Establishing Modus Vivendi with a new political ancient history paradigm
In Cambridge World History Vol 3 'Early Cities' [pub. 2015]
Carla Sinopoli , Roderick Mcintosh, Ian Morris, and Alex Knodell wrote:
Over the last few decades, archaeological and historical research in many regions of the world has challenged long-standing ideas concerning the nature and organization of ancient states and cities. Scholars have come to recognize the limits of hierarchy and to acknowledge that ancient urban societies varied considerably in scale, physical form, social composition, and governance.
Specifically, research has questioned the accepted wisdom that early cities were inevitably characterized by straightforward, linear hierarchies of control – with a mass of subjects on the bottom administered by a small number of elites at the top. They have also questioned whether the presence of a specific assemblage of architectural forms (for example, palace buildings, central temples, city walls) is required to make an urban place. And as scholars have come to recognize that ancient communities had created very different kinds of urban forms in Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, this has called into question understandings of even the archetypal hierarchical early cities of Mesopotamia, where scholarship has expanded from a focus on palaces and temples to also consider the power and forms of authority exercised by various councils and assemblies, and/or diverse economic, kin, or other social groups. The result has been both a broadening of perspectives on ancient urbanism and new understandings of the limits of hierarchy …
… [We] draw on our case studies and other recent research to consider alternate ways of being urban and to advocate for models of urbanism that recognize the existence of a broad range of organizational structures and institutions – both vertical and horizontal – through which power could be distributed in early cities. We begin by briefly reviewing how it is that the kinds of cities that we address came to be viewed as aberrant or somehow less than other more “typical” ancient cities.
How is it that archaeological scholarship came to argue that (with the exception of the exceptional Greeks), ancient cities: (1) must have been ruled by kings who reside in elaborate palaces and belong to a restricted hereditary elite; (2) must have had central and powerful religious institutions (that is, state religions); and (3) must have been governed by rigid administrative hierarchies? Certainly, many ancient cities had all these features; but many others did not …
… [We] seek not to reargue old debates but instead to recontextualize and broaden our perspectives on early cities. We do this by addressing the limits of hierarchy and the existence, and indeed long-lived success, of other ways of being urban – and the specific times, places, scales, and forms in which some of those other urban places emerged, persisted, or failed …
Other ways of being urban: distributed power in early cities:
… Many of the cities discussed … were places where power was distributed in ways that worked to challenge or undercut straightforward linear hierarchies of authority and administrative control. This is not to say that hierarchy was not recognized or did not exist in the Greek city-states, the Indus world, or the African clustered cities that are the focus of [our] chapters. Various social, economic, and ideological hierarchies and inequalities most certainly were operative in all of these places and no doubt profoundly shaped and differentially affected the experiences of diverse urban residents (that is, non(male)-citizens, enslaved individuals and communities, gendered groups and other ranked social and/or economic groups) within each of these settings.
Thus, it is not the absence of linear structures of authority or hierarchy that characterized these cities, but the existence of alternative and distinctive mechanisms that prevented or constrained hierarchical structures from becoming the sole or primary exercisers of diverse forms of power …
[regional examples given here]
… These examples all point toward the multiple ways that ancient societies constructed and inhabited urban places, and they open the door to comparative archaeological and historical scholarship that seeks to understand the diverse routes and factors that led communities in various regions of the world to build large, complex, and economically, socially, and functionally differentiated residential centers – or cities. Each of the three chapters in this section discusses contexts in which power – economic, political, ideological, military – was variously distributed, such that no single kin or social group could effectively dominate the individual cities they resided in or the polities of which these cities were a part …
Tensions and competition no doubt existed among the diverse kin groups and communities that constituted Greek, West African, and Indus cities, as they engaged in commerce, agricultural and craft production, diplomacy, sanctioned violence, and local, regional, and interregional interactions. In such urban places, a variety of social and ideological mechanisms would have been required to mitigate competition and limit the accumulation of wealth and resources that could have contributed to the increasing power of one or another corporate group, or the subjugation of others. Viewed from within this framework, we might point to the lack of evidence for elite burials in the Indus cities and the limited (but far from insignificant) range of material expressions of wealth and status differences as being the result of political and religious ideologies that discouraged the materialization of the hierarchies that did exist – part of an active and self-conscious political strategy that worked to maintain a non-hierarchical political structure (or – perhaps, more accurately – a political structure that sought to ideologically render hierarchy less visible), rather than as evidence for the absence of political institutions.
