhabitants of the central valley of Mexico occupied the city at its height.

However, according to the story the Davids tell, the city later went in a very different direction: "the entire trajectory of Teotihuacan's political development seems to have gone off on a remarkable tangent." (341). The central temple was sacked and desecrated, after which all signs of monarchy and aristocracy disappear. However, rather than abandon the city, the residents decided to "self consciously" reorient their society along egalitarian lines: “Teotihuacan...changed its course away from monarchy and aristocracy to become instead a 'Tollan of the people'." (343) While unique for its time and place, the Davids claim that this shift became the template for the subsequent traditions of democratic rule and collective self-governance seen throughout Mesoamerica which have been neglected by scholars.

All of the evidence suggests that Teotihuacan had, it its height of power, found a way to govern itself without overlords—as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan. Yet it did so with very different technological foundation, and on an even larger scale. (330)

What we propose to do...is bring to the surface this neglected strand of Mesoamerican social history: one of urban republics, large-scale projects of social welfare, and indigenous forms of democracy that can be followed down to the time of the Spanish conquest and beyond. (332-333)

While many early cities were notable for the absence of palaces, Teotihuacan seemed remarkable to its initial excavators for consisting of nothing but palaces. In addition to religious monuments, the site featured a multitude of complex, multifamily residential compounds built out of stone and laid out in a uniform grid. These spacious villas featured central courtyards, shaded porticoes, finely plastered floors and brightly-colored walls adorned with murals. Some even featured indoor toilet facilities. Yet these apartment blocks were not reserved for kings or rulers; rather, it appears that every family lived in their own private luxury apartment regardless of rank, status or ethnicity: “Even the more modest apartments show signs of a comfortable lifestyle.” (343)

The Davids attribute this to an ambitious program of social housing which allocated each family the amount of living space normally reserved only for kings and rulers in other societies: “Instead of building palaces and elite quarters, the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city's population, regardless of wealth or status.” (341) Meanwhile, ostentatious palaces and monuments to war are strikingly absent unlike Mayan or later Aztec sites.

Archaeologists at first considered the masonry apartments to be palaces, and it is possible that is exactly how they began around AD 200, when the city seemed set on a course of political centralization.

But after AD 300, when the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was desecrated, their construction continued apace, until most of the city's 100,000 or so residents were effectively living in 'palatial', or at least very comfortable conditions…(343)....Without written sources, we can't really say why. Archaeologists are not yet able to distinguish the precise sequence of events with any confidence. But nobody doubts that something did happen. (341)

In other words few were deprived. More than that, many citizens enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own. (343)

This political transformation appears to have been accomplished without any bloodshed. While there are no written sources, the layout of the city itself might provide a clue to its political organization. Instead of monarchy or centralized authority, power was distributed between various neighborhood wards and urban assemblies similar to those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia or Classical Athens. The presence of bottom-up democratic structures in the New World as well as the Old World indicates that these types of democratic assemblies and flattened hierarchies were not as anomalous in the ancient world as often portrayed, nor were they unique achievements attributable to "Western" civilization:

Without written evidence it may never be possible to reconstruct the details, but by now we can probably rule out any sort of top-down system in which elite cadres of royal administrators or priests drew up plans and sent out orders. A more likely possibility is that authority was distributed among local assemblies, perhaps answerable to a governing council.

If any trace of these community associations survives it is in the district shrines known as 'three temple complexes'. At least twenty such complexes were dispersed throughout the city, serving a total of 2,000 apartments, one for every 100 apartment blocks. This might imply the delegation of government to neighborhood councils with constituencies similar in size to those of Mesopotamian city-wards, or the assembly houses of Ukrainian mega-sites...or for that matter the barrios of later Mesoamerican towns. (344)

The Davids draw a direct line between Teotihuacan and the political arrangement of the later city-state of Tlaxcala, which played a pivotal role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. They cite reports from Hernán Cortés describing the political system of Tlaxcala as resembling the republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa. At Tlaxcala, the Spanish conquistadors found themselves negotiating not with a unitary ruler who wielded absolute power, but with representatives of neighborhood assemblies and urban councils who democratically deliberated and voted on which course of action to take.

