#title Against the Grain #subtitle A Deep History of the Earliest States #author James C. Scott #date 2017 #source <[[https://astudygroup.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/against-the-grain_-a-deep-histo-james-c-scott.pdf][astudygroup.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/against-the-grain_-a-deep-histo-james-c-scott.pdf]]> #lang en #pubdate 2023-10-11T00:58:21 #topics History #cover j-c-james-c-scott-against-the-grain-1.jpg ** [Front Matter] *** [Title Page]
The complex of houses and yards protected all of the settlement’s inhabitants in the winter months, including invited and uninvited commensals. Tidbits, scraps, or spoiled items, foods prepared from pounded and ground plant parts reached the dogs and, later in the Neolithic era the pigs kept in the household compounds. A shared diet between humans, dogs, and pigs—one that was becoming softer in consistency—might partly explain shared gracilization [loss of bone mass due to evolution] and cranio-facial and dental reduction in these species.[60]Beyond the morphological and physiological consequences of domestication for man and beast lie changes in behavior and sensibility that are more difficult to codify. The physical and cultural realms are closely connected. Is it the case, for example, that like their domesticates, sedentary, grain-planting, domus-sheltered people have experienced a comparable decline in emotional reactivity and are less intently alert to their immediate surroundings? If so, is it related, as in domestic animals, to changes in the limbic system, which governs fear, aggression, and flight responses? I know of no evidence bearing directly on this question, nor is it easy to imagine how the question could be addressed in an objective way. As far as biological changes associated with agriculture itself are concerned, we must be doubly cautious. Selection works by variation and inheritance, and only 240 human generations have elapsed since the first adoption of agriculture and perhaps no more than 160 generations since it became widespread. We are, therefore, hardly in a position to reach sweeping conclusions.[61] While issues of this scope may be beyond our capacity to resolve, we may be able to say more about how sedentism, animal and plant domestication, and a largely grain diet has shaped our behavior, routines and our health. *** THE DOMESTICATION OF US We, as a species, are inclined to see ourselves as the “agent” in narratives of domestication. “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. Michael Pollan sees it this way in his sudden and memorable aperçu while gardening.[62] As he is weeding and hoeing around his thriving potato plants, it dawns on him that he has, unwittingly, become the slave of the potato. Here he is, on his hands and knees, day after day, weeding, fertilizing, untangling, protecting, and in general reshaping the immediate environment to the utopian expectations of his potato plants. Looked at from this angle, who is doing whose bidding becomes almost a problem in metaphysics. If our domesticated plants cannot thrive without our help, it is equally true that our survival as a species has likewise become dependent on a handful of domesticated cultivars. The domestication of animals can be seen in virtually identical terms. Who is serving whom is no simple matter while cattle and other livestock are being reared, led to pasture, given fodder, and protected. Evans-Pritchard, in his famous monograph on the ultimate cattle people, the Nuer, had much the same insight about the Nuer and their cattle as Pollan had about his potatoes.
It has been remarked that the Nuer might be called parasites of the cow. But it might be said with equal force that the cow is a parasite of the Nuer, who lives are spent in insuring its welfare: they build byres, kindle fires, and clear kraals for its comfort, move from villages to camps, from camp to camp, from camps back to villages for its health, defy wild beasts for its protection and fashion ornaments for its adornment. It lives its gentle, indolent, sluggish life thanks to the Nuer’s devotion.[63]One might well object to this line of reasoning by observing that, in the final analysis, Pollan eats his potato and the Nuer eat (trade, barter, and tan the skin of) their cattle. The final disposition is not in doubt. But this overlooks the fact that while it lives, the potato and the cow are the objects of a demanding and solicitous routine that caters to their well-being and safety. Thus, while larger questions of how our brains and limbic systems have been shaped by domestication cannot yet be determined, we can nevertheless say something about how life in the late Neolithic has been shaped by our relationship to our domesticates in the domus. First let us compare, broadly, the life world of the hunter-forager with that of the farmer, with or without livestock. Close observers of hunter-gatherer life have been struck by how it is punctuated by bursts of intense activity over short periods of time. The activity itself is enormously varied—hunting and collecting, fishing, picking, making traps and weirs—and designed in one way or another to take best advantage of the natural tempo of food availability. “Tempo,” I think, is the key word here. The lives of hunter-gatherers are orchestrated by a host of natural rhythms of which they must be keen observers: the movement of herds of game (deer, gazelle, antelope, pigs); the seasonal migrations of birds, especially waterfowl, which can be intercepted and netted at their resting or nesting places; the runs of desirable fish upstream or downstream; the cycles of the ripening of fruits and nuts, which must be collected before other competitors arrive or before they spoil; and, less predictably, appearances of game, fish, turtles, and mushrooms, which must be exploited quickly. The list could be expanded almost indefinitely, but several aspects of this activity stand out. First, each activity requires a different “tool kit” and techniques of capture or collecting that must be mastered. Second, we should not forget that foragers have long gathered grains from natural stands of cereals and had, for this purpose, already developed virtually all the tools we associate with the Neolithic tool kit: sickles, threshing mats and baskets, winnowing trays, pounding mortars and grinding stones, and the like. Third, each of these activities represents a distinct problem in coordination such that the cooperative group and division of labor for each is different. Finally, the activities, like those of the earliest village in the Mesopotamian alluvium, span several food webs—wetlands, forest, savanna, and arid—each of which has its own distinct seasonality. While hunter-gatherers depend vitally on these rhythms, they are, at the same time, generalists and opportunists ever alert to take advantage of the scattered and episodic bounty nature may bring their way. Botanists and naturalists have been continually amazed by the degree and breadth of knowledge hunters-gatherers have of the natural world around them. Their taxonomies of plants are not classified in Linnaean categories, but they are both more practical (good to eat, will heal wounds, will make blue dye) and quite as elaborate.[64] Codifications of farming knowledge in America, by contrast, have traditionally taken the form of the Farmers’ Almanac, which suggests, among other things, when maize should be planted. We might, in this context, think of hunters and gatherers as having an entire library of almanacs: one for natural stands of cereals, subdivided into wheats, barleys, and oats; one for forest nuts and fruits, subdivided into acorns, beechnuts, and various berries; one for fishing, subdivided by shellfish, eels, herring, and shad; and so on. What is perhaps just as astonishing is that this veritable encyclopedia of knowledge, including its historical depth of past experience, is preserved entirely in the collective memory and oral tradition of the band. To return to the concept of tempo, one might think of hunters and gatherers as attentive to the distinct metronome of a great diversity of natural rhythms. Farmers, especially fixed-field, cereal-grain farmers, are largely confined to a single food web, and their routines are geared to its particular tempo. Bringing a handful of crops successfully to harvest is to be sure a demanding and complex activity, but it is usually dominated by the requirements of one dominant starch plant. It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.[65] The domestication of plants as represented ultimately by fixed-field farming, then, enmeshed us in an annual set of routines that organized our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structure, the built environment of the domus, and much of our ritual life. From field clearing (by fire, plough, harrow), to sowing, to weeding, to watering, to constant vigilance as the crop ripens, the dominant cultivar organizes much of our timetable. The harvest itself sets in train another sequence of routines: in the case of cereal crops, cutting, bundling, threshing, gleaning, separation of straw, winnowing chaff, sieving, drying, sorting—most of which has historically been coded as women’s work. Then, the daily preparation of grains for consumption—pounding, grinding, fire making, cooking, and baking throughout the year—set the tempo of the domus. These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, and mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the center of any comprehensive account of the “civilizing process.” They strap agriculturalists to a minutely choreographed routine of dance steps; they shape their physical bodies, they shape the architecture and layout of the domus; they insist, as it were, on a certain pattern of cooperation and coordination. In that sense, to pursue the metaphor, they are the background musical beat of the domus. Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants and, in Mesopotamia particularly, wheat or barley. Norbert Elias wrote convincingly of the growing chains of dependence among ever denser populations in medieval Europe that made for the mutual accommodation and restraint that he termed “the civilizing process.”