It is also important to point out that large-scale cooperation and coordinated urban activities were not precluded by the simultaneous coexistence of multiple loci of distributed power. We noted above the city walls of Jennejeno. In some Greek cities, citizens collaborated to form a government that built impressive urban monuments, created legal and juridical structures, launched major maritime expeditions, and went to war. The builders of Indus cities coordinated labor to construct and for centuries maintain massive public works, and were able to develop and agree upon largescale standardized systems of weights and measures (and economic values) that allowed for economic interactions within and between Indus settlements, over enormous distances and involving numerous categories of commodities.
In sum, these urban places were successful and their residents developed organizational structures and accommodations that allowed them to endure for many centuries. Indeed, their success and resilience may well have been fostered by the lack of rigidity in their organizational structures and relations, which allowed individual households, neighborhoods, corporate units, and the city as a whole to respond to emerging situations and opportunities with greater ease than in highly bureaucratic administrative structures.
That said, it is not insignificant to note that early Roman emperors typically justified their efforts to dissolve republican institutions during times of crisis by arguing that democratic institutions such as the Roman senate were not sufficiently agile to respond rapidly enough to existential threats, and the slow, consensus-building, consultative democratic process endangered the Roman state and capital during times of political and economic crisis. In the millennia since, many similar claims have been made by many other powerful rulers seeking to centralize power and justify the dissolution of decision-making bodies.
While such arguments clearly have a transparent aggrandizing agenda, they do raise important questions about the limits of structures of distributed power that merit serious consideration [and a] consideration of the constraints and limitations of cities organized around distributed power, addressing both internal and external challenges to the durability and success of these urban forms.
Can distributed power endure?
We take as our premise that the social, political, economic, etc. organization of all early cities entailed some degree of distributed power. Even in the most hierarchical and dictatorial of political systems, rulers cannot (and seldom try to) control all aspects of life, ceding (voluntarily or not) some degree of autonomy to various corporate groups and institutions. And urban residents will inevitably find ways to resist or subvert administrative, economic, or religious hierarchies – avoiding taxes, exchanging surplus food for extra pottery vessels a neighbor may have, worshipping family or household gods rather than at state temples. The distribution of power in urban centers may best be conceived as ranging along a continuum from more centralized to more distributed rather than as an either/or construction. Different realms of urban life may be situated at quite different locations along such a continuum (that is, military defense of urban boundaries may be organized hierarchically even as markets are not), and any city’s overall position likely varied over both long and short time scales and in response to a variety of internal and external factors.
We take as a second premise that not generating hierarchies takes work, and that the long-term durability of distributed power relations requires both ideological commitments and material benefits to the actors involved. The Classical Greek city-states, Indus cities, and West African clustered cities all thrived for many centuries; as we have noted, they were by any measure large and successful cities. Until they were not. Below we consider the range of factors and conditions that may influence the durability of urban systems of distributed power. We focus on questions of scale, resource distribution, and long- and short-term temporal oscillations in production, consumption, and interregional interactions, as they played within the frame of local political histories and political actors. We begin by addressing how urban life itself may create conditions that foster the intensification and formalization of hierarchy, in ways that challenge the effectiveness of non-hierarchical modes of organizing residents and activities …
… As we have noted earlier, even in relatively non-hierarchical cities, it should not be forgotten that urban life was no doubt experienced very differently by citizens as compared to slaves, by women as compared to men, by land-owners as compared to the landless, and by the well-off as compared to the impoverished.
