Cleopatra and the Peasant, by Eugene Delacroix (Date: 1838)
[I will show you how elites and peasants in ancient administered societies made a π deal..]
In this post I commence a movement towards a topic of El Dorado proportions, the emergence of ‘the state’ between 2000 BC and 1000 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
As an introduction, I will outline my priorities and propose a few desirable shortcuts that will make the topic manageable. I will also try to whet your appetite by quoting lively encapsulating insights from experts in the fields of ancient state formation.
Firstly, I prioritise a quotation about method and history from one the theorists most often referred to in scholarly historical debates about ancient state formation.
“The painting of a historical backcloth cannot possibly be a matter of mere description: reality is so rich and diverse that no unselective description could even be begun, let alone completed. Instead, one chooses the crucial and elementary factors operative in human history, selected to the best of one's judgement, and then works out their joint implications. If the resulting picture fits the available record and highlights the relevant questions, well and good. If not, further tinkering with the premisses is evidently required. The method is in principle very simple; its implementation is not. If this be the method, in what way does it differ from theories or models in any other field? There is something here which is distinctively historical: the sequence or order in which new important elements are added to the model is a matter of recorded or surmised fact, not just of logical convenience. Food production, political centralisation, the division of labour, literacy, science, intellectual liberalisation, appear in a certain historic sequence. They do so because some at least of the later developments in human history seem to presuppose the earlier ones, and could not have preceded them. Human history is a play in which the cast tends to increase over time and within which constraints seem to be imposed on the order in which the characters appear. The theorist of human society cannot introduce them in any old order at will. Some changes are at least relatively irreversible: agriculture, centralisation, literacy, science can of course disappear in areas where they were once established, and occasionally such regressions do occur; but, by and large, there does seem to be a kind of overall cumulativeness.” [Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, University of Chicago Press 1989, pp. 13-14]
Recap
Of my nine historical types of society, five are said to be governed by states.
These are
the administered society (type 4, it slowly became the first state),
the peripheralised society (type 6 core-periphery),
the stratified society (type 7 European status polities of the middle ages),
the free society (type 8 modern capitalist democracy),
and the elitist society (type 9 rest-of-the-world societies that have still not crossed the threshold to modernity despite my how-to recommendations).
For now I will keep readers guessing about where contemporary China fits. My type 10 society is the future (decentred state) society in which governance will be assisted by artificial intelligence. Type 10 cannot be comprehended without knowledge of the whole history of society, and, not least, the individualised type 1 prehistory society.
Explanations of types 4, 6, and 7 are required in order to understand the early modern (seventeenth century) breakthrough to a new ‘functionally differentiated’ modern society (type 8), whose characteristic feature is the decentring of the state. Knowledge of the earlier societies is also needed in order for me to fully explain the reasons for the pressures of political overload that the modern type of society is facing today.
Introduction
Until we are ready conceptually and empirically to observe the modern decentring of the state and the nature of its contemporary extinction crisis I will employ a classical definition of the state as the organisation of organisations with an identifiable (if sometimes symbolic or divinely conceptualised) centre of power, which for most of history has been manifested as an apex person, usually a king or emperor.
The emphases are on ‘centre’, ‘power’, ‘administration’, and ‘organisation’. I have already introduced a non-state society, Republican Rome, which possessed a system of governance rather an organisation of governance, and lacked a single centre of power.
I have not yet explained type 3 ‘person over group’ societies, which are usually referred to as chiefdoms. Unlike type 2 ‘group over person’ hunter gatherer societies the chiefdoms centralised power. In some ways the dynamics of chiefdoms resemble the dynamics of the early states in that they were similarly in continual flux as chiefs competed with one another, absorbed each other, and expelled each other. One of our loyal Social Science Files subscribers, Michael Mann, captures the condition vividly:
“Locality can be played off against locality, client against client, clan against village, chiefs, elders, bigmen, and so forth, against people. It is in this multilayered, decentralised struggle that the chief can exploit his centrality. But on the other hand, the client chiefs can play the same game. The monarch must bring them to court, to exercise personal control over them. But now they, too, acquire the advantage of centralisation. It is not a way forward to the institutions of the state, but to an endless cycle of intriguing aspirant rulers, the rise of a formidable despot, and the collapse of his or his son’s ‘empire’ in the face of a rebellion of intriguing chiefs.” [Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, Cambridge University Press 1986]
One may care to see chiefdoms—or their local equivalents in Mesopotamia—as, in a sense, the origin of states. But things are not quite so simple.