[66] But literally thousands of years before the social changes Elias describes—and quite apart from any hypothetical changes to our limbic system—much of our species was already disciplined and subordinated to the metronome of our own crops. Once cereals became established as a staple in the early Middle East, it is striking how the agricultural calendar came to determine much of public ritual life: ceremonial ploughing by priests and kings, harvest rites and celebrations, prayers and sacrifices for an abundant harvest, gods for particular grains. The metaphors with which people reasoned were increasingly dominated by domesticated grains and domesticated animals: “a time to sow and a time to reap,” being “a good shepherd.” There is hardly a passage in the Old Testament that fails to make use of such imagery. This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of wild fauna for a handful of livestock. I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, “What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.”[67] If this is a too bleak view of a breakthrough credited with making civilization possible, let us at least say that it represented a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world, a contraction of diet, a contraction of space, and perhaps a contraction, as well, in the breadth of ritual life. CHAPTER THREE ** 3. Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm *** DRUDGERY AND ITS HISTORY 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 the huge increase in drudgery entailed by fixed-field agriculture and animal husbandry unless they had, as it were, a pistol at their collective temple? We know that even contemporary hunter-gatherers, reduced to living in resource-poor environments, still spend only half their time in anything we might call subsistence labor. As the students of a rare archaeological site in Mesopotamia (Abu Hureyra), where the entire transition from hunting and gathering to full-blown agriculture can be traced, put it, “No hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly. Energy investment per unit of energy return would have been too high.”[68] Their conclusion was that the “pistol at their temple” in this case was the cold snap of the Younger 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. I am in no position to adjudicate, let alone resolve, the controversy over what drove people over several millennia to agriculture as a dominant mode of subsistence. The long-accepted explanation, virtually an orthodoxy, was an intellectually satisfying narrative of subsistence intensification covering a span of as much as six thousand years. The first pulse of intensification was termed “the broad spectrum revolution,” a reference to the exploitation of more varied subsistence resources at lower trophic levels. 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 mix 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 bones of large wild animals decline and the volume of starchier plant matter, shellfish, small birds and mammals, snails, and mussels begin to predominate. For the founders of this orthodoxy, the logic behind the broad-spectrum revolution and the adoption of agriculture was identical and, moreover, worldwide. The global increase in population, especially after 9,600 BCE, when the climate improved, together with the decline in big game (clearly documented in the Middle East and the New World), forced hunters and gatherers to intensify their foraging. Pressing ever more heavily on the carrying capacity of their environment’s resources, they were obliged to work harder for their subsistence. Thus the broad-spectrum revolution was, in this view, the first step in a long increase in drudgery that later reached its logical conclusion in the even more unremitting toil of plough agriculture and livestock rearing. In most versions of this narrative, the broad-spectrum revolution and agriculture were also nutritionally damaging, resulting in poorer health and higher mortality. As an explanation for the broad-spectrum revolution, demographic pressure on carrying capacity seems in many locations to be in conflict with the available evidence. The “revolution” occurs in settings where there seems to be little population pressure on resources. It may also be the case that the wetter and warmer conditions after 9,600 BCE promoted a much greater abundance of plant life, as in the Mesopotamian alluvium, that could be easily gathered, though this would not explain the observed nutritional deficiencies in the archaeological record. There is no doubting the reality of the broad-spectrum revolution, but the jury is still out when it comes to understanding either its causes or its consequences. About the development of agriculture proper, some three or four millennia later, however, the jury is in. There was growing population pressure; sedentary hunters and gatherers found it harder to move and were impelled to extract more, at a higher cost in labor, from their surroundings, and most large game was in decline or gone. This, then, is no Whiggish story of human invention and progress. Planting techniques were long known and occasionally used; wild plants were routinely gathered and their seeds stored; all the tools for grain processing were at hand, and even a captive animal or two might be held in reserve. 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 resurgence 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 agricultural field was not only labor intensive; it was fragile and vulnerable. *** THE LATE NEOLITHIC MULTISPECIES RESETTLEMENT CAMP: A PERFECT EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STORM The world’s population in 10,000 BCE, according to one careful estimate, was roughly 4 million. A full five thousand years later, in 5,000 BCE, it had risen only to 5 million. This hardly represents a population explosion, despite the civilizational achievements of the Neolithic revolution: sedentism and agriculture. Over the subsequent five thousand years, by contrast, world population would grow twentyfold, to more than 100 million. The five thousand–year Neolithic transition was thus something of a demographic bottleneck, reflecting a nearly static level of reproduction. Supposing even a population growth rate just barely over replacement levels (for example, 0.015 percent) the total population would have still more than doubled over these five millennia. One likely explanation for this paradox of apparent human progress in subsistence techniques together with long period of demographic stagnation is that, epidemiologically, this was perhaps the most lethal period in human history. In the case of Mesopotamia, the claim is that, owing precisely to the effects of the Neolithic revolution, it had become the focal point of chronic and acute infectious diseases that devastated the population again and again.[69] Evidence in the archaeological record is hard to come by inasmuch as such diseases, unlike malnutrition, only rarely leave signature traces on human bones. Epidemic disease is, I believe, the “loudest” silence in the Neolithic archaeological record. Archaeology can assess only what it can recover and, in this case, we must speculate beyond the hard evidence. There are nonetheless good reasons for supposing that a great many of the sudden collapses of the earliest centers of population were due to devastating epidemic diseases.[70] Time and again there is evidence of a sudden and otherwise unexplained abandonment of previously well-populated sites. In the case of adverse climate change or soil salinization one would also expect depopulation, but in keeping with its cause it would be more likely to be regionwide and rather more gradual. Other explanations for the sudden evacuation or disappearance of a populous site are of course possible: civil war, conquest, floods. Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding the Neolithic revolution made possible, is the most likely suspect, judging from the massive effects of disease that appear in the written records once they become available. The meaning of epidemic disease in this context is not confined to Homo sapiens alone. Epidemics affected domestic animals and crops that were also concentrated in the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp. A population could as easily be devastated by a disease that swept through their flocks or their grain fields as by a plague that menaced them directly. Once written records become available, however, we have ample evidence of deadly epidemics, which can, with caution, be read back to earlier periods. The Epic of Gilgamesh provides perhaps the most powerful evidence when its hero claims that his fame will outlive death as he depicts a scene of bodies felled, probably by pestilence, floating down the Euphrates. Mesopotamians, it seems, lived in the ever-threatening shadow of fatal epidemics. They had amulets, special prayers, prophylactic dolls, and “healing” goddesses and temples—the most famous of which was at Nippur—designed to ward off mass illness. Such events were, of course, poorly understood at the time. They were seen as “the devouring” of a god and as punishment for some transgression requiring compensatory ritual including the sacrifice of scapegoats.[71] The first written sources also make it clear that early Mesopotamian populations understood the principle of “contagion” that spread epidemic disease. Where possible, they took steps to quarantine the first discernible cases, confining them to their quarters, letting no one out and no one in. They understood that long-distance travelers, traders, and soldiers were likely carriers of disease. Their practices of isolation and avoidance prefigured the quarantine procedures of the lazaretti of the Renaissance ports. An understanding of contagion was implicit not only in the avoidance of people who were infected but avoidance as well of their cups, dishes, clothes, and bed linen.[72] Soldiers returning from a campaign and suspected of carrying disease were obliged to burn their clothing and shields before entering the city. When isolation and quarantine failed, those who could fled the city, leaving the dying and deceased behind, and returning, if ever, only well after the epidemic had passed. In doing so, they must frequently have brought the epidemic to outlying areas, touching off a new round of quarantines and flight. There is little doubt in my mind that a good many of the earlier and unchronicled abandonments of populous areas were due more to disease than to politics. Evidence for the role of pathogens in the diseases of humans, domesticated animals, and domesticate crops before the middle of the fourth millennium BCE is necessarily speculative. As written records proliferate, however, the evidence for epidemics grows in proportion; the texts refer, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat claims, to tuberculosis, typhus, bubonic plague, and smallpox.