John Baines and Norman Yoffee wrote:
Kingship and Other Forms of Rule:
Among forms of political structure, kingship can be defined, rather inexactly, as rulership by a single individual holding a supreme office in a lifelong tenure, most often succeeding on a hereditary principle and wielding- or not, as the case may be - great personal power. As such, it may be the single most frequent form of state government, but it is by no means the only one. It occurs typically both in states and in non-state entities such as chiefdoms: there is no easy distinction between "chief" and “king".
Conversely, city states, while belonging firmly with state forms in which administration is at least partly disembedded from kinship rules, generally display a range of types of government and often do not focus on kingship. These contrasting options are exemplified by the ancient Near East. Egypt offers a type case of the kingship-dominated non-city state; in the more diverse city state forms of Mesopotamia, kings were at their most salient during periods of centralization, and then during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires of the mid-first millennium.
A form of leadership whose symbols developed directly into those of kingship can be identified in Egypt by the early fourth millennium BC, before social complexity had developed to a significant extent. Kingship emerged before unification, and, probably through internal assimilation and conquest in the formative period of the late fourth millennium, kings created the unified polity whose ideology set the trajectory for all later times. During Dynasties 0-3 (c. 3100-2600 BC) the king acquired a complex titulary that proclaimed he manifested aspects of various deities on earth. Official forms displaying his qualities related him to the gods, but he was not the same order of being as they — more central and salient for human society, but of lesser status and potential.
The two basic terms for “king", njswt and bjtj, related to hierarchically ranked aspects of kingship and, in dynastic times, were connected with Upper and Lower Egypt (roughly equivalent to the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta). This characteristically Egyptian dualism held that only entities formed from dualities were meaningful [footnote to E. Hornung, see insert below]; by implication, the unity of the country — typically known as the "Two Lands” and long lacking an overall proper name — was vested in king and kingship.
[MGH: I looked up the interesting passages by Hornung and insert them below]
[The] reigning king is the prime son and image of the creator god; almost all Egyptian references to man as the “image of god” relate to him. From the Fourth Dynasty on—that is, from the time of the Great Pyramid at Giza — the king is the “son” of the sun god, and in the course of the Middle Kingdom …
One typical Egyptian form of thought — dualistic thought — has long been identified and is often described. As we learned from Egyptian ontology, the order established by the creator god is characterized by “two things” and thus by differentiation or diversity; this idea is incorporated in the teaching that Egypt is the “Two Lands” and in a mass of other pairs that can form a totality only if taken together. The greatest totality conceivable is “the existent and the nonexistent”, and in these dualistic terms the divine is evidently both one and many. Oppositions such as these are real, but the pairs do not cancel each other out; they complement each other. A given x can be both a and not-a: tertium datur — the law of the excluded middle does not apply.
E. Hornung, 1982, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, Cornell University Press, pp. 138, 240
[END of insert]
Neither the country of Egypt nor full rulership could be imagined without kingship, because the king was the sole formal intermediary with the gods. Only around 750 BC, toward the end of several centuries of the Third Intermediate period, did significant numbers of regional leaders emerge who did not claim the title of king.
The king's role in relation to and in combination with the gods perpetuated the fragile order of the cosmos, offering a central legitimation that overrode the "moral economies" of smaller social organizations ….
… Missions abroad were undertaken to bring back materials needed for king, cult, and the dead. Conquest was an "extension of the boundaries" that built upon the idea of maintaining the cosmos. The basis of kingship was not, however, strongly military, and for much of the third millennium the country seems to have lacked a standing army. Within Egypt, royal authority was underpinned by the king's theoretically absolute ownership of the land and rights over his subjects …
The king's most powerful influence was probably on the elite. Their status and wealth depended on him-often on his personal favor and caprice. The palace was the central institution that mobilized the country's resources, although in most periods there also were significant "secular" and temple administrations.