“In none [of the archaic states examined—the Maya, Zapotec, Central Mexican, Andean, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Aegean] did a group of chiefdoms grow into a group of “city-states”. Rather, the state formed in the context of a group of competing chiefdoms when one of those chiefdoms succeeded in subjugating its neighbours, turning them into the provinces of a larger, unitary state. … I see no mechanism by which a group of chiefdoms can evolve into a group of tiny statelets. A state is not just a chiefdom that has received an injection of growth hormones. It is a large polity, each of whose provinces was a former chiefdom, forged together by deliberate political and territorial reorganisation rather than simple growth.” [Joyce Marcus, ‘The peaks and valleys of ancient states: An extension of the dynamic model’, in M. Feinman and J. Marcus, eds., Archaic States, School of American Research Press, New Mexico 1998, pp. 91–92.]
Two points should be kept in mind. Chiefdoms were centralised but they lacked the administrative organisation that is the defining feature of a state. A ‘state’ forms when the mechanisms of society’s governance are centralised as hierarchical organisations for the administration of power within a territory. In my terminology, the earliest form of state represents the ‘centre over society’. The ‘core is born’ as an organisation circle within the circle of society, i.e. structurally separate from society while within society. My type 4 is called ‘administrative differentiation’ because administration of society is differentiated from all other human actions and interactions in society, and also because administrative centres become (perhaps rapidly) differentiated from each other within the ‘core’ circle—for example, administrative organisations responsible separately for agriculture, infrastructure, army, tax, and king’s household are created.
The second point is the sheer multi-millennial time scale of change, a factor that is interwoven with the underlying evolutionary reason for state formation and military defence of localities and routes, namely imperatives for organisation-administration that originated in the development of agriculture, with its associated requisites and repercussions for infrastructure building, storage, irrigation, market places, a stable and large controllable sedentary population, and continual technological advance.
Another of our longtime Social Science Files subscribers, Ian Morris, recently wrote:
Village life appeared in the Middle East by 12,500 BCE, domestication by 9500 BCE, and full-blown agriculture over the following two millennia … On the whole, each part of the world followed a roughly similar timetable once it started down the path of growth. It normally took two to four millennia to go from the first intervention in other species’ genomes to permanent farming villages with hundreds of residents. It then took another two to four millennia for agricultural villages to grow into what I call ‘low-end’ states with monarchs, priests, aristocrats, and (usually) writing, and a further 1,500–2,500 years for these to turn into ‘high-end’ empires with tens of millions of subjects and extremely sophisticated elite cultures. … [It] probably makes sense to think of both northern China and Egypt as clusters of separate city-states rather than rickety but unified Agrarias [MGH: Gellner’s term for highly stratified agrarian society with elites ruling over peasants, hence Delacroix’s idyllic painting of Cleopatra trading face to face with a peasant].
In the early first millennium BCE, similar small units (typically with populations under ten thousand, organized around a fortified town) dominated the Levant from the Philistines in the south to the Neo-Hittites in the north. As population grew in the eighth century BCE, Greeks and Italians adopted and adapted similar forms of organization, and throughout the first millennium BCE, city-states flourished in the oases of Central Asia. Their commercial elites often enjoyed more freedom and power than those in Agrarias, their hierarchies were often less rigid, and some enjoyed astonishing cultural creativity. Over the long run, groups of city-states tended to coalesce into larger Agrarias, either because one city-state conquered its peers or because all were conquered from outside; but on the other hand, when an Agraria broke apart (as happened in Egypt and China) it might decompose into dozens of city-states. This cycling back and forth was an important dynamic in the first millennium BCE, but, as we shall see, the long-term trend was very much towards large states absorbing small ones.” [Ian Morris, ‘Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BCE–1350 CE’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the World, edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Oxford University Press 2019, pp. 214-216, 223]
I have quoted Morris at length because in addition to pointing out the astonishing time scales he also provides a handy introduction to some issues I will be dealing with such as the distinction between city states and territorial states, the causal primacy of state formation as a materialistic adaptation (first) and catalyst (second) to agriculture, and the fluidity of state formation and reformation that was also typical of chiefdoms.
An important initial caveat that can be mentioned here is that my classic definition (above) takes for granted that the structural solidity of society’s state is a reflection of organisational routines based on formal legality. Modern states are characteristically continuous, whereas early ancient states were unstable, notwithstanding the longevity of some of them and their relative permanence compared with pre-state chiefdoms. Scholarship on ancient states shows us that many of them remained in an almost perpetual flux of absorption and disintegration alternating with enlargement and integration. Periods of collapse may have been as long as the periods of formation.
Shortcuts
My focus is society rather than state. Therefore I will be spending less time than state theorists and historians do on variations in types of state rule, the mechanics of state rule, disentangling different modes of power, authority, surplus extraction, modes of production, evolving interrelations between elites and between elites and non-elites, sociopolitical mobility within state apparatuses, and so on. These are important and interesting topics that have occupied theoreticians and historians since the 1980s. I read their foundational works while I was a university student in the 1980s.