[73] One of the earliest and most amply attested is a devastating epidemic at Mari on the Euphrates in 1,800 BCE. The list of others is long, although the nature of the disease is typically obscure. The epidemic that destroyed the army of Sennachrib, son of Sargon II and Assyrian king in 701 BCE, that figures as well in the Old Testament’s litany of plagues is now ascribed to typhus or cholera, the traditional scourges of armies on campaign. Later, the crushing plague of Athens in 430 BCE, described memorably by Thucydides, and the Antonine and Justinian plagues of Rome play a decisive role in what amounts to early “imperial” history. Given the larger populations and growing long-distance trade of this later era, there is little doubt that epidemics touched more people and more areas than before. Nevertheless, Mesopotamia of the late fourth millennium BCE was a historically novel environment for epidemics. By 3,200 BCE, Uruk was the biggest city in the world, with anywhere from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand inhabitants, together with their livestock and crops, dwarfing the concentrations of the earlier Ubaid period. As the most demographically packed area, the southern alluvium was especially vulnerable to epidemics; the Akkadian word for epidemic disease “literally meant ‘certain death’ and could be applied equally to animal as well as human epidemics.”[74] That concentration and an unprecedented flow of trade created, as we shall now explain, a uniquely new vulnerability to the diseases of crowding. Sedentism alone, well before widespread cultivation of domesticated crops, created conditions of crowding that were ideal “feedlots” for pathogens. The growth of large villages and small towns in the Mesopotamian alluvium represented a ten- to twentyfold increase in the population density over anything Homo sapiens had previously experienced. The logic of crowding and disease transmission is straightforward. Imagine, for example, an enclosure with ten chickens, one of which is infected with a parasite spread by droppings. After a while—depending in part on the size of the enclosure, the activity of the fowl, and the ease of transmission—another chicken will become infected. Now, instead of ten chickens, imagine five hundred chickens in the same enclosure and the chances rise at least fiftyfold that another bird will become quickly infected, and so on exponentially. Two birds are now excreting the parasite, doubling the probability of a new infection. Recall that we have increased not only the poultry but also their droppings by fifty times so that soon, the smaller the enclosure, the likelihood of other birds avoiding contact with the pathogen becomes vanishingly small. For the present purposes we are applying the logic of crowding and diseases to Homo sapiens, but, as in the example above, it applies equally to the crowding of any disease-prone organism, flora or fauna. It is a crowding phenomenon that applies equally to flocks of birds and sheep, schools of fish, herds of reindeer or gazelle, and fields of cereals. The greater the genetic similarity—the less variation—the greater the likelihood that they will all be vulnerable to the same pathogen. Before extensive human travel, migratory birds that nested together combined long-distance travel with crowding to constitute, perhaps, the main vector for the spread of disease over distance. The association of infection with crowding was known and utilized long before the actual vectors of disease transmission were understood. Hunters and gatherers knew enough to stay clear of large settlements, and dispersal was long seen as a way to avoid contracting an epidemic disease. Late medieval Oxford and Cambridge maintained plague houses in the countryside to which students were dispatched with the first sign of the plague. Concentration could be lethal. Thus the trenches, demobilization camps, and troop ships at the conclusion of World War I provided the ideal conditions for the massive and lethal influenza pandemic of 1918. Social sites of crowding—fairs, military encampments, schools, prisons, slums, religious pilgrimages, such as the hajj to Mecca—have historically been locations where infectious diseases have been contracted and from which they have subsequently been dispersed. The importance of sedentism and the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand. They were, in the strong sense, a “civilizational effect.” These historically novel diseases—cholera, smallpox, mumps, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and perhaps malaria—arose only as a result of the beginnings of urbanism and, as we shall see, agriculture. Until very recently they collectively represented the major overall cause of human mortality. It is not as if presedentary populations did not have their own parasites and diseases, but such diseases would have been not the crowding diseases but rather diseases characterized by long latency and/or a nonhuman reservoir: typhoid, amoebic dysentery, herpes, trachoma, leprosy, schistosomiasis, filariasis.[75] The diseases of crowding are also called density-dependent diseases or, in contemporary public health parlance, acute community infections. For many viral diseases that have come to depend on a human host, it is possible, by knowing the mode of transmission, the duration of infectivity, and the duration of acquired immunity after infection, to infer the minimal population required to keep the infection from dying out for lack of new hosts. Epidemiologists are fond of citing the example of measles in the isolated Faroe Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An epidemic brought by sailors devastated the islands in 1781, and, given the lifelong immunity conferred on survivors, the islands were free of the measles for sixty-five years until 1846, when it returned, infecting all but the aged folks who had survived the earlier epidemic. A further epidemic thirty years later infected only those under thirty. For measles specifically, epidemiologists have calculated that at least 3,000 newly susceptible hosts would be required annually to sustain a permanent infection and that only a population of roughly 300,000 could provide this many hosts. Having a population far below this threshold, the Faroe Islands had to “import” its measles anew for each epidemic. By the same token, of course, this means that none of these diseases could have existed before the populations of the Neolithic. It also explains the generally vibrant good health of the New World populations—as well as their later vulnerability to the Old World pathogens. The groups crossing the Bering Strait in several waves around 13,000 BCE came before most such diseases had arisen and, in any case, in groups far too small to sustain any of the crowding diseases. No account of the epidemiology of the Neolithic is complete without noting the key role of domesticates: livestock, commensals, and cultivated grains and legumes. The key principle of crowding is again operative. The Neolithic was not only an unprecedented gathering of people but, at the same time, a wholly unprecedented gathering of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, geese. To the degree that they were already “herd” or “flock” animals, they would have carried some species-specific pathogens of crowding. Assembled for the first time around the domus, in close and continuous contact, they quickly came to share a wide range of infective organisms. Estimates vary, but of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases, originating in nonhuman hosts. For most of these pathogens, Homo sapiens is a final “dead-end” host: humans do not transmit it further to another nonhuman host. The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them. The victors, as it were, in this pest race were those pathogens that could quickly adapt to new hosts in the domus and multiply. What was occurring was the first massive surge of pathogens across the species barrier, establishing an entirely new epidemiological order. The narrative of this breach is naturally told from the (horrified) perspective of Homo sapiens. It cannot have been any less melancholy from the perspective of, say, the goat or sheep that, after all, did not volunteer to enter the domus. I leave it to the reader to imagine how a precocious, all-knowing goat might narrate the history of disease transmission in the Neolithic. The list of diseases shared with domesticates and commensals at the domus is quantitatively striking. In an outdated list, now surely even longer, we humans share twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-two with rats and mice, thirty-five with horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six with sheep and goats, fifty with cattle, and sixty-five with our much-studied and oldest domesticate, the dog.