Composition ‘A’ by Piet Mondrian (Date: 1923)
The Issues
Ancient Mesopotamians did not panic when faced with climate change and its consequences for water flows and soil quality. Rather they adapted. They did not reduce their standard of living or increase the costs of obtaining essential inputs to production. Instead they revolutionised the water technology and water management techniques by raising watercourse banks to protect water reserves, by draining off excess waters after floods and overflows, by distributing water to where it was needed, and by conserving and storing the water that would be required in the future.
Mesopotamians increased the productivity of agriculture by squeezing more from less. In the long run, extending through the 4th and 3rd millennia, Mesopotamians consolidated the greater value to be derived from large scale production units within agricultural estates by exploiting economies of scale in water and then by centralising authority over multiple estates and communities wherever the particularities of local consent or communal enterprise might be obstacles to whole society decision making.
We speak of a time at least 2000 years before Aristotle and economic theory when environments were adverse, when technologies were rudimentary, when transport and communications were slow and arduous, when no mechanisms existed for articulating and representing a diversity of socioeconomic interests, when new knowledge was necessarily concentrated in few minds, and when there could be no such thing as a property right that might be defended with secure and predictable rule of law.
In these circumstances only the development of central administrative organisation could help farmers spread the risks of irrigated cultivation and coordinate dispersed cultivation in varied terrains over large areas. This place and period in my history of society is characterised by administrative imperatives. Only administration enabled efficient allocations of labour and equipment. Only administration could prevent free-riding behaviour. Only administration could reduce the probabilities of risks being disproportionately shouldered by individual households. Only administrators were able to collate information and speedily explain new and more efficient techniques to producers. Only administrators had the training and skill to make new technologies available for widespread use. Only administrators could classify different inputs and outputs. Only administrators could record and compare performance by calculating the ratios of inputs to outputs in order to determine which were the most optimal strategies. Only administrators in central units could conceive, concentrate, and coordinate a society’s potential capabilities for measurement and calculation.
Diagram drawn by Nicholas Postgate
The Facts
The techniques of managed proto-administrative irrigation began on a small scale with little streams sluiced from big streams sluiced from rivers. The first cultivators farmed on narrow strips of land directly alongside the Tigris and Euphrates and their tributaries. Farmers became adept at using animal traction ploughs to carve the long furrows for irrigating the long fields. These saved time and space for efficient sowing and harvesting. With artificial irrigation land could be farmed far more intensively than it would be in rain- or flood-irrigated or dry farming. Proportionally less land was therefore required for subsistence per household and this productivity increase meant that more population settlements could fit in smaller territories.
Nissen explains:
[start quote]
Babylonia was now much more densely settled than any other part of the Near East had ever been in the previous period. This was one result of the necessity to employ irrigation, the basic techniques of which had long been known, but which never previously had to be used so systematically. … there was nonetheless for some considerable time so much water still available that nearly every arable plot had easy and direct access to it.
[end quote]
Over long periods of time, as population density increased and people began living and farming further away from the main water courses, more streams were cut to direct water to outlying fields. There thereby evolved vast networks of irrigation ‘branches’. In order to avoid conflicts, free riding, and to maintain continuous water flow to remoter fields, water courses had to be managed by village rulers and estate administrators. As management needs intensified, there also formed ‘committees’ to coordinate the different institutional stakeholders. Channels needed to be regularly cleaned of vegetation and debris. Crops needed to be rotated. Different crops required different flows of water. Thus irrigation supply was also rotated between properties.
Water rights begin to be documented alongside land rights in registers of inheritance. Named categories of irrigation inspectors were created alongside named categories of agricultural administrators. Together they regulated intersecting activities of ditch building, maintenance and distributive control, entailing mobilisations of the kinds of communalistic labours that had been needed in the construction of large buildings for the assembly of peoples and for the processing, manufacture and storage of goods. Such labour was now used also for the construction of small and medium-size canals.
The change from small or medium to large scale irrigation was prompted both by climate changes and the growth in population density. Population density was in large part the result of more efficient local administration of plentiful water. When water became less plentiful the superior rationality of economies of scale became obvious, without need of theory. As we saw earlier in cited examples of large scale agricultural production and construction of communal buildings, Mesopotamians already had the experience, skills and instinct required for the mobilisation of communalistic labour.
