It creates no new knowledge of its own but aims, at its most ambitious, to “connect the dots” of existing knowledge in ways that may be illuminating or suggestive. The astonishing advances in our understanding over the past decades have served to radically revise or totally reverse what we thought we know about the first “civilizations” in the Mesopotamian alluvium and elswhere.
My goal is twofold: first, the more modest one of condensing the best knowledge we have of these matters and the suggesting what it implies for state formation and for both human and ecological consequences of the state form.
Thus I suggest that the broadest understanding of domestication as control over reproduction might be applied not only to fire, plants, and animals, but also, to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family. I propose that the cerial grains have unique characteristics such that they would be, virtually everywhere, the major tax commodity essential to early state building. I believe that we may have grossly underestimated the importance of the (infectious) diseases of crowding in the demographic fragility of the early state. Unlike many historians, I wonder whether the frequent abandonment of early state centers might often have been a boon to the health and safety of their populations rather than a “dark age” signaling the collapse of a civilization. And finally, I ask whether those populations that remained outside state centers for millenia after the first states were established may not have remained there (or fled there) because the found conditions better. All of these implications I draw from my reading of the evidence are meant to be provocations. They are intended to stimulate further reflection and research. Where I have been stumped, I try to indicate so frankly. Where the evidence is thin and I stray into speculation, I try to signal that as well.
Introduction: A Narrative in Tatters: What I Didn’t Know
The narratiev of this process has typically been told as one of progress, of civilization and public order, and of increasing health and leasure. Given what we now know, much of this is wrong or seriously misleading. p2
Once written documents–say, hieroglyphics or cuneiform–appear in the historical record, the bias becomes even more pronounced. These are invariably state-centric texts: taxes, work unites, tribute lists, royal genealogies, founding myths, laws. There are no contending voices, and efforts to read such texts against the grain are both heroic and exceptionally difficult. p13
This is entirely understandable if the purpose of a history is to examine the cultural achievements that we revere, but it overlooks the brittleness and fragility of state forms. In a good part of the world, the state, even when it was robust, was a seasonal institution. p15
The domestication of plants and animals was, as I have noted, not strictly necessary to sendentism, but it did create the conditions for an unprecedented level of concentration of food and population. especially in the most favorable agro-ecological settings: rish flood plain or loess soils and perennial water. This is why I choose to call such locations late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps. p18
The burdens of life for nonelites in the earliest states, the subject of Chapter 3, were considerable… farming was far more onerous than hunting and gathering. p20
A second great and unanticipated burden of agriculture was the direct epidemiological effect of concentration–not just of people but of livestock, crops, and the large suite of parasites that followed them to the domus or developed there. p21
Chapter 4 is devoted to what might be called the grain hypothesis. It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain… p21
It follows, I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. p22
What the state has often done, once established, however, is to maintain, simplify, and expand the agro-ecological setting that is the basis of its power by what we might call state landscaping. p23
What is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it than can be easily administered and mobilized. p24
The lowland kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot, in the long run, than as a site of plunder. p34
Chapter 1: The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and … Us
The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. p38
The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animlas they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. p39
…what we have here is a deliberate disturbance ecology in which hominids create, over time, a mosaic of biodiversity and a distribution of desirable resources more the their liking. p40
Fire powerfully concentrates people in yet another way: cooking. p40
The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it. p41
…diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grasslands and arid) p.41
Fire for cooking was at least as important as fire as landscape architecture for the concentration of population. The latter places more desirable foods within easier reach, while the former rendered a whole range of hitherto indigestible foods now both nutritious and palatable. The radius of a meal was much further reduced. p41
The gains in nutritional efficiency, [[Richard Wrangham]] claims, largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect, judging by other mammals. p42
Compared, say, with hunter-gatherers who may follow large game (seals, bison, caribou), those who take most of their diet from lower trophic levels such as plants, shellfish, fruits, nuts, and small fish that are, other things equal, denser and less mobile than the larger mammals and fish, can be far less migratory. p51
A transition between the aquatic resources of the wet season and the terrestial resources of the dry season was the great annual pulse of the region. p52
The point is that the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized food supply. p53
The advantage of waterborne transport compared with overland cart or donkey travel is almost impossible to exaggerate. p54