[76] Measles is suspected to have arisen from a rinderpest virus among sheep and goats, smallpox from camel domestication and a cowpox-bearing rodent ancestor, and influenza from the domestication of waterfowl some forty-five hundred years ago. The generation of new species-jumping zoonoses grew as populations of man and beasts swelled and contact over longer distances became more frequent. It continues today. Little wonder, then, that southeast China, specifically Guangdong, probably the largest, most crowded, and historically deepest concentration of Homo sapiens, pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, and wild animal markets in the world, has been a major world petri dish for the incubation of new strains of bird and swine flu. The disease ecology of the late Neolithic was not simply a result of the crowding of people and their domesticates in fixed settlements. It was rather an effect of the entire domus complex as an ecological module. The clearing of the land for agriculture and the grazing of the new domesticates created an entirely new landscape, and an entirely new ecological niche with more sunlight, more exposed soils, into which new suites of flora, fauna, insects, and microorganisms moved as the previous ecological pattern was disturbed. Some of the transformation was by design, as with crops, but much more represented the second- and third-order collateral effects of the domus’s invention. Emblematic of this collateral effect was the concentration of animal and human wastes: in particular, feces. The relative immobility of sedentary humans and livestock and their wastes permits repeated infection with the same varieties of parasites. Mosquitoes and arthropods, often the vectors of disease, find the wastes ideal sites for breeding and feeding. Mobile groups of hunter-gatherers, by contrast, often leave their parasites behind by moving to a new environment where they cannot breed. Once stationary, the domus, with its humans, livestock, grain, feces, and plant wastes, makes an attractive feedlot for many commensals, from rats and swallows down the chain of predation to fleas and lice, bacteria and protozoa. The pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing. In fact, it was not until the late nineteenth-century discoveries of the founders of microbiology, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, that it became clear what a heavy price in chronic and lethal infections Homo sapiens was paying for the absence of clean water, sanitation, and sewage removal. As devastating new illnesses left humans not knowing what hit them, folk theories and remedies proliferated. Only one nostrum—“dispersal”—implicitly identified crowding as the basic cause. The density-dependent diseases afflicting the populations of the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp represented a new and rigorous selection pressure from pathogens never experienced by their ancestors. One imagines that not a few early concentrations of sedentary peoples were all but exterminated by diseases to which they had virtually no resistance. For smaller preliterate societies it is all but impossible to know for sure the role of epidemics in mortality, and much of the evidence from early cemeteries in inconclusive. It is quite likely, however, that the crowding diseases, including especially zoonoses, were largely responsible for the demographic bottleneck of the early Neolithic. In time—how long is uncertain and varies with the pathogen—crowded populations developed a degree of immunity to many pathogens, which in turn became endemic, signifying a stable and less lethal pathogen-host relationship. After all, only those who survive live on to have children! Some diseases—whooping cough and meningitis, for example—might still endanger the very young, while others, if contracted by a younger young person, were relatively harmless and conferred immunity: polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, and infectious hepatitis.[77] Once a disease becomes endemic in a sedentary population, it is far less lethal, often circulating largely in a subclinical form for most carriers. At this point, unexposed populations having little or no immunity against this pathogen are likely to be uniquely vulnerable when they come into contact with a population in which it is endemic. Thus war captives, slaves, and migrants from distant or isolated villages previously outside the circle of crowd immunity have fewer defenses and are likely to succumb to diseases to which large sedentary populations have become, over time, largely immune. It was for this reason, of course, that the encounter between the Old World and the New World proved so cataclysmic for the immunologically naïve Native Americans, isolated for more than ten millennia from Old World pathogens. The diseases of sedentism and crowding in the late Neolithic were compounded by an increasingly agricultural diet, deficient in many essential nutrients. One’s chances of surviving an epidemic disease, other things equal, especially as an infant or a pregnant woman, depended very much on one’s nutritional status. The extremely high rates of mortality for infants (40–50 percent) among most early agriculturalists was a result of the conjuncture of a diet that weakened the vulnerable with new infectious diseases that carried them off. Evidence for the relative restriction and impoverishment of early farmers’ diets comes largely from comparisons of skeletal remains of farmers with those of hunter-gatherers living nearby at the same time. The hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average. This presumably reflected their more varied and abundant diet. It would be hard, as we have explained, to exaggerate that variety. Not only might it span several food webs—marine, wetland, forest, savanna, arid—each with its seasonal variation, but even when it came to plant foods, the diversity was, by agricultural standards, staggering. The archaeological site of Abu Hureyra, for example, in its hunter-gatherer phase, yielded remains from 192 different plants, of which 142 could be identified, and of which 118 are known to be consumed by contemporary hunter-gatherers.[78] A symposium devoted to assessing the impact of the Neolithic revolution on human health worldwide concluded on the basis of paleopathological data:
[Nutritional] stress . . . does not seem to have become common and widespread until after the development of high degrees of sedentism, population density, and reliance on agriculture. At this stage . . . the incidence of physiological stress increases greatly and the average mortality rates increase appreciably. Most of these agricultural populations have high frequencies of porotic hyperostasis [overgrowth of poorly formed bone associated with malnutrition, particularly iron-deficiency related malnutrition] and cribra orbitalia [a localized version of the above condition, in the eye socket], and there is a substantial increase in the number and severity of [tooth] enamel hypoplasis and pathologies associated with infectious diseases.[79]Much of the malnutrition detected in what we might call “agricultural woman”—for women, owing to blood loss with menses, were the most severely affected—seems to be due to iron deficiency. Preagricultural women had a diet that supplied abundant amounts of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids derived from game, fish, and certain plant oils. These fatty acids are important because they facilitate the uptake of iron necessary for the formation of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Cereal diets, by contrast, not only lack the essential fatty acids but actually inhibit the uptake of iron. The result of the first increasingly intensive cereal diets in the late Neolithic (wheat, barley, millet) was therefore the appearance of iron-deficiency anemia, leaving an unmistakable forensic bone signature. Most of the added vulnerability to novel infections seems due to a relatively high and narrow carbohydrate diet without much in the way of wild foods and meat. It was likely to lack some essential vitamins and to be protein poor. Even the meat of the domesticates on which they might occasionally feast contained far fewer vital fatty acids than wild game. Illnesses attributable to the Neolithic diet that do have bone signatures, such as rickets, can be documented; those that affect the soft tissues are far harder to document (except in the occasional well-preserved mummy). Nevertheless, on the basis of dietary knowledge and early written accounts of illnesses that can probably be assumed, again on dietary knowledge, to have existed earlier, the following nutrition-related diseases have been attributed to Neolithic foodways: beriberi, pellagra, riboflavin deficiency, and kwashiorkor. What about crops? They too were subjected to a kind of “sedentism” on fixed fields and conditions of crowding, as well as a new, human-driven selection process that reduced their genetic diversity to foster desired characteristics. They too, like any organism, were subject to their own density-dependent diseases, as we shall see. Because “both herding and agriculture are frequently afflicted with epidemics, crop failure, or other misfortunes,” Nissen and Heine claim that early farmers preferred, when possible, to rely on hunting, fishing, and gathering.[80] Here again the archaeological record is not very helpful. It is possible to show, say, that a previously populous area was suddenly abandoned; before written records, however, knowing why it was deserted is another matter. A crop fungus, a rust, an insect infestation, or even a storm that destroys a ripe crop, like soft-tissue diseases, leave little or no trace. Written records, when they are available, are more likely to record a “harvest failure” or famine than to specify the cause, which, in many cases, is not understood by the victims themselves. Crops represented their own perfect “floral” epidemiological storm. Consider as a pathogen or insect might the attractions of the Neolithic agricultural landscape. It was not only crowded but, compared with wild grasslands, was largely devoted to just two major grains: wheat and barley. Furthermore, these were fixed fields cropped more or less continuously, as compared, say, with fire-field cultivation (aka swidden or slash-and-burn), where a field was planted for a year or two and then fallowed for a decade or more. Repeated annual cultivation provided, in effect, a permanent feedlot for insect pests and plant diseases—not to mention obligate weeds—which built up to population levels that could not have existed before fixed-field monocropping. Large sedentary communities necessarily meant many arable fields in close proximity, growing a similar variety of crop; this promoted a commensurate buildup of pest populations. As with the epidemiology of human crowding, it seems logical to suppose that many of the crop diseases besetting Neolithic planters were new pathogens that evolved to take advantage of such a nutritious agro-ecology. The literal meaning of “parasite,” from the original Greek root, is “beside the grain.” Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small—snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.