Mesopotamian kingship contrasts strongly with that of Egypt. Without an overarching political state, its forms of kingship were markedly different. Kingship acquired its character in the endemic struggle among the Sumerian city-states in the time before Sargon of Akkade (c. 2350 BC). It seems that kings were at first elite landowners, perhaps important figures in community assemblies, who progressively assumed more power as war leaders and who bought land from corporate landholding groups … The Mesopotamian king was a local lord whose acquisition of power was internal and unrelated to conquest outside his own state … Early Mesopotamian city-states were arenas for a normative and constant struggle between the burgeoning royal authority and the power of the temple estate.
… In sum, while Mesopotamian kings were powerful leaders in war and in civil administration, they never achieved the same position as the foci of ideology, economy, and social life as the kings of Egypt did. In some periods the Mesopotamian king shared power with temple estates and local assemblies. Furthermore, the palace often contracted with, and sometimes depended upon, private entrepreneurs to supply its local subsistence needs, as well as its desire for distant luxury goods ..
Politics and Economy:
… Inequality, such as existed in both civilizations, created a large surplus for a small elite — the ruling group of high officials in Old Kingdom Egypt numbered perhaps 500 people; this required legitimation to the people from whom the surpluses were exacted, or so modem analysts tend to suppose. Although state formation created great economic potential, its consequences may have left those below the elite, after the exactions required of them, in an economic condition similar to that of their pre-state forebears. Throughout the history of the early state, the majority of people hardly had alternatives or points of comparison beyond their own societal environment; this limited perspective would have reduced the requirements of legitimation …
While traditional forms of local social organization and their “moral economies” may have retained some validity for the non-elite, precisely because the state (and/or large manorial estates) removed from them the means of storage and provision against misfortune, the state appropriated the salient discourse on the constitution of social order. Although we should not assume that those outside the elite always accepted the rhetoric of their superiors, state legitimations were generally designed so that elites could exploit rather freely the resources available to them. Elites were able to be profoundly separate from the rest of their societies. This separateness extended to the system of values, which was hardly accessible to those outside an inner social layer.
Despite the residual survival of the moral economy on which their inferiors relied for a legitimation of their dependence, elites had little regard for the human lives of those whose efforts they were eager to utilize for their own grand plans, taking huge disparities of circumstances between groups for granted. Only rarely and mainly in the later stages of these two ancient states did the moral economy appear to a significant extent in the texts. Since much of society was involved in the execution of the grand plans, additional values and interests must have held societies together both in these goals and more generally. But the analysis of those plans needs to focus principally on the elite groups and on the ways in which they created and sustained among themselves the mechanisms for supporting and ensuring the success of specific types of goals. These elite values were not only political; economics were a means more than an end. Political and economic analysis only partly addresses elite motivations …
… The inner elite controlling ancient Near Eastern (and presumably all other) states and civilizations were few; during early post-formative periods their numbers became further reduced. In Egypt, this process culminated in the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2500 BC), when a high proportion of the country's resources was devoted to the king's funerary monument. The number of the surrounding, less grandiose tombs of the inner elite suggests that this group consisted of no more than a few dozen male officeholders, in a population of perhaps 1-2 million for the entire country. These men formed the central decision-making group, who together with their families controlled and enjoyed the fruits of the country's labors. The group was larger in other periods, but it can never have numbered far into the thousands.
The more populous and numerous city-states in Mesopotamia did not gather resources to a single center in the same way, but in Mesopotamian civilization, too, wealth and status were highly concentrated [with] the formation of an urban inner elite that is reflected in extravagant practices … The lexical "list of professions" shows that many bureaucratic titles already existed in the late fourth millennium, as well as names of occupational specialists and community officials. Few of these, however, can be described as privileged elites. In all periods, these Mesopotamian elites, which included high temple officials, private landowners, community elders, and wealthy traders as well as high military and administrative officials, however numerous they may have been, formed a minuscule percentage of the population …
The formation and maintenance of elites, and then of elites within elites, lie at the heart of civilizations: inequality is fundamental. For these two ancient civilizations, the option of equality or of a serious search for an integrating "moral economy" hardly existed. Cosmological elaborations and "political economies" are among the features that can distinguish civilizations from non-civilizations. The formation and entrenchment of such inequalities set the evolutionary trajectory toward civilization apart from trajectories that led to less differentiated and stratified societies …
High Culture:
… The distinctive achievement of archaic civilizations is as much to transform the meaning of wealth as to create more wealth. Elites control symbolic resources in such a way as to make them meaningful only when it is they who exploit them. This appropriation of meaning is complementary to, and at least as important as, other legitimations available to controlling individuals or groups. There is also the “religious" affirmation that cosmic order is maintained only by the activities of leaders, typically of the king and the central priestly officiants or, if religious imperatives are acted out in the wider world, of the military.
