States-as-Empires From Bronze Age to Iron Age
The Editor’s overview of the Invention of Empire
MGH: For the next couple of weeks I will focus on the origins of states and empires, including some essays in the recent 2-volume Oxford World History of Empire. From an ‘origins’ typology perspective (assuming at least prior identification of ‘egalitarian’ and ‘leadership’ societies), the earliest empires are most illuminating. Therefore, today’s extract is Vol 2’s introduction to these relevant cases.
Peter Fibiger Bang wrote:
… Boasting conquered foes across Mesopotamia down to the Persian Gulf and in the opposite direction, all the way to the Mediterranean, Sargon became legend. Tales and myths accumulated in his name while monarchs celebrated his deeds and sought to step into the shoes of the mighty conqueror, “ruler of the universe”.
Sargon, ruling in the late third millennium BCE, is commonly discussed as the first empire builder in world history. In fact, precious little is known of the realm claimed by Akkade; it appears to us only as a nebulous entity, a very light structure. By this time, the pharaohs had already united the many communities strewn along the Nile Valley under their rule, combining the thrones of both Upper and Lower Egypt. Normally, however, the word “empire”, among Egyptologists, is reserved for periods when the pharaohs attempted to project their power beyond their core dominion, down into Nubia or up toward Palestine. By contrast … Ur III, a geographically much more compact, but administratively firmer entity that followed the dynasty of Akkade [is included in] discussion of early Mesopotamian empire. Where precisely to locate the beginnings of empire between these alternatives is perhaps less significant than recognizing the underlying process.
State- and empire-building became possible when the agricultural population stopped being able to escape the demands of emerging military and ritual specialists. This happened first in the fertile flood valleys of the ancient Near East with the so-called Bronze Age urban revolution, during the fourth and early third millennium BCE. Favorable conditions for irrigated agriculture produced grain yields well above what was possible in other locations and supported growing numbers of people on the land. These in turn constituted a ready supply of labor with which to extend irrigation works further. Irrigation agriculture and population fed on one another in an upward spiral. Soon the population had become too large to maintain itself outside the flood valleys; the peasantry was trapped and open for control.
Historically, populations have been able to resist demands for labor or taxes by moving away: nomads, for instance, or slash-and-burn agriculturalists. The great anthropologist and macro- historian Jack Goody identified a decisive rift between the parts of the Old World that had participated fully in the Bronze Age urban revolution and those that did not. In Sub-Saharan Africa, state-building elites had made little progress because land had been too plentiful and population too sparse. Confronted with their demands, people moved out of reach and on to new territories. When empire finally emerged in Sub-Saharan West Africa, with the adoption of Islam from the North, imperial formations such as the Mali and Songhay and the Sokoto Caliphate may have been geographically very extended, but in terms of imposing effective control they were capable of relatively little. Not so in Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, where priests and military men became able to extract a substantial part of the agricultural production in return for protection from the wrath of warriors and divine beings alike.
In the beginning, this resulted in small, nucleated communities organized around a temple cult and ruling elite, supported by estates, corvée labor, and slaves. But the logic governing the process was expansive and aggregate as elites quickly became locked in competition with each other; the organization of “protection” entailed clear economies of scale. Very early on, the pharaohs managed to extend their sway over a much wider territory, enabling them for years on end to call up the labor of the several thousand peasants required in order to erect the vast and awe-inspiring pyramids. However, within the wider dominions that were forming, local elites continued to control the smaller “temple communities” or city-states (as they are called among scholars of Egypt and Mesopotamia, respectively), while mediating relations to the monarch hovering high above. There was little alternative to local government in a world where communication and transport was by slow — moving sailboat, domesticated animal, or one’ s own feet. Distance, as Braudel remarked, was “the first enemy”, an obstacle to integration against which empires had to wage an “unremitting struggle”. Compulsory cooperation, a term coined by Michael Mann, became a central building block of geographically more extended forms of state power. Local and regional elites took care of most of the nitty-gritty affairs of government in return for a share of the income, the tribute generated by extracting a part of the produce and labor of the subject population.