[81] The seed in the ground is attacked by insect larvae, rodents, and birds. During growth and grain development the same pests are still active, as well as aphids that suck sap and transmit disease. Fungal diseases are especially devastating, including mildew, smut, bunt, rusts, and ergot (famous as St. Anthony’s Fire when ingested by humans) at this stage. The part of the crop that does not succumb to these predators must compete with a host of weeds that have come to specialize in ploughed soil and to mimic certain crops. And once the harvest is in the granary it is still subject to weevils, rodents, and fungi. It is common enough in the contemporary Middle East for several crops in succession to be lost to insects, birds, or disease. In an experiment in northern Europe, a crop of modern barley, fertilized but not protected with modern herbicides or pesticides, was reduced by half: 20 percent due to crop disease, 12 percent to animals, and 18 percent to weeds.[82] Threatened by the diseases of crowding and monoculture, domesticated crops must be constantly defended by their human custodians if they are to yield a harvest. It is largely for this reason that early agriculture was so dauntingly labor intensive. Various techniques were devised to reduce the labor involved and improve the yields. Fields were scattered so that they were less contiguous; fallowing and crop rotation was practiced; and seed was procured at a distance to reduce genetic uniformity. Ripening crops were closely guarded by farmers, their families, and scarecrows. But given the disease-prone agro-ecology of the domesticated crop, it was touch and go whether the crop would survive all the predators to feed its ultimate guardian and predator: the farmer. The older narrative of civilizational progress is, in one basic respect, undoubtedly correct. The domestication of plants and animals made possible a degree of sedentism that did form the basis of the earliest civilizations and states and their cultural achievements. It rested, however, on an extremely slender and fragile genetic foundation: a handful of crops, a few species of livestock, and a radically simplified landscape that had to be constantly defended against a reconquest by excluded nature. At the same time, the domus was never even remotely self-sufficient. It required a constant subsidy, as it were, from that excluded nature: wood for fuel and building, fish, mollusks, woodland grazing, small game, wild vegetables, fruits, and nuts. In a famine, farmers resorted to all the extradomus resources that hunter-gatherers relied on. The domus was at the same time a veritable feast and a pilgrimage site for uninvited commensals and pests large and small, down to the smallest viruses. Its very concentration and simplicity made it uniquely vulnerable to collapse. Late Neolithic agriculture was the first of many steps in the development of special techniques for maximizing the production of a small number of preferred plant and animal species. An illness—of crops, livestock, or people—a drought, excessive rains, a plague of locusts, rats, or birds, could bring the whole edifice down in the blink of an eye. Based on a narrow food web, Neolithic agriculture was far more productive, in a concentrated way, but also far more fragile than hunting and gathering or even shifting-cultivation, which combined mobility with a reliance on a diversity of foods. How, despite its fragility, the domus module of fixed-field agriculture became a hegemonic, agro-ecological and demographic bulldozer that transformed much of the world in its image is something of a miracle. *** A NOTE ON FERTILITY AND POPULATION The ultimate dominance of the Neolithic grain complex is hardly prefigured by the epidemiology of the domus. An attentive reader might not only be puzzled by the rise of agrarian civilization but might wonder how, in light of the pathogens Neolithic cultivators faced, this new form of agrarian life managed to survive at all, let alone thrive. The short answer, I believe, is sedentism itself. Despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-à-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out that sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction—enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality. The effect of the transition to sedentism on fertility has been convincingly documented in contemporary studies by Richard Lee, comparing newly settled with still-mobile !Kung Bushman women, as well as other studies making more comprehensive comparisons of fertility between farmers and foragers.[83] Nonsedentary populations typically limit their reproduction deliberately. The logistics of moving camp regularly make it burdensome, if not impossible, to have two infants who must be carried at the same time. As a result, the spacing of children of hunter-gatherers is on the order of four years, a spacing that is achieved by delayed weaning, abortifacients, and neglect or infanticide. Furthermore, some combination of strenuous exercise with a lean and protein-rich diet meant that puberty arrived later, ovulation was less regular, and menopause arrived earlier. Among sedentary agriculturalists, by contrast, the burden of a much shorter spacing of children as experienced by mobile foragers is much reduced and, as we shall see, the greater value of the children as a labor force in agriculture is enhanced. By virtue of sedentism, menarche is earlier; with a grain diet, infants can be weaned earlier on soft foods; and by virtue of a high-carbohydrate diet, ovulation is encouraged and a woman’s reproductive life is extended. Given the disease burden of agrarian society and its fragility, the demographic “advantage” of farmers over hunter-gatherers might have been quite small. But the thing to remember in this context is that over a period of five thousand years—like the “miracle” of compound interest—the eventual difference became massive. For example, if one computes doubling times for different rates of reproduction, it turns out that an annual rate of 0.014 percent doubles population in five thousand years while a rate of 0.028 percent, still minuscule, doubles population in half that time (twenty-five hundred years), and, of course, doubles again to a total four times as great after five thousand years. Given enough time, the small reproductive advantage of farmers was overwhelming.[84] The demographic expansion (if the crude order of magnitude we are using is realistic) of world population from four million to five million over five thousand years seems puny indeed. As the proportion of Neolithic farmers to hunter-gatherers was far greater in 5,000 BCE than in 10,000 BCE, it is quite likely that even in this bottleneck period, the grain famers of the world were demographically overtaking hunter-gatherers. The two other possibilities are that many hunter-gatherers were taking up agriculture by choice or force or that the agrarian pathogens that had become endemic and less lethal to farmers were devastating the still immunologically naïve hunter-gatherers with whom they came into contact, much as European pathogens killed a great majority of the New World’s population.[85] There is no clear evidence to confirm or reject these possibilities. One way or another, however, Neolithic farming communities in the Levant, Egypt, and China were expanding and spreading to alluvial bottomlands, apparently at the expense of nonsedentary peoples. The writing, however faint, was on the wall. CHAPTER FOUR ** 4. Agro-ecology of the Early State
Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has grain, and pass his time there. —Sumerian text: Debate between Sheep and Grain
Ultimately men bow down to the man, or group of men, who can and dare take over the hoard, the store of bread, the riches, to distribute among the people again. —D. H. Lawrence{1}IF civilization is judged an achievement of the state, and if archaic civilization means sedentism, farming, the domus, irrigation, and towns, then there is something radically wrong with the historical order. All of these human achievements of the Neolithic were in place well before we encounter anything like a state in Mesopotamia. Quite the contrary. On the basis of what we now know, the embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation. The module was, as we shall see, the only possible scaffolding available for the design of a state. Settled populations growing crops of domesticated grains, and small towns with a thousand or more inhabitants facilitating commerce, were an autonomous achievement of the Neolithic, being in place nearly two millennia before the appearance of the first states, around 3,300 BCE.[86] These earliest towns are, Jennifer Pournelle reminds us, “better imagined as islands embedded in a marshy plain, situated on the borders and in the heart of vast deltaic marshlands.” “Their waterways served less as irrigation canals than as transportation routes.”[87] Although there were earlier proto-urban settlements elsewhere in the region outside the southern alluvium, it seems clear that urbanism, thanks to wetland abundance, was more persistent, durable, and resilient in the alluvium than anywhere else.[88] This complex, however, represented a unique new concentration of manpower, arable land, and nutrition that, if “captured”—“parasitized” might not be too strong a word—could be made into a powerful node of political power and privilege. The Neolithic agro-complex was a necessary but not a sufficient basis for state formation; it made state formation possible but not certain. In Weberian terms, we are dealing here with something like “elective affinity” rather than cause and effect. Thus it was possible and not uncommon at the time to have sedentary farming populations on alluvial soils practicing irrigation without any state.[89] But there was no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population. What constitutes a state in this context? How would we know the first pristine state when we saw it? The answer is not cut and dried; I am inclined to see “stateness” as a more-or-less proposition rather than strictly either/or. There are many plausible attributes to stateness, and the more of them a particular polity possesses, the more likely we are to call it a state. Small embryonic towns of sedentary foragers, cultivators, and pastoralists that manage their collective affairs and trade with the outside world are not, ipso facto, states. Nor is the standard Weberian criterion of a territorial political unit that monopolizes the application of coercive force entirely adequate, for it takes so many other features of states for granted. We think of states as institutions that have strata of officials specialized in the assessment and collection of taxes—whether in grain, labor, or specie—and who are responsible to a ruler or rulers. We think of states as exercising executive power in a fairly complex, stratified, hierarchical society with an appreciable division of labor (weavers, artisans, priests, metalworkers, clerks, soldiers, cultivators). Some would apply more stringent criteria: a state should have an army, defensive walls, a monumental ritual center or palace, and perhaps a king or queen.