Modern archaeological excavations...confirm the existence of an indigenous republic at Tlaxcala long before Cortés set foot on Mexican soil, while latter written sources leave little doubt as to its democratic credentials...the political traditions of Tlaxcala are not an anomaly, but lie in one broad stream of urban development which can be traced back, in outline, to the experiments in social welfare undertaken 1,000 years earlier at Teotihuacan...it was the Aztec rulers of Tenochtitlan who finally broke with tradition, creating a predatory empire that was in some ways closer to the dominant European political models of the time, or what has since come to be known as 'the state'. (358)

The Davids highlight the rhetorical skills on display at Tlaxcala and compare them to the words of Kondiaronk, the Wendat statesman whose observations about European society were supposedly conveyed by the writings of French Baron Lahontan to European intellectuals at the start of the 18th century. Kondiaronk is used earlier in the book as an example of the political “self-awareness” of native and indigenous peoples, and as proof that these cultures were as politically sophisticated as any European or "complex" society. Thus, they tell us, egalitarianism wasn't a primordial "state of nature" that was lost forever, but a deliberate political choice that was made by many different cultures around the world over and over again at different periods throughout history (and prehistory).

Much though later European authors liked to imagine them as indigenous children of nature, the indigenous populations of North America were in fact heirs to their own, long intellectual and political history—one that had taken then in a very different direction to Eurasian philosophers and which, arguably, ended up having a profound influence on conceptions of freedom and equality, not just in Europe but everywhere as well. (453-4)

This also hearkens back to a theme explored from the very outset of the book: the effect that contacts with indigenous cultures had on European intellectuals. According to Graeber and Wengrow, the discovery of these alternative social arrangements caused European intellectuals to question inequality and see it not as something intrinsic or god-given, but as an artificial phenomenon that had an origin.

This realization had two related effects. In one case, it helped to kickstart the Enlightenment. But it also caused a counter-reaction where some European intellectuals argued that egalitarianism was only possible in small-scale, 'primitive' societies, and that extreme inequality was simply the price to pay for living in large-scale urban civilizations with their complex economies and occupational specialization. Furthermore, they argued that the larger and richer the society the more unequal it was invariably going to be. They tell us that the main intellectual theories about the origins of inequality—proposed by Hobbes (pro) and Rousseau (con)—were subconsciously derived from Biblical teachings of a “fall from grace” rather than actual evidence from either history or archaeology.

[T]he conventional wisdom we've been challenging throughout the book—about hunter-gatherer societies, the consequences of farming, the rise of cities and states—has its genesis...with Turgot, Smith and the reaction against the indigenous critique. (441)

The Dawn of Everything is Graeber and Wengrow’s corrective. Rather than an ineluctable march from freedom towards inequality, they tell us, there were in fact, many contingencies and reversals over time. Ultimately, each of these examples of early cities are in the service of denying the supposed causal connection between hierarchy and scale. As they conclude:

It's important to stress that we are not arguing that the very first cities to appear in any region of the world were invariably founded on egalitarian principles...What we are saying is that archaeological evidence shows this to have been a surprisingly common pattern, which goes against conventional evolutionary assumptions about the effects of scale on human society.

In each of the cases we've considered...a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites.

In short, archaeological research has shifted the burden of proof onto those theorists who claim causal connections between the origins of cities and the rise of stratified states, and whose claims now look increasingly hollow...(322)...Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized. (326)

Conclusion

I think the most interesting part of these chapters is the idea that monarchy wasn't an autochthonous urban development but a result of cultural interactions between warlike cultures that organized themselves hierarchically and urban communities which developed more anarchic and participatory systems of self-governance. As Ran Prieur summarizes:

The most interesting bit I've read recently is a reversal of the popular story that repression started in agricultural cities and moved out to conquer the peaceful hunter-gatherers. In the Fertile Crescent and also in central Europe, it seems to have been the opposite, with the dense populations on the plains being peaceful, and the hill people being violent invaders.

It's really a refutation of the so-called "Managerial Model" which argues that centralized power stemmed from the need to solve coordination (or, collective action) problems. That may be the case in part, but it may not explain the origin of charismatic or despotic forms of power which were just as likely to originate elsewhere.

But as for their larger thesis that social scale has no effect on hierarchy, well, I just don't think that's the case. It's intuitive and self-evident that larger, denser and more complex societies are going to have a greater need and potential for hierarchy than smaller, more mobile societies in which most interactions are face-to-face, or where most people do the same basic activities. This concept is known as scalar stress, and it has been widely documented across a wide variety of societies. The link between social size and complexity is a very robust conclusion, for example, see the following paper: Organization Structure and Scalar Stress (PDF)

Like other parts of the book, they are arguing against popular—and not scholarly—misconceptions, yet they attribute these misconceptions to scholars by selectively excerpting from popular “Big History” accounts. This is a recurring problem throughout the book.