Nissen again:
[start quote]
The organization of labor probably proved extremely useful in the solution of a problem that became increasingly urgent for Babylonia: the growing shortage of water. As we have already seen, in the beginning the recession of the waters, triggered by a mild change in climate, had nothing but beneficial effects. As the recession continued, however, it must finally have had a tremendous effect on an agricultural economy that relied exclusively on artificial irrigation, so that during the Early Dynastic period settlements were no longer scattered over wide areas of the whole country, but assembled along a few water courses. In addition the river courses not only seem to run in a straightened line but, in some cases, water courses branch off from them that are so straight that they resemble, for the first time, lines of canals … artificial canals bringing water to areas that would otherwise have remained waterless. It may be seen as a matter of luck in the development of this area that at the moment when it became necessary to build the sort of huge canal systems that could only be constructed by great collective effort, society had already developed suitable methods for the organization of labor.
[end quote]
Postgate provides support for such claims on technical grounds:
[start quote]
On the purely technical side both irrigation and cultivation are more efficient on a large scale. The construction and maintenance of canals and other water controls are better arranged in bigger units, and the technology of ploughing with teams of oxen favours long furrows, which minimise the number of turns required. This favours a field layout of long narrow strips, which also ensures as many farmers as possible have direct access to the canal banks … Such a layout can be achieved by communal consent, but it is much easier to create and administer as part of a single enterprise. There are also advantages of scale to be reaped from sharing equipment and labour, which can be deployed with more efficiency the larger the estate and the greater its variety of land and crop.
[end quote]
River View with Boat and Sun, by Piet Mondrian (Date: 1907)
The Interpretation
In the circumstances just described rules for water were integrated in administrative structures. In absence of formal laws, administration was, in effect, ‘the law’. Rules took on qualities of laws. The networks for managing water entailed a considerable centralisation of social organisation, and, in the larger context of agricultural administration based on the template estate structures, became the driving force in the emergence of nucleated cores of governance. This is hardly surprising given that emergent societies were so thoroughly dependent on improvement in their economic livelihoods. Much later, legal codes would pay close attention to the relation between crop loss and water management success or failure in terms of the legality of risk.
When agriculture, administration, and society had become highly integrated phenomena the scale of irrigation enterprises could no longer be purely local. Canal building had to keep pace with agricultural expansion. Some irrigation projects were so large that they were preconditioned by and may have been causative of centralised political control over a large area, i.e. the ‘administrative unification’ of some core central settlements. For economic reasons it made sense that dykes and watercourses be lengthened and broadened to cross over existing polity and territorial borders.
Local communalistic enterprise could be drawn on per location for labour. ‘Socially’ obligatory communal labour—eventually given in exchange for highly regulated and standardised food distributions, a ‘payment’ not best described as exploitative corvée labour—had been conventional practice for thousands of years and was ingrained as an expectation of human conduct. Compulsory cooperation in exchange for rations of food had facilitated the emergence of template estates. We can take for granted that administrators of template centres later governed by the kings would have understood their social obligations and self-interest well enough to ensure that the labour duties would not be so onerous as to give rise to injury, social disorder or depopulation. The freedom of labour to leave a bad π settlement was, we assume, a constant.
On the other hand, perceptions of the self-identifying separateness of one society as administratively independent from another society could be overcome only through a mutually advantageous form of rulership by collaboration and unification, or by disadvantageous subordination. Big irrigation had geopolitical consequences.
Postgate explains why “the ultimate dyke” was the “border dyke”:
[start quote]
Larger projects, such as the construction of a massive [irrigation canal] regulator [a control device to raise water to required levels], were of sufficient importance to be celebrated in the formal inscriptions of the Pre-Sargonic [dynasties]. Really major schemes, involving the redirection of the Euphrates or Tigris, are mentioned in royal inscriptions … only after the Pre-Sargonic period, and presuppose political control of a large area. … Projects spanning more than one of the original [polity nuclei] depended on the administrative unification of the plain, or on the collaborative subordination of local interests to the larger common benefit.
[end quote]
If one believes ‘administration’ begins on a small scale then the concept of ‘administration’ starts to be relevant for small settlement householder and estate contexts before the centralised multi-settlement governance cores become firmly established. The organisational dynamic is exactly the same. The changes lie in the scale, intensity, and complexity. The chain of causality that I think we can easily accept is that administration’s technical and technological advances, as presented so far, were most clearly motivated by the increasing size and complexity of wealth producing agricultural economies in changing environments, and, in that context, irrigation was just one vector of sociopolitical change associated with agricultural intensification. Elaborate dynastic rulership in advanced densely populated settlement cores was a consequence of the success of longstanding estate-based agricultural development, while great waterworks—which were boat transport highways as well as irrigators of agricultural lands— were a consequence of both.