[90] Pinpointing the birth of the early state, given these various attributes, is a relatively arbitrary exercise that is further constrained by the few sites from which we have convincing archaeological and historical evidence. Among these characteristics, I propose to privilege those that point to territoriality and a specialized state apparatus: walls, tax collection, and officials. By such standards there is no doubt that that the “state” of Uruk is firmly in place by 3,200 BCE. Nissen calls the period from 3,200 to 2,800 BCE the “era of high civilization” in the Near East, during which “Babylonia was, without doubt, the region that produced the most complex economic, political and social orders.”[91] Not incidentally, the iconic founding act of establishing a Sumerian polity was the building of a city wall. A wall at Uruk was, in fact, built between 3,300 and 3,000 BCE, when Gilgamesh was thought by some to have reigned. Uruk was the pioneer of the state form that would be replicated throughout the Mesopotamian alluvium by roughly twenty other competing city-states or “peer polities.” These polities were small enough that one could walk from the center of most to the outer boundary in a day. With political and economic dominance over a modest agricultural hinterland, as well as a structured city government, the Sumerian city of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BCE met the criteria of the city-state. It was, at first, unique in its size and power. We have enough evidence to demonstrate, however, that by the first half of the third millennium, at the latest, major cities such as Kish, Nippur, Isin, Lagash, Eridu, and Ur belong to the same category as Uruk.[92] If Uruk looms particularly large in this and other examinations of early state making, it is not simply because it seems to be the first state but because it is, at the same time, the most documented archaeologically. Compared with Uruk, our knowledge of other early state centers in Mesopotamia is fragmentary. For its time, it was almost surely the largest city in the world in both physical extent and in population. Estimates of its population range from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand; the number of inhabitants tripled over two hundred years, an increase unlikely to have come from natural population growth, given the high mortality rates. As the place-names of Ur, Uruk, and Eridu appear not to be of Sumerian origin, this suggests an in-migration displacing or absorbing earlier inhabitants. The bas reliefs depicting prisoners of war in neck shackles suggest another means by which the population was augmented. Uruk’s walls appear to have enclosed an area of 250 hectares, twice the size of classical Athens nearly three millennia later. Given Postgate’s calculation that another Sumerian city, Abu Salabikh, with its hypothetical population of about ten thousand, would have had to dominate a rural hinterland for ten kilometers around, one imagines that Uruk’s hinterland would have been at least two or three times as great.[93] There is, moreover, abundant evidence of substantial work gangs mobilized for agricultural and nonagricultural tasks by temples, as well as thousands of standardized bowls used, most judge, to distribute food or beer rations. Other marks of stateness include a specialist scribal class, soldiers (full-time?) with armor, and efforts at standardizing weights and measures. Most of my discussion of the early state, therefore, unless otherwise noted, relies on the extensive literature on Uruk with occasional references to the nearby, well-documented but short-lived Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III) a millennium later. If state formation depends on the control, maintenance, and expansion of the concentrations of grain and manpower on the alluvium, the question arises of how the early state could have come to dominate these population-and-grain modules. The would-be subjects of this hypothetical state, after all, had direct, unmediated access to water and flood-retreat agriculture as well as a variety of subsistence options beyond cultivation. One convincing explanation for how this cultivating population might have been assembled as state subjects is climate change. Nissen shows that the period from at least 3,500 to 2,500 BCE was marked by a steep decline in sea level and a decline in the water volume in the Euphrates. Increasing aridity meant that the rivers shrank back to their main channels and the population increasingly huddled around the remaining watercourses, while soil salinization of water-deprived areas sharply reduced the amount of arable land. In the process, the population became strikingly more concentrated, more “urban.” Irrigation became both more important and more labor intensive—it now often required lifting water—and access to dug canals became vital. City states (for example, Umma and Lagash) fought over arable land and access to the water that could irrigate it. Over time a more reticulated canal system dug with corvée or slave labor developed. If Nissen’s scenario of aridity and its demographic consequence of concentration, both of which rest on solid evidence, is accepted, it provides one plausible account of state formation. The shortage of irrigation water confined the population increasingly to well-watered places and eliminated or diminished many of the alternative form of subsistence, such as foraging and hunting. As Nissen describes it, “We have already seen this happening in the previous period, where the tendency began to emerge for settlements to concentrate around the courses of the larger rivers, while the area between the rivers became increasingly empty.”[94] Climate change, then, by forcing a kind of urbanization in which 90 percent of the population lived in settlements of thirty hectares or more, intensified the grain-and-manpower modules that were ideal for state formation. Aridity proved the indispensable handmaiden of state making by delivering, as it were, an assembled population and concentrated cereal grains in an embryonic state space that could not, at that epoch, have been assembled by any other means. Not just in Mesopotamia but virtually everywhere, it seems, early state battens itself onto this new source of sustenance. The dense concentration of grain and manpower on the only soils capable of sustaining them in such numbers—alluvial or loess soils—maximized the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality. The state form colonizes this nucleus as its productive base, scales it up, intensifies it, and occasionally adds infrastructure—such as canals for transport and irrigation—in the interest of fattening and protecting the goose that lays the golden eggs. In terms used earlier, one can think of these forms of intensification as elite niche-construction: modifying the landscape and ecology so as to enrich the productivity of its habitat. 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 thus it was only in such settings that the first bureaucratic states were likely to arise. The development of the Mesopotamian state was not remotely linear. Statelets in the alluvium had, like their inhabitants, a very short life expectancy. Interregna were more common than “regna,” and long episodes of collapse and disintegration were commonplace. As we have seen, the late Neolithic proto-urban complex was a touch-and-go affair under the best of circumstances. It was menaced by variable rainfall, floods, pest attacks, and any number of crop, livestock, and human diseases that could wipe out a settlement or, more likely, force its residents to scatter as hunters, foragers, and pastoralists so as to sustain themselves. To the already considerable perils of the crowded Neolithic complex, the superimposition of the state added an additional layer of fragility and insecurity. Taxes and warfare can serve to illustrate the added fragility. Taxes in kind (grain or livestock) or in labor obviously meant that the farmer was not only producing for the domus but had to supply a fund of rent that elites appropriated for their own subsistence and display, although the same elites might occasionally disburse stored grain in a famine to keep their population intact. It is hard to determine how burdensome this tax was, and in any case, it varied over time and between polities. To judge from agrarian history in general, the tax in grain is unlikely to have been less than a fifth of the harvest. Cultivators walked, in effect, closer to the subsistence precipice: a crop failure that, without taxes, might mean hunger could, after the state took its taxes, mean utter ruin. The evidence for frequent warfare among rival polities in the southern alluvium is abundant. It is hard to tell precisely how sanguinary it was, but given the preciousness of population for all the early states, wars were probably more destructive than bloody. One account of warfare among the peer polities of the alluvium asserts that the population lived at the subsistence level except when a victorious army returned with loot and tribute.[95] The gains of the winner were offset by the losses of the vanquished. Warfare itself meant the burning of crops, the seizure of granaries, the confiscation of livestock and household goods—one’s own army was as likely to be as big a threat to livelihood as the enemy’s. The early state, rather like the weather, was more often an added threat to subsistence than its benefactor. *** THE AGRO-GEOGRAPHY OF STATE-MAKING Archaic states, in the crudest material terms, were all agrarian and required an appropriable surplus of agro-pastoral products to feed nonproducers: clerks, artisans, soldiers, priests, aristocrats. Given the logistics of transport in the ancient world, this meant the concentration of as much arable land and as many people to work it as possible within the smallest radius. The late-Neolithic resettlement camp located on rich alluvial soil was the already existing nucleus of people and grain from which a state could be elaborated. We can be more specific about the geographical conditions for state building. Only the richest soils were productive enough per hectare to sustain a large population in a compact area and to produce a taxable surplus. In practice this meant loess (wind deposited) or alluvial (flood deposited) soils. Alluvia, the historic gift of the annual floods of the Tigris and Euphrates and their tributaries, were the sites of state making in Mesopotamia: no alluvium, no state.