The biggest criticism I've read of this part of the book is that the Davids' depictions of the political structure of these early cities is based on 1.) Selective interpretations of the data which may not even be the consensus view among scholars; and 2.) Conjecture.

These chapters are filled with all sorts of hedges and qualifiers; for example, "All of this is guesswork" (336) and, "Other interpretation are no doubt possible" (326) and, "There is no firm consensus among archaeologists about what sort of social arrangements all this required", (293) and so on.

Which is fair enough. Archaeology is often a science of speculation based on less evidence than we would like, and many interpretations are no doubt possible. We can’t fault them for that. But readers might come away with the impression that these are the only—or even the dominant—interpretations of these sites. That is not the case, however.

For example, in his review of the book, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that many of the experts they cite have significantly different interpretations of these sites than those which Graeber and Wengrow put forward (my emphasis):

An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account [of Taljanky], John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man².

“Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But they don’t tell you that Kenoyer concludes that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”?

Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on...Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by a pair of distinguished archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere...

And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the potsherds pondered and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.

Similarly, their depiction of mature “urban democracies” in the Americas may belie the fact that many of these more resembled feudal states, with loose coalitions of hereditary aristocrats managing and governing large polities. This appears to have been the case at Tlaxcala—the alleged successor to Teotihuacan—as Walter Scheidel describes in his review:

The authors’ equation of the absence of monarchy with democratic politics likewise merits comment. Their chosen example is early sixteenth-century Tlaxcala, a quadripartite republic in east-central Mexico, whose form of government, in Hernan Cortés’ own words, “is almost like that of Venice, or Genoa, or Pisa, because there is no one supreme ruler. There are many lords all living in this city, and the people who are tillers of the soil are their vassals, though each one has his lands to himself, some more than others. In undertaking wars, they all gather together, and thus assembled they decide and plan them.”

Graeber and Wengrow cite only the first of these sentences: the elision of lordly power makes it easier to turn this system – governed by a council of some 50 to 100 mostly but not exclusively hereditary nobles that was coordinated by four principal leaders – into a “democracy” with a “mature urban parliament”. They instead choose to emphasize a later account of how those wishing to serve on the council had to undergo self-abasing and painful preparation, yet without mentioning that public bloodletting rituals had likewise been common among powerful Maya elites, hardly paragons of democratic governance.

So, in fact, some of these societies may have been more hierarchical then Graeber and Wengrow are portraying, even when signs of absolute monarchy are absent.

Moreover, their imaging of a social structure for Cucuteni–Trypillia mega-sites based on Basque communities belies the fact that Basque villages are not a single site but a number of small villages scattered across a wide area—none of which are circular in plan—making comparisons tenuous. Similarly, their speculation about a possible caste system at Mohenjo-Daro is based more on present-day Indian civilization which developed much later with significant influence from nomadic steppe peoples (as shown by the presence of Indo-European languages) rather than actual evidence from the site.

Many reviews I've read make a similar points—a lot of this is conjecture without any hard evidence. More to the point, every one of these examples—save for Mesopotamia—have no written records, making any reconstruction of their political structure purely speculative; and even Mesopotamian sources, they admit, don't tell us as much was we would like about how urban assemblies actually functioned. Only Teotihuacan is generally accepted by archaeologists to have been as egalitarian as they claim, and even that is not universal.

Furthermore, another thing these sites have in common is that every one of them was eventually abandoned for reasons which remain unclear, although climate change has been implicated in a number of them. This may indicate the need for centralized management rather than its irrelevance. As Walter Scheidel notes:

Nobody can tell if there were religious elites in Uruk well before there were kings, and even less is known about the Ukrainian mega-sites. Moreover (and as Graeber and Wengrow themselves note: 323), other than Uruk, where monarchs become visible by the early third millennium BCE, all of these sites failed spectacularly, not to be replaced by anything comparable.

Taken together, all this hardly amounts to a formidable challenge to the standard paradigm that links urbanization to hierarchy and centralized control, nor does it in any way “upend the conventional narrative”. We are left wondering – how much revision do prevailing interpretations of the emergence of urbanism actually require?