Another consequence of administering water was the additional spur it gave to mathematical measuring and calculation in the context of economies of scale, of crop yields, of rates of production, and of the ratios of rations to returns on labour. We will turn to the math matters soon. Before leaving the topics of agricultural development we need first, and briefly, to consider the big issue of sociopolitical causation.
Irrigation Ditch with Mature Willow by Piet Mondrian (Date: 1900)
The Theories
In the late 1950s a debate arose between two one-sided causality arguments. It is still of interest today because both sides were partly wrong and partly right by virtue of the fact that the relationships between irrigation and governance were, in reality, bi-causal. Parts of the truth are to be found in both arguments simultaneously. And another important part of the truth was simultaneously absent in both arguments.
The terms in which the debate were interpreted were starkly drawn, not least because the initiating author, Karl A. Wittfogel, chose to title his 1957 book Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Before we credit Wittfogel’s worthwhile insight into irrigation-governance causalities we must first say why neither ‘despotism’ nor ‘total power’ are credible in the Mesopotamian context. These terms are too extreme given what is known of Mesopotamian give-and-take politics in the context of
legitimation-consciousness in light of communalistic imperatives;
political π disciplines engendered by long run administrative perspectives;
rival sources of competing power—notably the long-lasting political jostling between estate administrator-managers and royal households which Steinkeller recently theorised and which we explore again later in the context of Ur III.
Uncontroversial contemporary analyses of Mesopotamian society based on a further 60 years of archeological-textual-philological research suggest there is little evidence for characterising Mesopotamia’s typical form of rulership as despotism defined as ‘absolute power exercised in a cruel and oppressive manner’ [dict.]. By our standards no rulership 4000 years ago could be described as fair and just let alone democratic.
Yet there were competing sources of power, constraints on power, and π imperatives to ‘satisfice’ populations upon whose labour and peaceableness all depended.
It is possible that monumental canal-building which compulsorily mobilised vast numbers of labourers recruited by dynastic rulers of nuclear settlements with large agricultural hinterlands might, in the prevailing relatively primitive sociopolitical conditions, have required a curtailment of ‘freedom’ that stretched legitimation codes to breaking point. Intra-society conflict or violence that might well be expected in degrees ranging from slaughter to subjugation or insurrection to depopulation cannot in fact be found in the body of evidence presented today by the archeological record. Recent literature does suggest there were low levels of routinised or ritual violence in ancient Egyptian governance. However, no such claims are made for Mesopotamia.
In what ways, then, does Wittfogel’s thesis remain a worthy scholarly contribution to debates about irrigation governance? We can single out the obvious truth of one of his claims, and, also, the general productivity of the sociological debate. In a caricature summary the ‘first position’ in that debate states that irrigation management required despotism and total power, and that despotism was the byproduct of irrigation. The ‘second position’ states that despotism existed before the irrigation, and the irrigation was the product of the despotism. In reality authors on both sides presented nuanced arguments. All (Wittfogel included) acknowledged the simultaneity of smaller-scale locally managed irrigation works and large centralised irrigation structures. Both sides emphasised numerous ‘civilisational’ advances that coevolved and codetermined with ‘despotic’ bureaucracy. Most authors (Wittfogel included) substituted words like “bureaucracy” for “despotism”, employing a meaning akin to central control (which is not thereby not intrinsically ‘despotic’) or “complexity” (a term which is meaningless for ‘despotism’). So, when the second position argues for positions—such as the role of decentralised water management—that the first position included as a preliminary to the first position, one must ask whether there was any basis for ‘argument’ at all.
Postgate, who is himself crystal clear about the theoretical advantages and empirical realities of (the eventual) Mesopotamian imperatives giving rise to centralised control of large-scale irrigation works, nevertheless fashionably takes sides against Wittfogel:
[start quote]
[Wittfogel attributed] the increased complexity of such societies to the managerial imperatives imposed by the need to organise a large-scale irrigation system. This is a seductive hypothesis, and we shall see that in Mesopotamia large institutions could profit from the regime of the rivers; but it is no longer fashionable to see the need to administer irrigation as the chief formative influence … closer inspection of the third-millennium evidence does suggest that the irrigation system was in the hands of the traditional local authorities, not … of a newer political order.