…were set in extensive wetlands that offered abundant harvests of fish, birds, shellfish, and small mammals from the edge environments of several ecologies. p56
The anomoly of such a stretch of history, when all the building blocks for a classic agrarian society are in place but fail to coalesce, begs an explanation. p58
Rather than relying on only a small bandwidth of food resources, they seem to have been opportunistic generalists with a large portfolio of subsistence options spread acorss several food webs. p59
It is entirely possible that some or even most of this variation could have broadly human causes: diseases, epidemics, rapid population growth, exhaustion of local resources and game, social conflict, and violence, not all of which leave unabiguous traces in the archaeological record. p61
It’s just that so long as there were abundant stands of wild foods they could gather and annual migrations of waterfowl and gazelles they could hunt, there was no earthly reason why they would risk relying mainly, let alone exclusively, on labor-intensive farming and livestock rearing. p63
I propose quite a different explanation for sowing crops based on a simple analogy between fire and flood. The general problem with farming–especially plough agriculture–is that it involves so much intensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor: “flood-retreat” agriculture. p66
Chapter 2: Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex
Thanks in large part to fire, this low-intensity horticulture practices over many millenia had a substantial impact on the natural world. p69
Since the dawn of the species, Homo sapiens has been domesticating whole environments, not just species. The preeminent tool for this, before the Industrial Revolution, was not the plough so much as fire. p70
This is why, finally, the conventional “subspecies” of subsistence modes–hunting, foraging, pastorialsm, and farming– make so little historical sense. The same people have practiced all four, sometimes in a single lifetime; the activities can and have been combined for thousands of years, and each of them bleeds imperceptibly into the next along a vast continuum of human rearrangements of the natural world. p71
The dominant explanation until fairly recently was what might be called the “backs-to-the-wall” theory of plough agriculture associated with the great Danish economist [[Ester Boserup]]. Starting from the unassailable premise that plough cultivation typically required far more work for the calories it returned than did hunting and gathering, she reasoned that full cultivation was taken up not as an opportunity but as a last resort when no other alternative was possible. p71
The back-to-the-wall theory of agriculture is in tatters (at leas for the Middle East), but it has not been replaced by a satisfactory alternative explanation for the spread of culitvation. p72
If Homo Sapiens is judged the most successful and numerous invasive species in historu, this dubious achievement has been due to the allied battalions of domesticated plants and livestock it has taken with it to virtually every corner of the globe. p77
The hallmark behavioral difference between domesticated animals and their wild contemporaries is a lower threshold of reaction to external stiumuli and an overall reduced wariness of other species–including Homo Sapiens. p79
“We” domesticated wheat, rice, the sheep, the pig, the goat. But if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, one could argue that it is we who have been domesticated. p87
This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapients had traded a wide spectrum of wild fauna for a handful of livestock. p92
Chapter 3: Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm
Agro-pastoralism–ploughed fields and domestic animals–comes to dominate much of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent well before the appearance of states. With the exception of areas favored by flood-retreat agriculture, this fact represents a paradox that, in my view, has still not been satisfactorily explained. Why would foragers in their right mind choose huge increases in drudgery entailed by fixed-field agriculture and animal husbandry unless they had, as it were, a pistol at their collective temple? p93
Their confusion was that the “pistol at their temple” in this case was the cold snap of the Youner Dryas (10,500-9,600 BCE), which reduced the abundance of wild plants, together with hostile adjacent populations, which restricted their mobility. This explanation, as noted earlier, is hotly contested in terms of both evidence and logic. p94
The transition was brought about in the Fertile Crescent by the growing scarcity (by overhunting?) of the big-game sources of wild protein–aurochs, onager, red deer, sea turtle, gazelle–the “low hanging fruit,” to mx metaphors, of early hunting. The result, perhaps impelled as well by population pressure, forced people to exploit resources that, while abundant, required more labor and were perhaps less desirable and/or nutritious. Evidence for this broad-spectrum revolution is ubiquitous in the archaeological record as the boes of large wild animals decline and the volume of starchier plane matter, shellfish, small birds and mammals, snails and mussels begin to predominate. p94
Nevertheless, planting and livestock rearing as dominant subsistence practices were avoided for as long as possible because of the work they required. And most of the work arose from the need to defend a simplified, artificial landscape from the resurgences of nature excluded from it: other plants (weeds), birds, grazing animals, rodents, insects, and the rust and fungal infections that threatened a monocropped field. The tilled agriculture field was not only labor intensive; it was fragile and vulnerable. p96
Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding the Neolithic revolution made possible, is the most likely suspect… p97
A population couldas easilybe devasted by a disease that swept through their flocks or their grain fields as by a plague that menaced them directly. p98
That concentration and an unprecedented flow of trade created, as we shall now explain, a uniquely new vulnerability to the diseases of crowding. p100