Similarly, Ian Morris points out that a few isolated exceptions don’t invalidate the general trend in his review:

The truth is that we just don’t know why a few urban systems (the Greek among them) got along perfectly well without palaces or elite cemeteries; but we do know that it really was only a few systems, and that the vast majority of ancient cities did have rich, powerful rulers. To be convincing, a general theory must explain both the overall trend toward hierarchy and the occasional egalitarian exceptions, rather than just declaring that one part of the pattern trumps the other.

Plus, scale is quantifiable. While I agree with their criticisms of relying too heavily or exclusively on quantifiable evidence as opposed to more qualitative methods of analysis, this is one instance where degrees of scale can actually be quantified and tested. If you're claiming that scale and social structure aren't related—a very bold claim—a series of anecdotes don't add up to data. As this critical review of this portion of the book notes, there is no functional definition of "urban scale" provided, nor is there specific, objective criteria for what constitutes a “city”. The reviewer points out that even Burning Man started running into governance problems once it reached a certain size threshold:

Early Cities in The Dawn of Everything: Shoddy Scholarship in Support of Pedestrian Conclusions (Cliodynamics)

Unlike some other reviewers, I don't have a problem with speculating about the possible political and social arrangements of these early settlements. I think that attempts to use more recent cultural parallels to help understand how ancient sites may have functioned is a worthwhile endeavor. However, it's not the thorough "debunking" that so many people seem to think it is. It's really more of a "what if?" scenario designed to stretch our imagination. The Davids themselves admit that they are not giving the definitive interpretation of these sites; only highlighting alternative interpretations which they say are ignored or neglected because of what they see as a teleological narrative of history.

One thing I do agree with them is that evidence for distributive systems of power tends to be invisible in the archaeological record, while signs of hierarchy and despotism like palaces, temples, storehouses, fortifications and royal burials are unmistakable. This can indeed color our view and lead us to believe that autocratic systems of power and hierarchical societies were more common than they actually were in the distant past—an example of the Streetlight Effect. The Davids point out the double standard of assuming that the default social arrangement is top-down management and autocratic control while demanding firm, incontrovertible evidence of flatter, less hierarchical systems of governance:

Once again, while evidence of democratic self-governance is always a bit ambiguous (would anyone guess what was really going on in fifth-century Athens from archaeological evidence alone?), evidence for royal rule, when it appears, is entirely unmistakable... (306)

Scholars tend to demand clear evidence and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It's striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.

But again, this simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together (and, by implication, that something called 'democracy' emerges only much later, as a conceptual breakthrough—and most likely just once, in ancient Greece) (319)

If their goal is to describe the diversity of ancient political forms, then they've succeeded. If their goal was to alert us to other possibilities beyond just elites controlling everything, then they've succeeded. But if their goal is to prove beyond a doubt that scale has no effect on social structure and social development, well, I don't think they've cleared that bar.

The data they present, while perhaps a bit selective and speculative, highlights other possibilities for governance throughout the ancient world then we're normally exposed to, which is valuable in itself. There were surely many and varied political arrangements in the past, just as there are now, but the relationship between the size of a society and how autocratic or despotic it is is complex. Singapore is often considered highly autocratic, despite being a nominal democracy. Yet Switzerland, with over three million more people, is a democratic, decentralized society, with cantons voting on nearly every issue. There were more electoral representative democracies in the late twentieth century, with its seven billion people, than there were in 1800 with only one billion. All of which is to say it's complicated, and I'm sure it was just as complicated in the past.

1. A popular statue found in the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro is often referred to as a "priest king". However this is a modern, speculative interpretation by early archaeologists, and there is no indication that it depicted any sort of ruler or official. As Wikipedia notes, "Given the lack of evidence for a military-based monarch or ruling class, the model of some sort of theocracy was widely adopted by the early archaeologists."

2. The Davids, for their part, reject this interpretation: "This is difficult to reconcile with the substantial nature of their houses (consider the effort in felling trees, laying foundations, making good walls, etc.) More probably, the mega-sites were much like other cities, neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, but somewhere in between." (293)

Of course, it's possible that not all the houses at the site were occupied at the same time and that new houses were sequentially added to arrive at the total number. But, then, why didn't later people simply move into existing houses rather than build new ones?