[end quote]
Liverani, who is unfashionably sympathetic to Wittfogel’s insights, and defends Wittfogel against the large number of exaggerating or misattributing critics, wrote:
[start quote]
By now the middle position has made progress, which assigns an important role to the central state in the construction of the great networks of canals, and leaves their administration to the functionaries of the local communities.
[end quote]
The observation about different organisational imperatives applied to construction and management makes a lot of sense. But it does not clear up questions concerning the direction or sequence of causation from small decentralised irrigation to large centralised irrigation in either management and construction. Liverani claims that administrative texts and texts for training scribes and administrators “show without any margin of doubt how the digging of the canals was an operation carried out by the [central] administration”. He cites, in support of Wittfogel, studies of 3rd millennium Larsa—close to Uruk—whose ruling administrative apparatus included an ‘Irrigation Office’ for the recruitment of canal labourers for construction and maintenance.
For a more sharply drawn polarity in terms of concepts and timing we need to go back to 1959, when Robert McCormick Adams attacked Wittfogel’s (1957) thesis.
[start quote]
To the extent that large-scale irrigation is found to have begun very early, its social requirements may be adduced as a convincing explanation for the origin of [centralised administration] … Our view is firmly to the contrary … the introduction of great irrigation networks was more a “consequence” than a “cause” of the appearance of dynastic … organizations …
[end quote]
In a rejoinder to Adams’s categorical cause-consequence declaration Liverani says:
[start quote]
I think one could say, less extremely, that the connection between an agricultural surplus and development of settlements exists, but not in a uni-directional sense (hydraulic cause, urban effect) but rather as a progressive growth with reciprocal influence, because dynastic states would not occur without growth based on intensified agricultural production having already taken place.
[end quote]
This is, in our view, the most reasonable position. There begins to emerge a plausible chain of causation. On the basis of evidence presented above, it was agriculture that drove the need for irrigation. And, in the most general causative terms it was agriculture and irrigation combined that exerted phenomenal day-by-day pressure for ever more organisationally and hierarchically complex and sophisticated administration. Over time these pressures scaled up the locus of economic governance from local to central settlement points. We may call this a ‘natural’ polity evolution given the developments in agricultural production and consequent changes in irrigation imperatives.
Now let us see what Wittfogel himself argued in the good sections of his book:
[start quote]
Distinguishing as I do between a farming economy that involves small-scale irrigation (hydro-agriculture) and one that involves large-scale and government-managed works of irrigation and flood control (hydraulic agriculture), I came to believe that the designations ‘hydraulic society’ and 'hydraulic civilisation’ express more appropriately than the traditional terms the peculiarities of the order under discussion. …
Primitive man has known water-deficient regions since time immemorial; but while he depended on gathering, hunting, and fishing, he had little need for planned water control. Only after he learned to utilise the reproductive processes of plant life did he begin to appreciate the agricultural possibilities of dry areas, which contained sources of water supply other than on-the-spot rainfall. Only then did he begin to manipulate the newly discovered qualities of the old setting through small-scale irrigation farming (hydro-agriculture) and/or large-scale and government-directed farming (hydraulic agriculture). Only then did the opportunity arise for despotic patterns of government and society. …
… A large quantity of water can be channeled and kept within bounds only by the use of mass labor; and this mass labor must be coordinated, disciplined, and led. Thus a number of farmers eager to conquer arid lowlands and plains are forced to invoke the organizational devices which—on the basis of pre-machine technology—offer the one chance of success: they must work in cooperation with their fellows and subordinate themselves to a directing authority. Again history followed no unilinear course dictated by unavoidable necessity. There were recognised alternatives; and those who were faced with them were able to make a genuine choice. But whatever their decisions, they were made within a framework that offered only a limited number of workable possibilities. Thus the changeover to hydraulic agriculture, or its rejection, was not without order or direction. The various decisions displayed regularities in conditioning and motivation. But the relative equality of the original choices did not imply a relative equality in the final results. The majority of all hunters, fishermen, and rainfall farmers who preserved their traditional way of life were reduced to insignificance, if they were not completely annihilated. …
… It is no accident that among all sedentary peoples the pioneers of hydraulic agriculture and statecraft were the first to develop rational systems of counting and writing. It is no accident either that the records of hydraulic society covered not only the limited areas of single cities or city states, of royal domains or feudal manors, but the towns and villages of entire nations and empires. The masters of hydraulic society were great builders because they were great organisers; and they were great organisers because they were great record keepers.