[96] If reliable and noncatastrophic floods allowed, flood-retreat agriculture could be practiced on the easily worked and nutritious silt (in Egypt along the Nile as well), in which case the density of the population might be even greater. Much the same can be said for the earliest state centers in China (Qin and Han Dynasties), in the loess soils along the Yellow River, where population density reached levels rare for preindustrial societies. To follow the progress of the Chinese state is to follow the agro-ecology that made it possible. As Owen Lattimore noted, “Irrigation was spectacularly rewarding in the loess core of ancient China, soft, easily worked soil, no stone, a climate allowing many different crops—the complex spread farther and farther out so long as land was suitable.”[97] Water, of course, was vital. Its abundance in the wetlands provided, as we have seen, the basis for some of the first substantial sedentary communities. Only well-watered alluvium, whether by reliable rainfall or irrigation water close at hand, was a possible site for state making. But water was vital in other ways as well. Located at or near a floodplain and specializing in grain agriculture, none of the early state centers in Mesopotamia was even remotely self-sufficient economically. They required a host of products that originated in other ecological zones: timber, firewood, leather, obsidian, copper, tin, gold and silver, and honey. In exchange, the small statelets might trade pottery, cloth, grain, and artisanal products.[98] Most of these goods had to move by water rather than overland. I am tempted to say, “no water transport, no state”—only a slight exaggeration.[99] We have already emphasized earlier how transportation by ship or small barge is exponentially more economical than shipment by donkey or cart. Illustrating the contrast is the striking fact that as late as 1800 (before the steamship or railroad) it was about as fast to go from Southampton, England, to the Cape of Good Hope by ship as it was to go by stagecoach from London to Edinburgh.[100] And of course, the ship could carry vastly more cargo. The miracle of eliminating so much friction by water transport has meant that it was a very rare early state that did not depend on nearby navigable waterways—coastal or riverine—to trade for its requirements. Being located near the bottom of the Tigris-Euphrates watershed, the earliest alluvial states could also take advantage of the current to float bulk commodities such as timber, with minimum expenditure of labor. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the middle passages of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a narrative of floating a raft of cedar—which will become the main gate of the newly founded city—down the river after killing the giant guarding the great forest. Avoiding friction in general is important to state making. Navigable, calm water for much of the year is typically essential. It helps if the land is flat, as well. A floodplain is basically flat by definition, while rugged terrain adds, again exponentially, to the cost of transport. Grasping the implicit ecology of state formation, Ibn Khaldun noted that the Arabs could conquer lands that were flat but were stymied by mountains and ravines.[101] Specifying the conditions of elementary state making helps us appreciate the obverse: the conditions under which state formation is unlikely or indeed impossible. As the concentration of population facilitates state making, dispersal thwarts it. Because it is the rich, well-watered alluvium that allows for such concentration, it follows that nonalluvium ecologies are unlikely to be sites of early states. Arid deserts and mountainous zones (barring fertile intermontane basins) virtually require dispersed subsistence strategies and can hardly serve as the nucleus of a state. These “nonstate spaces,” owing to their different subsistence patterns and social organization—pastoralism, foraging, and slash-and-burn cultivation—are often stigmatized and coded “barbarian” by state discourses. The state “module” requires concentrated manpower—specifically agricultural manpower practicing mainly fixed-field cultivation. Concentration alone will not do. The wetlands ecology of the southern part of the Mesopotamian alluvium, where substantial sedentism first arose in the Middle East, is a case in point.[102] It was heavily populated and although some crops were grown, its earliest towns yield no remains of the regular ploughed fields that leave an unmistakable signature in the archaeological record. Livelihoods here, as described earlier, were exceptionally diverse: wetland foraging and hunting, harvesting wild reeds and sedges, recessional grazing of sheep, goats, and cattle. Despite a dense and affluent population, this was not an agricultural population. “Rather than supporting a model of social transformation driven by irrigated grain crops, this revisualized heartland of cities suggests a settlement progression beginning with . . . opportunistic dependence on littoral bio-mass.”[103] The wetlands produced wealth and towns but no states until more than a millennium later. Unlike a landscape of plough agriculture, the exuberant diversity of livelihoods in the wetlands was not favorable to state making. As if to confirm the suspicion that larger river deltas are not conducive to early state building, the Nile Delta seems to provide a comparable case. Early Egyptian states arose upriver from the Delta, which, though also well populated and rich in subsistence resources, was not the basis of a state. On the contrary, it was seen as a zone of hostility and resistance to the state. Like the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian wetlands, the Nile Delta population lived on turtlebacks, fished, harvested reeds, ate shellfish, and practiced little if any agriculture; they were not a part of dynastic Egypt. The heartland of early states along the Yellow River were, similarly, upriver and not in the turbulent, ever-changing delta area. Cultivation, though it was of millet, was as vital to the state-building nucleus in China as wheat and barley were to the Mesopotamian states. The Chinese state-building project, hopped, as it were, from one rich arable loess location to another, leaving aside both the hilly blocks of land (“inner” barbarians) between them and the complex, diverse Yellow River Delta. *** GRAINS MAKE STATES The subsistence bases of all the earliest, major agrarian states of antiquity—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Yellow River—bear a remarkable resemblance to one another. They are all grain states: wheat, barley, and, in the case of the Yellow River, millet. Subsequent early states follow the same pattern, although irrigated rice and, in the New World, maize are added to the list of staple crops. A partial exception to this rule might be the Inka state, which relied on maize and potatoes, although maize seems to have predominated as the tax crop.[104] 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. Here the emphasis should be again on Lucien Febvre’s concept of “possibilism”; such a niche was necessary for state formation (and could be expanded by landscape management such as canals and terracing), but it was not sufficient.[105] And in this case, population concentration must be distinguished from state making; wetlands abundance, as we have seen, could lead to incipient urbanism and commerce, but did not lead to state formation without grain growing on a large scale.[106] Why, however, should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.[107] 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. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation. The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary. In practice, in the case of the medieval tithe, the cultivator was expected to assemble the unthreshed grain in sheaves in the field, from which the tithe collector would take every tenth sheaf. Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the remainder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly.[108] Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by opposing armies.[109] The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation; in Mesopotamia this included insisting on repeated ploughing to break up the large clods of earth and repeated harrowing for better rooting and nutrient delivery. The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable. Compare this, for example, with the attempt to assess and tax the commercial activity of buyers and sellers in the market. One reason for the official distrust and stigmatization of the merchant class in China was the simple fact that its wealth, unlike that of the rice planter, was illegible, concealable, and fugitive. One might tax a market, or collect tolls on a road or river junction where goods and transactions were more transparent, but taxing merchants was a tax collector’s nightmare. For purposes of measuring, dividing, and assessing, the simple fact that the cereal harvest consists ultimately of small grains, husked or unhusked, has enormous administrative advantages. Like grains of sugar or sand, cereal grains are almost infinitely divisible, down to smaller and smaller fractions and precisely measurable by weight and volume for accounting purposes. Units of grain served as standards of measurement and value for trade and tribute against which the value of other commodities was calculated—including labor. The daily food ration of the lowest class of laborers in Umma, Mesopotamia, was almost exactly two liters of barley measured out in the beveled bowls that are among the most ubiquitous archaeological finds.