The short answer, I believe is sendentism itself… it turns out that sendentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction–enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality. p113
Chapter 4: Agro-ecology of the Early State
… it seems clear that urbanism, thanks to wetland abundance, was more persistent, durable, and resilient in the alluvium than anywhere else. p117
It is, of course, only in the context of rich soils and available water that the ecological capacity for the further intensification of agriculture and population growth was possible, and this ut was only in such settings that the first bureaucratic states were likely to arise. p122
Statelets in the alluvium had, like there inhabitants, a very short lfe expectancy. p122
It was menaces by variable rainfall, floods, pest attacks, and any number of crop, livestock, and human diseases thatcould wipe out a settlement or… p122
Taxes and warfare can serve to illustrate the added fragility. p123
alluvlial (flood deposited)
no alluvial, no state, p124
“no water transport, no state” p125
In a grain state, one or two cereal grains provided the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar. Such states were confined to the ecological niches where alluvial soils and available water made them possible. p128
The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops–legumes, tubers, and starch plants–have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. p129
The problem with most legumes, from a tax collector’s perspective, is that they produce fruit continuously over an extended period. p132
Grain, because it has a higher value per unit of volume and weight than almost any other foodstuff, and because it stores comparitively well, was an ideal tax and subsistence crop. It could be left unhusked until it was needed. It was ideal for distributing to laborers and slaves, for requiring as tribute, for provisioning soldires and garrisons, for relieving a food shortage or famine, or for feeding a city while resisting a siege. It is hard to imagine the early state without grain as a basis for its sinew and muscle. p134
In one way or another, nongrain peoples–that it to say most of the world–embodied forms of livelihood and social organization that defeated taxation… p136
Most towns in the Mesopotamiuan alluvium were, by the middle of the third millennium BCE, walled. p137
As [[Owen Lattimore]] and others have observed for the Great Wall(s) of Chine: they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep barbarians (nomads) outside. p138
Peasantries with long experience of on-the-ground statecraft have always understood that the state is recording, registering, and measuring machine. p139
Once a polity comprises even a few thousan subjects, some form of notation and documentation beyond memory and oral tradition is required. p141
They reveal, at a minimum, the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it. p141
Physical mobility and dispersal are the bane of the tax man. p146
Chapter 5: Population Control: Bondage and War
The important point for our purpose is that a peasantry–assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs–will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it. p152
The state with the most people was generally richest and usually prevailed militarily over smaller rivals. p154
…as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage. p156
Slavery, while hardly as massively central as in classical Athens, Sparta, or Rome, was crucial for three reasons: it provided the labor for the most important trade good, textiles; it supplied a disposable proletartiat for the most onerous work (for example, canal digging, wall building); and it was both a token of and a reward for elite status. p157
The most unambiguous category of slaves was the cpatured prisoner of war. p158
The most obvious advantage is that the conquerors take for the most part captives of working age, raised at the expense of another society, and get to exploit their most productive years. In a good many cases the conquerors went out of their way to seize captives with particular skills that might be useful–boat builders, weavers, metal workers, armorers… p167
The domesticated flock of sheep has many ewes and few rams, as that maximizes its reproductive potential. In the same sense, women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine. p169
…in Greco-Roman territories they were deployed as a kind of disposable proletariat in the most brutal and dangerous work: silver and copper mining, stone quarrying, timber felling, and pull oars in galleys. p170
“Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit. p172
What if we were, as a fruitful conjecture, to take seriously Artistotle’s claim that a slave is a tool for work and, as such, to be considered as a domestic animal as an as might be? p180
The domesticated plough animal or beast of burden lifts much of the drudgery from man’s back. Much the same could obviously be said for slaves. p181
Chapter 6: Fragility of the Early State: Collapse and Disassembly
Their vulnerability and fragility were so manifest that it is their rare appearance and even rarer persistence that requires explanation. p183
The reasons for abandonment and reoccupation typically remain obscure. Possible contributing factors include climate chage, resource depletion, disease, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance. p184
…a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformation and decentralization. p186
The effect, for our purposes, of this vast enlargement of the commercial sphere is that it similarly enlarged the sphere of transmitted diseases. p192
In terms of demography alone there is nothing like warfare for the mass movement and relocation of populations. p193
The early state’s appetite for wood was nearly insatiable and far exceeded what even a sizable sedentary community might have required. p196
The less local firewood within easy gathering distance, the more likely it will be replaced by charcoal from a distance. p198
The effect of deforestation or agricultural clearance was that the watershed released the rains and the silt they carried far more quickly, making for a faster and more violent flood pulse. p199