These elite activities are characterized by the massive appropriation of material resources, which are put to use in the enduring forms characteristic of ancient states. Such resources are due to the ruler and elite because they are the carriers of exclusive and expensive cultural meanings that require such exactions for their maintenance and development. Elites, as the principal human protagonists and prime communicants to the deities who are the supreme members of the total society, require the highest products of culture. High culture … [is] the essential locus, in which order exploits wealth for legitimacy. Here, high culture becomes self-motivating and self-sustaining, while its meaning-bearing acquires a measure of autonomy through the expertise and internal discourse of the specialists who maintain it …
… We take high culture to be characteristic of civilizations rather than simply of states, and we see the boundary between one form of high culture subscribed to by local elites and another as the boundary between one civilization and another. We define high culture as the production and consumption of aesthetic items under the control, and for the benefit of, the inner elite of a civilization, including the ruler and the gods. The phrase "aesthetic items”, rather than “works of art”, is intended to encompass a wide range of domains including visual art, visual, verbal, and musical performance, garments, perfumes, and the most highly prized food and drink …
… The aesthetic character of high culture is a powerful legitimizing force, because works of art and architecture involve great material outlays, and often or mostly require activities that can neither be expected of the consumers nor provide directly for more than a small proportion of society …
[M]itigations of the divisions introduced by high culture do not alter the fact that the phenomenon itself necessarily encompasses only a small proportion of society, and that its prime intent is to remain restricted. Moreover, in the absence of advanced technology or gross exploitation of outsiders, the production of elite high culture adversely affects the material culture and living standards of the rest. Thus, high culture contains an inner dynamic and a paradox: it seeks to legitimize the whole order of society, along with the role of the elite, as cosmologically just. If it is to do so without simply imposing authority from above, it must offer real or perceived benefits to the rest of society, but those who count most in perceiving the benefits are once again the elite …
…. Although the changes of the late fourth millennium built on what came before, the transformation of art, the introduction of writing, and the centralization of symbolic structures all suggest that new meanings and values were arising from the cauldron of state formation. We further infer that the evolution of centralized government and an inner elite was seen as having the mission of enhancing the new order through its exploitation of the wealth it created. In the new social and cultural hierarchy, the invention and elaboration of high culture become self-legitimizing …
… The centrality of artistic forms was reinforced by the way in which they defined the cosmos and implied its maintenance, celebrating the world's order and arranging it into hierarchies in which god and king were central. Somewhat paradoxically, even the elite play a relatively modest role in early works. This reticence may have a legitimizing force: what are most significant are the gods, the cosmos, and the king. These essential components can be seen as important for all of society and not just the elite, even though the rest could not have had access to the objects that codified these conceptions. Probably few of them were aware of much of what the artistic hierarchies and system of decorum implied …
… State formation, legitimation, and hierarchization were thus played out in art …
… The integrated artistic system acquired its own momentum and detailed execution was in the hands of sub-elites rather than central elites. Nonetheless, the high-cultural complex was so important that the main elite must have participated in changes.
The general development … was toward ever more extravagant and elaborate monuments for the king and for a diminishing proportion of the inner elite …
… As before, those outside the inner elite appear not to have had a significant historical role. What becomes visible is the existence of different factions within the elite …
Conclusion:
In the rapid crystallization of states in [these] regions, we see the rise of a new kind of order that reformulated the cosmos so that a new form of leadership and the principle of hierarchization were proper to the continuance of that cosmos. In all aspects, from the material and economic to the religious, the institutionalization, continuance, and, on occasion, expansion of the new order are the essential tasks of the leaders.