Distinguishing themselves from the rest of the population, the ruling elites began to develop lifestyles and public rituals that stood out from the simplicity and largely self-sufficient modes of living found among the peasantry. The class of rulers and priests required access to strategic goods, such as the metals necessary for the production of bronze, and they coveted rare and exotic materials. All these things were necessary to the elite for the fabrication of weapons and for employment in the elaborate ceremonies that served to enhance their prestige and appearance while the steep and rigid hierarchical order of society was being enacted and ritually impressed upon the commoners. But if the flood valleys were unusually fertile, they were also uncommonly uniform environments, often lacking in the range of natural resources available. To get access to greater variety, elites had to venture outside the agricultural base. Soon expansion also began to reach out toward the control of trade routes and supply lines of the more strategic and numinous materials. Mounting expeditions to obtain cedars from Lebanon — prized for their tall tree trunks, to be used as columns in monumental building — came to rank among the deeds that every Mesopotamian king should aspire to. More generally, agrarian empire and trade are often discussed as mutually exclusive opposites; but this is a false dichotomy. Imperial elites needed access to markets to transform part of their agricultural wealth into a greater array of products and goods. Empire was a strategy to capture the world’s diversity, in materials as well as in people.
The demand of state-forming elites for distant products even fueled the rise of a thin Afro-Eurasian long-distance trade. Sometimes misleadingly referred to as the Silk Road, the series of overlapping macro-regional commercial networks that slowly came to span pre-industrial Eurasia may perhaps better be labeled as a form of “archaic globalization”, a result of elite ideologies of consumption and far-flung imperial conquest. Under this rubric also belongs slavery, the capture of human labor, sometimes in possession of specialized skills that were not otherwise available to rulers and their elites. Victory in war automatically brought with it captives, and through most of history, the growth of empire often went together with the growth of slavery …
… The Near Eastern world had grown and populations had become denser since the time of Sargon. Several great powers had emerged among a vast number of lesser rulers. This select family of “great kings” was pulled together in mutual recognition and rivalry. The annals of ancient Near Eastern history presents a long catalogue of putative imperial powers … However, behind the vast parade of powers that came and went, a trend toward expansive growth and consolidation was gathering strength, but only slowly. The Bronze Age societies of the Levant still comprised only a few million people and state organizations remained brittle and vulnerable. The twelfth century BCE even saw a period of widespread collapse, especially along the margins. Historians continue to struggle to explain this “dark age”, but the first adaptation of iron for the production of weaponry likely represented a serious challenge to the hold on power for existing state and warrior elites. Iron was far more easily available than bronze alloy, which in addition to copper requires tin, a metal that was only obtainable from a very restricted number of distant geographical locations. As new and old elites learned to adapt to the conditions of the iron age and managed to regain control, state-building resumed with greater strength; its repertoire of governing institutions and practices now took on firmer contours. These developments culminated in the triumphant rise of Assur, a city-state in Northern Mesopotamia. From the late tenth century BCE until the late seventh century BCE, the Assyrians managed, bit by bit, to subject the rest of the ancient Near East to their rule and bring the old Mesopotamian process of state-formation to its logical conclusion: universal empire.
From near and far, people would flock to new palatial cities constructed at Kalhu, Dur Sharrukin, and Nineveh to demonstrate their loyalty or seek the favor of the great king; eventually even Egypt was reduced to vassalage. The Assyrian lord knew no equal and his writ ran to all corners of the Levantine world while his armies wrought havoc among enemies and rebels. Populations of specialist craftsmen and laborers were deported to new locations to cater to the needs of the Assyrian rulers. Large irrigation works were constructed, hunting grounds with animals and plants from all over the realm were established to symbolize the universality of the empire in microcosm, while the world of letters was served by the sponsorship of vast book collections … Then, at the height of its glory and power, the empire was riven by rebellion and civil war. A composite body, potential rival centers of power remained within its territory. One such was Babylon, a vast city-state in southern Mesopotamia and once the seat of an empire of its own; it now came to serve as a basis for a rival claimant to the throne. However, the succession struggle opened a Pandora’s Box. In less than a decade Assyrian power collapsed while the Babylonians were able to capture a part of the imperial territories. In doing so, they also drew on assistance from the neighboring Iranian regions. This was a sign of things to come.