In considering the trajectories of early cities, we might also consider whether cities, as a consequence of being cities, intensify and generate inequalities and hierarchy. In the 1990s, at a conference on Asian cities attended by Sinopoli, Rita Wright – a specialist in Mesopotamian and Indus archaeology – astutely observed that once the inhabitants of the densely packed houses in Indus cities had invented and adopted indoor toilets, which fed to sewer drains that ran through the cities’ streets, they also created the necessity for people to clean those sewers so that the urban infrastructure could continue to function. Sewer cleaners, trash collectors, tanners – one can easily identify numerous kinds of undesirable occupations that would be required to maintain dense urban places (though perhaps less so in the more dispersed clustered settlements of West Africa).
Urban life, in other words, may generate its own social hierarchies, which then require new organizational and ideological responses. These hierarchies may be obscured in ideologies of democracy that exclude slaves, resident aliens, and women from participation, allowing for an urban structure that benefits a sizeable portion (but far from all) of their population. Or they may be regulated in non-hierarchical ways and/or by non-centralized self-regulating organizations; here we think of guilds or religiously sanctioned castes such as developed in Early Historic South Asia and which proved tremendously durable and effective in regulating both behavior and local and interregional political and economic interactions. The corporate kin and occupational groups that occupied the various groups of West African clustered cities may have operated in similar ways. Or the “winners” in ancient cities may regulate their emergent underclasses through the creation of new, more centralized and hierarchical administrative structures that undercut earlier distributed modes of organization. And, of course, cities may fail – and residents may, for a wide variety of reasons, “vote with their feet” and walk away from particular urban places or, in rare cases, like the Indus, from urban life entirely.
We have suggested above that cities characterized by distributed power may have greater resilience to some stresses than more hierarchically organized cities, though we have also noted that in other circumstances, they may be more vulnerable. Comparative research on the long- and short-term histories and responses of early cities of diverse organizational forms to various kinds of stresses may allow us to better understand both individual urban trajectories and larger patterns of similarity and difference …
Most important among [the larger research themes are] questions of scale and temporality: including both the frequency and intensity of temporal oscillations affecting a range of domains, from subsistence production to the social, economic, and political relations within and among any city’s diverse communities. Internal challenges to the success of networks of distributed power may come from rapid demographic changes – population growth, reduction, or redistribution – that render unstable existing organizational modes. It is certainly the case that what constitutes “rapid” change may have been quite different in different historical contexts and environmental settings; and it is also likely the case that different urban organizational structures were likely better (and worse) able to respond to such change …
… Numerous external factors may also affect the durability of systems of distributed power. All early cities existed in larger networks of other urban (and non-urban) formations; and all these existed in larger worlds populated by numerous other cultures and societies with which they interacted. In their roles as centers of commerce, early cities were certainly affected by larger regional and “global” networks through which material resources moved, such as the maritime exchange relations that allowed the Classical Greek cities … to grow, thrive, and feed their subjects on crops imported from throughout the Mediterranean. And as we mentioned earlier, the Persian Empire initially gave common cause to fifth-century Greek cities and in the fourth century provided a reason and conduit for the conquests of Alexander; this, as Morris and Knodell report [in their chapter], “drastically changed the politics of power in the Greek world.”
Large-scale threats and crises do of course pose challenges to all early cities – those organized hierarchically and those characterized by nonhierarchical structures of distributed power … Here, we [are] merely … arguing that the comparative study of early cities must take into account ancient cities that look different and were organized differently than our standard (and problematic) inherited model: cities that may have consisted of dispersed settlement mounds without a central core; cities that lacked kings, courts, palaces, and state religions; cities whose residents created systems and structures for leadership, administration, and international relations that were dispersed among diverse interlocking groups, rather than under singular linear systems of rule.
Moreover, we must recognize that cities frequently grouped together as “Greek”, “South Asian”, or “African”, for example, varied markedly in their scale and organization through time. We hope to show that this diversity (both within and between ancient societies) is precisely what makes the comparative study of ancient cities interesting and relevant.
The Source:
Carla M. Sinopoli , Roderick J. Mcintosh, Ian Morris, and Alex R. Knodell, ‘The Distribution of Power: Hierarchy and its Discontents’, in The Cambridge World History, Volume 3: Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE, edited by Norman Yoffee, Cambridge 2015 [pp. 381-393]
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