Although this ideological principle of order evolves or is invented in [these] civilizations, in Egypt the cosmos is firmly connected to one head of state and one organized system of values and beliefs; office and values are inextricably linked … the artistic forms are maintained for as long as the civilization.
In Mesopotamia there was no single political system, but a strong cultural sense of unity was manifest in the material culture and in standardized language and school curriculum. In part, this order was originally imposed because of the necessity to keep track of people and commodities, which is the logical outcome of trajectories toward differentiated societies that result in centralized administrative institutions. Nevertheless, the early trends toward standardization of written expression across separate and independent city-states and the counterfactual conception that there should be political unity in the land bespeak the existence of an overarching cultural sphere of interaction that cannot be reduced to economics.
Order is more than a political necessity. It is the logic of a new way of thinking about society and about the cosmos, one that justifies the association of people who are not kin, especially those in the service of the inner elite, and establishes the principle of stratification and of limited access to wealth.
Insofar as order itself creates a "natural" progression toward increased order, complexity, and hierarchy, especially in its high-cultural manifestations, it must exploit wealth for this self-enhancement; it cannot be generalized to everyone.
Wealth, together with its restriction to certain groups, is one of the most obvious facts of civilization. The acceptance of agreed measures of wealth and the creation of storable and to some extent convertible forms of it transform its social potential. The move toward imperishable forms is especially significant … Wealth is displayed, and such displays require further stratification because it is obtained through the labor of others, from networks in which the negotiants are not kin, or from organizing the procurement of materials, some of them from remote regions, on a scale not feasible for kin groups alone. Wealth therefore requires new codes of communication that establish the ability to trade with foreigners and connect these distant people in a community of interests. Such activities assume a scale and importance hardly seen outside complex societies …
The internal elaboration of order and its exploitation of and expression through wealth involve significant legitimation. The ruling elite must return benefits to the rest and to posterity. This return is made in matters of war and defense, economic security, and legal procedures, but above all in perpetuating the cultural patterns that establish and maintain order. These patterns include sacred rites, which may sometimes be the irreducible focus of elite activities, but they also extend to the entire high-cultural complex within which the rites have meaning. Kings and rulers must show their concern with the whole population by promulgating "laws" and edicts that present such concerns and by staging events in which spectacle and ceremony define the state's role. Through the common definition and labor of ruler and ruled, the arenas of temple, palace, city, and country in which the ruling elite act out their role, their concerns, and their privileges are constructed as interlocking representations and enactments of the cosmos and its maintenance. All these activities emphasize the dispersive ties between ruler and ruled, interweaving order, wealth, and legitimacy into the civilization’s fabric. What they do not do is enact any legitimizing requirement that the elite redistribute the wealth created by order throughout society.
We have insisted on the utility of employing the term "state" in the sense it took on in the European Renaissance: as the central, governing institution and social form in a differentiated, stratified society in which rank and status are only partly determined through kinship. We use "civilization" to denote the overarching social order in which state governance exists and is legitimized … [T]here has been far more study of obvious matters of political control and economic differentiation in ancient states than of what mattered most to those who led and motivated those states: cosmologies …
… Egyptian ideology focused on one or two centers, the administrative and religious capitals that were sometimes the same and sometimes not, and strongly on the frontier … The ultimate defining concern was with the dualities of Egypt and with what was within the Egyptian world and what was not. This interest in demarcations and boundaries that responded to the Egyptian environment was elevated into a general principle, powerfully visible in the architecture and iconography of temples. Temples formed microcosms, enacting and symbolically encapsulating in nested layers a model of the order they defended and celebrated … so that gods encompassed the land. Yet, just as the model of the temple dominated the diversity of gods, so the centralizing impetus dominated tendencies to regional variety.
The Source:
John Baines and Norman Yoffee, 'Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia’, in Archaic States edited by Gary M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus, School of American Research 1998 [pp. 199-260]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.