A few decades later (539 BCE), Babylon would fall to an invading force led by Cyrus, a local Persian dynast. The Achaemenid or Persian Empire had been born. Under Cyrus and his successors, the armies of the Achaemenid rulers would roam wider and further than anyone before. What Droysen remarked of Alexander the Great, the eventual Macedonian conqueror of the realm, could as well be said about the Achaemenids themselves: they seem both to bring an epoch in world history to its conclusion and be the initiators of a new age. From one perspective, the Achaemenids stepped successfully into the shoes of the Assyrian Empire, conquering all of its former territories. However, the new empire did more than just restore and build on the foundations of the past; it broke the bounds of the old Near Eastern world, extending its hegemony across Iran and deep into Central Asia, as well as to the west, pushing out through Anatolia to reach for the growing world of Hellenic city-states around the Aegean. Empire was now sustainable outside the traditional population centers of the Levantine world. The zones of relatively dense sedentary peasantries, which required the intensification of land use and cultivation of food crops, had continued to grow bigger, and the formation of empire followed suit. The Achaemenid achievement marks a new plateau in world history that set the parameters of imperial rule for many centuries to come. In broad terms, they effectively stretched across as much territory as could be managed until the age of colonialism widened the reach of imperial power further still.
As king of kings, their rule has become an emblem of imperial diversity, subjecting an almost infinite variety of ethnic groups and polities to their decentralized overlordship. Satraps were sent out from the court to govern individual regions of the empire, more in the nature of a viceroy than the civil servant of a centralizing administration. Meanwhile, the Achaemenid ruler himself traveled, taking turns residing in a number of royal residences situated around the empire. His realm was a patchwork, a composite and occasionally fissiparous body comprising many regionally distinct forms of political organization; the ruler responded in the only way possible — by conspicuously professing his respect for local customs and traditions.
A loose unity, or integration, was produced not through assimilation, but through a hierarchical and ritual dialogue; the court of the ruler and his highest representatives would distribute privileges and distinctions to local elites, who were left mostly to govern themselves, in return for submissive loyalty. Only a small tier, mostly of Persian descent, constituted an empire-wide aristocracy, or “ethno-ruling class” as some prefer, on whom the very highest positions at court, in the army, and across the provinces would be bestowed. Their children would be sent to court to bond and fraternize with the royal offspring. Such a thin super-structure was enough. The demands of the Achaemenid world ruler would have been a relatively light burden to carry, at least for much of the empire. But the realm was of such gigantic proportions that even modest tax demands were sufficient to make the depth of the imperial coffers proverbial. No one could match the wealth and amount of resources available to the Great King.
The imperial monarchy of the Achaemenids set a powerful example for the next several centuries, sparking both emulation, tacit adaptation, and open rejection. Herodotus (ca. 484– 420 BCE), in one of the earliest extant works of history — written from the margins of the Persian world— saw the great realm as immoderate, militating against the laws of reason and proportion. Whether the Achaemenid world empire was reviled or admired, however, it produced an archetype that, bundling a set of solutions to the problem of extensive government in pre- industrial societies, would be both adapted, modified, developed, and reinvented from scratch in subsequent millennia by imperial rulers. This happened as the Achaemenid king of kings ceased to have the world to himself and found that rivals of his own caliber had appeared. The growth of peasant populations capable of supporting state formation outpaced, so to speak, the reach of Persian arms. From the early sixth to the end of the fourth centuries BCE, the central-western Mediterranean, East Asia, and North India saw the rise of state-systems and states of sufficient weight to constitute new centers around which extensive empires would begin to congeal …
The Source:
Peter Fibiger Bang, ‘The Near- Eastern “Invention” of Empire (Third Millennium to 300 BCE)’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021 [pp. 1-12]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.