Here and Now my aims are purposively reductive. In these early states which were so reliant on centrally controlled organisations I am unlikely to find functional whole-state governance systems requiring detailed analysis of interactions between (system) parts. If I can identify a definite, broadly defined state category that is historically concrete (in times and places), well documented and well theorised, presenting a clear empirical pattern and supportive of my simple hypotheses about a type 4 category of society, i.e. one that is synthetically compatible with all other category types (in terms e.g. of definition of society, the universal π calculation, the striving for system even in the absence of system, and the symbols and rules that are functionally equivalent across all society types), then my job is done and we can move on to another category type.
Having said that, there will be areas of overlap between a state-focus and my society-focus. I do need to know how these states were legitimated. Among the state theories there are some compelling explanations, especially regarding the role of religion and the efforts of kings to present themselves as deities or as intermediaries with heavens.
My emphatic interest in the personal-impersonal π calculation inevitably requires me to find relevant examples of early state decision making that arguably demonstrate the π calculation in terms of practical volitional actions for finding the relevant means to ends. As part of these investigations I may propose examples of microlevel attempts to establish abstract system dynamics in place of the usual human-fallible instrumental interactions of a traditional organisational type (for example in ‘systems’ of taxation).
I hope to show how objective and ‘realistic’ we must be when evaluating the social character of the early states in the Mesopotamian area. They are often referred to as the “cradle of civilisation” because of their innovations in writing, religion, laws, architecture, and the scientific and technological innovation and material progress that flowed from the discovery and application of new techniques for production-exchange in agriculture and artisanery, and the new governance techniques.
But these were not ‘nice people’ states. They were in contemporary terms ‘socially’ brutal, exploitative, and unequal states. To use Herbert Spencer’s words, collaboration was compulsory rather than voluntary. Their artistic achievements and legendary personages should not blind us to the ugly patterns and sour actions which were the inevitable accompaniments of imperatives for ordering society in harsh places.
We must balance the exigencies of their time and place against the excellences of their innovations, against their extremist methods of control, and their (allegedly) illegitimate norms for extracting surplus from the weak. If given a choice between egalitarian hunter-gathering, personalistic rule by chiefs, or agricultural exploitation by states, many people freely chose to become or remain peasants under the yoke of states ruled by administrative-militaristic elites. There were indeed slaves, i.e. people for whom such a choice was out of the question. Nevertheless, the scholarly literature on early states in Mesopotamia and the ‘agricultural societies’ which they governed is perhaps principally concerned with explaining elites, peasants, tributes and taxes.
In being ‘society-focused’ I call attention to the distinctiveness of my own approach, which aims to survey the history of differences between types of societies rather than between types of states. My first question for a new classification of ‘type’ is ‘was it really a society?’. The early states often outstretched their society, exerting significant powers and controls by violent and non-violent means over territories that they could not in fact (or as yet) administer, and therefore could not integrate into society. Some or many of the ‘early states’ as defined in the literature were not societies in the terms I employ. They lacked some or all the essential features of bordering-bonding-binding.
Nevertheless so-called ‘city states’ which were the ‘centres’ of these larger and fluid ‘state’ units may well have been very tightly bordered (e.g. with walls), sufficiently well bonded (e.g. by traditions and informal customs or conventions for ‘legitimate’ levels of productive ‘exploitation’ in terms of surplus extraction), and impersonally bound by formal state rules. By excluding states that were not societies I take a bit of a shortcut.
There is an extremely influential widely reproduced diagram drawn by Ernest Gellner which depicts the agrarian society of an early state (‘Agraria’) as a subdivided box with various categories of elites occupying the top horizontal sections. Below are vertically separate boxes of unconnected peasants. Gellner called it a ‘society’, as can be seen in the diagram’s title. But others suggest it could not possibly be a ‘society’ because the concept of ‘society’ presupposes shared ‘norms’. I accept, of course, that the ethics, customs, conventions, and rules of elites and peasants would have differed. Elites and peasants ‘think’ differently because they have different priorities in group or family life and in economic production and exchange. I will argue (a) the vertical linkages between elites and peasants could (or would necessarily) have entailed a degree of clientelism—not as sophisticated as clientelism in Rome, but clientelism nonetheless. I will argue (b) that some utilitarian society-preserving, economy-preserving customs and conventions will have been shared horizontally and vertically across all groups and individuals in the agriculture-dependent and geopolitically-vulnerable early states. Otherwise they would not have been fit to survive, either as states or societies.
Diagram from: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY. 1983 [p. 9]
My concepts and ideas in this post are original under copyright and must be attributed to ©2023 Michael G. Heller
This post is a ‘peer reviewed’ publication
If you have a question or comment contact me at mgs.heller@gmail.com
“Now, let me tell you that if you play dirty” in the Social Sciences today “they [do] catch you”, and “that’s the beginning of intelligence” (inverse paraphr. Douglass North 2003)
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