Salinization and soil exhaustion are two further anthropogenic results of the grain-and-irrigation state that may come to threaten its existence. All irrigation water contains dissolved salts. As plants do not take it up, it accumulates over time in the soil, and, unless leached out by flushing, will kill them. p200
In a war for captives between two states, the losing state was, virtually by definition, effaced. p202
The key fact, however, is that the most lucrative zone of control is the area closest to capital or easily reachable by navigable water routes. Is is therefore within this zone that one finds the symbols and resources of power: grain stores, market shrines, administrative staff, praetorian guards, central markets, the most productive, best-watered agricultural lands, and, not least, the adobe of the palace and temple elites… It was the core zone that was the key to state power and cohesion. It was also the state’s Achilles’ heel, as it was this zone that was likely to be squeezed first and hardest by any crisis. p205
Chapter 7: The Golden Age of the Barbarians
…“barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who moght, under certain circumstances, be incorporated; “savages,” on the other hand, were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable as raw material for civilization, who might be ignored, killed, or enslaved. p221
The period between the first appearance of states and their hegemony over nonstate people represented, I believe, something of a “golden age of barbarians.” What I mean is that it was in many ways “better” to be a barbarian because there were states… If we think of the carrying capacity of barbarian ecology, my argument is that it was enhanced by the existence of petty states. p223
The greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians, however, was less as sires for predation than as trading posts. Because states represented such narrow agro-ecologies, they relied on a host of products from outside the alluvium to survive. State and nonstate peoples were natural trading partners. p226
Barbarian geography and ecology is, on the other hand, much harder to describe concisely because it constitutes a large and residual category; basically they comprise all those geographies that are unsuitable for state making. p228
Nomads, [[Christopher Beckwith]] has noted, “were in general much better fed and led easier, longer lives than the inhabitants of the large agricultural states. There was a constant drain of peoples escaping from China to the realms of the eastern steppe, where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomad lifestyle…” p233
…the purpose of the Great Wall(s) was as much to keep the Chinese taxpayers inside as to block barbarian incursions… p233
Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe… make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not emancipation. p234
While the density of grain, population, and livestock in a concentrated space is the source of a state’s power, it is also the source of its potentially fatal vulnerability to mobile raiders. p237
The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture,” cited in my introduction, is significant. p237
Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” p240
“Chinese, Greek and Arab historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade. The careful manner in which Central Eurasians generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and tried to get cities to submit peacefully. Only when they resisted, or rebelled, was retribution necessary…. The Central Eurasians’ conquests were designed to acquire trade routes or trading cities. But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory that could be taxed in order to pay for the rulers’ socio-political infrastructure. If all this sounds exactly like what sedentary peripheral states were doing, that is because it was indeed the same thing.” p244
The early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims; both sought to dominate the grain-and-manpower core with its surplus. p244
They were, after all, by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones, the connective tissue between the various sedentary cereal-intensive states. p248
“Not only the frontier between civilization and barbarism, but barbarian societies themselves, were in large measure crated by the growth and geographical spread of the great ancient civilizations. It is proper to speak of the barbarians as “primitive” only in that remote time when no civilization yet existed and when the forbearers of the civilized peoples were also primitive. From the moment civilization began to evolve… it recruited into civilization some of the popel who had land and displaced others and the effect on those who were displaces [was] that … they modified their own economic practices and experimented with new kinds of specialization and they also evolved new forms of social cohesion and political organization, and new ways of fighting. Civilization itself created its own barbarian plague.” p249
Hunters and gatherers or swiddeners might nibble at the state, but politically mobilized large confederations of mounted pastoralists were designed to extract wealth from sedentary states; they were a “state in waiting” or, as [[Barfield]] puts it, a “shadow empire.” p249
The life of “late barbarians” would, on balance, have been rather good. Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs; being dispersed, they would have been less vulnerable to the failure of a single food source. They were more likely to be healthier and live longer–especially if they were female. More advantageous trade made for more leisure, thus further widening the leisure-drudgery ration between foragers and farmers. Finally, and by new means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order or sedentary agriculture and the state. They were in almost every respect freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer. This is not a bad balance sheet for a class of barbarians over whom waves of history were supposed to have rolled a long time ago. p255