[end quote]
As can be seen Wittfogel was not unaware of small scale locally managed irrigation. And he clearly admired the civilisational achievements of his so-called ‘despots’. He might have avoided much of the criticism if he had he termed the emergent society ‘Administered Society’ and offered a nuanced sociological classification of rulers.
Surprisingly I find myself partially in sympathy with the ‘first position’ (above). The second position was wrong to claim that the Wittfogel thesis ignores local small scale irrigation realities—which, we should note, might themselves have been ‘despotic’ in a primitive personalistic age when chiefdoms remained alive and kicking.
A more important and consequential reason for supporting Wittfogel is that the critique by Adams commits a greater error than any found in Wittfogel. Adams was mistaken in reversing the causality. Great irrigation works were not a consequence of centralised organisation. Over a very long period agriculture and irrigation combined functionally in a process of trial and error to create the organisational-administrative dynamics that made centralised ‘core’ governance feasible and desirable.
Wittfogel played with fire when he used terms like ‘despotism’, ‘total power’, and ‘hydraulic’ to describe fledgling governance forms and mechanisms that settlements experimented with while on a long road to becoming administered societies. He was wrong also to overemphasise the role of water and irrigation per se. Wittfogel was, however, correct in emphasising the evolutionary impulse of humans to plan, control, and organise. He was similarly accurate when pointing out that humans who did not follow that impulse were doomed to extinction or stagnation. Wittfogel was right — in terms of his effort to identify the primal origins and evolution of advanced societies — to view ancient Mesopotamians first and foremost as ‘builders’ and ‘organisers’.
Adams, who gives the impression of attributing primary causal force to a preexisting “unique total patterning of every culture” was therefore mistaken in supposing that dynastic organisation was a precondition of big irrigation. Adams downplayed the need for organisation in small-scale irrigation while contradictorily conceding the effect of small scale irrigation on stratification, differentiation, and “the growth of militarism”. Adams apparently could not conceive of a gradual scaling up of irrigation and agriculture as society’s impetus for learning about the possibilities offered by large scale central governance. There was, I believe, a two-way causal interaction between economy and governance. Techniques of central governance were suggested in the process of accumulating knowledge gained in economic activities which, as we will soon examine, applied pressure on societies to administer and thereby govern differently.
There is a strong case to be made for the existence of a mechanical cause and effect in the evolutionary ‘ratcheting up’ of estate organisation with irrigation organisation whereby agriculture finds functional symbiosis with core central governance.
There is much that is tedious and wrong in Wittfogel’s full treatise. But it was tremendously influential. I have homed in on its primary and simple thesis stated on a mere handful of pages and found it to be correct. From this vantage point it can be seen that the distinction critics of Wittfogel tend to focus on — between small and large irrigation — is simply a false dichotomy, a red herring. Both the small/local and the large/central required management, therefore both equally required the creation or at least seasonal activation of organisations, and the differences lie only in the comparative seniority of the director (assessed by the greater or lesser quantity of ‘directed’ persons) and the depth or shallowness of the administrative hierarchies. The larger construction works managed by estates and dynasties, and documented after the invention of writing, were uppermost points on the learning curve, while village water management projects were incremental initiations on a slowly ascending learning curve. The distinction between the two is a ‘red herring’ because in either case what we are witnessing is a definite departure from type 2 forager and type 3 chiefdom or householder societies, and a leap toward type 4 administered society. The leap is energised considerably by the intense agricultural need to irrigate.
We have contemplated a point in time when so-called ‘egalitarian’ foraging was becoming extinct, while the Greek so-called ‘democratic’ idyl was an inconceivable distant future. Local estate management of small and medium level irrigation was established practice long before massive waterworks that seemed to demand direct centralised control by paramount rulers, not least when they required a redrawing of existing land rights and society’s borders. During intensive large scale constructions administrators with specialised canal construction knowledge were ‘in charge’.
Over the course of millennia small fed into large in a reverse image of the river whose branches feed into multitudes of small channels. The sociopolitical effect worked in the other direction. The techniques learned in managing branches and settlements growing one into another alongside the water courses fed into methods for managing the main river, the great ‘source’, the force governing societies. Material forces drove political forces to organise society to an unprecedented levels, and the organising led to unprecedented levels of learning about societal governance. Administered societies were the only societies among nine types in history to be economically ‘determined’.
The [start quote] [end quote] are included for the benefit of audio app listeners.
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