To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, reformed, corrected, punished. —Pierre-Joseph PrudhonPeasantries with long experience of on-the-ground statecraft have always understood that the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. So when a government surveyor arrives with a plane table, or census takers come with their clipboards and questionnaires to register households, the subjects understand that trouble in the form of conscription, forced labor, land seizures, head taxes, or new taxes on croplands cannot be far behind. They understand implicitly that behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders—paperwork that is for the most part mystifying and beyond their ken. The firm identification in their minds between paper documents and the source of their oppressions has meant that the first act of many peasant rebellions has been to burn down the local records office where these documents are housed. Grasping the fact that the state saw its land and subjects through record keeping, the peasantry implicitly assumed that blinding the state might end their woes. As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector.”[116] Southern Mesopotamia was the heartland of not one but several related state-making experiments between roughly 3,300 and 2,350 BCE. Like China’s Warring States period or the later Greek city-states, the southern alluvium was the site of rivalrous city-polities whose fortunes waxed and waned. Among the best known were Kish, Ur, and, above all, Uruk. Something utterly remarkable and without historical parallel was taking place here. On one hand, groups of priests, strong men, and local chiefs were scaling up and institutionalizing structures of power that had previously used only the idioms of kinship. They were creating for the first time something along the lines of what we would call a state, though they could not possibly have understood it in those terms. On the other hand, thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control. It is at roughly this time that writing makes its first appearance.[117] The coincidence of the pristine state and pristine writing tempts one to the crude functionalist conclusion that would-be state makers invented the forms of notation that were essential to statecraft. But it would not be too strong to assert that it is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping, even if it took the Inka form of strings of knots (quipu). The first condition of state appropriation (for whatever purpose) must be an inventory of available resources—population, land, crop yields, livestock, storehouse stocks. This information is, however, like a cadastral survey, a snapshot soon out of date. As appropriation proceeds, continuous record keeping is required—of grain deliveries, corvée labor performed, requisitions, receipts, and so on. Once a polity comprises even a few thousand subjects, some form of notation and documentation beyond memory and oral tradition is required. A powerful case for linking state administration and writing is that it seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature, mythology, praise hymns, kings lists and genealogies, chronicles, and religious texts.[118] The magnificent Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dates from Ur’s Third Dynasty (circa 2,100 BCE), a full millennium after cuneiform had been first used for state and commercial purposes. What can one infer from the trove of cuneiform tablets that have been recovered and translated about actual governance on the ground in Sumer? 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. Surely we know enough about even quite modern bureaucracies to realize that there is no necessary relation between the records on the one hand and the facts on the ground on the other. Documents are forged and fiddled for private advantage or to please superiors. Rules and regulations laid out meticulously in the documents may be a dead letter on the ground. Land records may be corrupt, absent, or simply inaccurate. The order of the records office, like the order of the parade ground, too often masks rampant disorder in actual administration and on the battlefield. What the records can tell us, however, is something about the utopian, Linnaean order in statecraft that is implicit in the logic of record keeping, its categories, its units of measurement, and, above all, in the things it pays attention to. The “gleam in the eye” of what I think of as the “quartermaster state”—is most instructive. As a mark of this aspiration, the very symbol of kingship in Sumer was the “rod and line,” almost certainly the tools of the surveyor.[119] We can see this state imagination at work in a brief examination of Mesopotamia and early Chinese administrative practice. The earliest administrative tablets from Uruk (Level IV), circa 3,300–3,100 BCE, are lists, lists, and lists—mostly of grain, manpower, and taxes. The topics of the surviving tablets in order of frequency are barley (as rations and taxes), war captives, male and female slaves.[120] A preoccupation at Uruk IV and later in other centers is the population roll. As in all ancient kingdoms, maximizing population was an obsession that usually superseded the conquest of territory per se. Population—as producers, soldiers, and slaves—represented the wealth of the state. The city of Umma, a dependency of Ur, where a huge trove of tablets has been found dating from about 2,255 BCE, was especially precocious, occupying one hundred hectares and having between ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants—a large population to administer. At the core of Umma’s project of legibility was a census of population by location, age, and gender as the basis for assigning the head tax and corvée labor, and for conscription. It was the “immanent” project, never realized in practice except perhaps for the temple economy and dependent labor force. Landholdings, apparently both temple and private, were designated by their size, the quality of their soil, and the expected crop yield, which served as the basis for a tax assessment. Some of the Sumerian polities, especially Ur III, look like command-and-control economies, heavily centralized (on paper—or, rather, on tablet), militarized, and regimented, resembling what we know of militarized Sparta among the Greek city-states. One tablet records 840 rations of barley, meted out, in all probability in the (mass produced?) beveled bowls holding two liters of barley. Other rations mention beer, groats, and flour. Labor gangs, whether of war captives, slaves, or corvée laborers, seem ubiquitous.
[Why did] every distinctive community on the periphery reject the use of writing with so many archaeological cultures exposed to the complexity of southern Mesopotamia? One could argue that this rejection of complexity was a conscious act. What is the reason for it? . . . Perhaps, far from being less intellectually qualified to deal with complexity, the peripheral peoples were smart enough to avoid its oppressive command structures for at least another 500 years, when it was imposed upon them by military conquest. . . . In every instance the periphery initially rejected the adoption of complexity even after direct exposure to it . . . and, in doing so, avoided the cage of the state for another half millennium.[123]
In the multitude of people is the king’s honor, but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince. —Proverbs 14:28
If the multitudes scatter and cannot be retained, the city state will become a mound of ruins. —Early Chinese Manual of Governance
It is true, I admit, that [the Siamese kingdom] is of greater extent than mine, but you must admit that the king of Golconda rules over men, while the king of Siam rules over forests and mosquitoes. —King of Golconda to a Siamese visitor, circa 1680
In a large house with many servants, the doors may be left open; in a small house with few servants, the doors must be shut. —Siamese sayingTHE excess of epigraphs above is meant to signal the degree to which concern over the acquisition and control of population was at the very center of early statecraft. Control over a fertile and well-watered patch of alluvium meant nothing unless it was made productive by a population of cultivators who would work it. To see the early states as “population machines” is not far off the mark, so long as we appreciate that the “machine” was in bad repair and often broke down, and not only because of failures in statecraft. The state remained as focused on the number and productivity of its “domesticated” subjects as a shepherd might husband his flock or a farmer tend his crops. The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.[124] Where there was no preexisting settled population that could serve as the nucleus of state formation, a population had to be assembled for the purpose. This was the guiding principle of Spanish colonialism in the New World, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The reducciones or concentrated settlements (often forced) of native peoples around a center from which Spanish power radiated were seen as part of a civilizing project, but they also served the nontrivial purpose of serving and feeding the conquistadores. Christian mission stations—of whatever denomination—among dispersed populations begin in the same fashion, assembling a productive population around the station, from which conversion efforts radiated. The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is “consumed” in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed.[125] Access to resources—land, pasture, hunting—was open to all by virtue of membership in a group, whether tribe, band, lineage, or family, that controlled those resources. Short of being cast out, an individual could not be denied direct and independent access to whatever means of subsistence the group in question disposed of. And in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A. V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.[126] 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. Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor—corvée labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery—was a surplus brought into being. Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor, as we shall see, but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier. Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working class of the right to be independent cultivators”—foragers, hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, pastoralists.[127] In the case of the earliest states, making the lower classes reliably unfree meant holding them in the grain core and preventing them from fleeing to avoid drudgery and/or bondage itself.[128] Do what it might to discourage and punish flight—and the earliest legal codes are filled with such injunctions—the archaic state lacked the means to prevent a certain degree of leakage under normal circumstances. In hard times occasioned by, say, a crop failure, unusually heavy taxes, or war, this leakage might quickly become a hemorrhage. Short of stemming the flow, most archaic states sought to replace their losses by various means, including wars to capture slaves, purchases of slaves from slave takers, and forced resettlement of whole communities near the grain core. The total population of a grain state, assuming it controlled sufficient fertile land, was a reliable, if not infallible, indication of its relative wealth and military prowess. Aside from an advantageous position on trade routes and waterways or particularly clever rulers, agricultural techniques as well as the technology of warfare were both relatively static and depended largely on manpower. The state with the most people was generally richest and usually prevailed militarily over smaller rivals. One indication of this fundamental fact was that the prize of war was more often captives than territory, which meant that the losers’ lives, particularly those of women and children, were spared. Many centuries later Thucydides acknowledges the logic of manpower by praising the Spartan general Brasidas for negotiating peaceful surrenders, thereby increasing the Spartan tax and manpower base at no cost in Spartan lives.[129] Warfare in the Mesopotamian alluvium beginning in the late Uruk Period (3,500–3,100 BCE) and for the next two millennia was likewise not about the conquest of territory but rather about the assembling of populations at the state’s grain core. Thanks to the original and meticulous work of Seth Richardson, we know that the vast majority of the wars in the alluvium were not those between the larger and well-known urban polities but, rather, the petty wars by each of those polities to conquer the smaller independent communities in its own hinterland to augment its laboring population and hence its power.[130] Polities aimed to assemble “unpacified,” “scattered” people and to “herd non-state clients into state orders by both force and persuasion.” This process, Richardson notes, is a continuing imperative inasmuch as states are simultaneously losing “their own constituent populations from and to non-state units.” Though the state might presume to a fine-grained administration of its subjects, it was, in fact, in a constant struggle to compensate for the losses from flight and mortality by a largely coercive campaign to corral new subjects from among hitherto “untaxed and unregulated” populations. The Old Babylonian legal codes are preoccupied with escapees and runaways and the effort to return them to their designated work and residence. *** THE STATE AND SLAVERY Slavery was not invented by the state. Various forms of enslavement, individual and communal, were widely practiced among nonstate peoples. For pre-Columbian Latin America, Fernando Santos-Granaros has abundantly documented the many forms of communal servitude practiced, many of which persisted along with colonial servitude after the conquest.[131] Slavery, though generally tempered with assimilation and upward mobility, was common among manpower-hungry Native American peoples. Human bondage was undoubtedly known in the ancient Middle East before the appearance of the first state. As with sedentism and the domestication of grain that also predated state formation, the early state elaborated and scaled up the institution of slavery as an essential means to maximize its productive population and the surplus it could appropriate. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently. As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.[132] In Southeast Asia all early states were slave states and slaving states; the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in insular Southeast Asia were, until the late nineteenth century, slaves. Old people among the so-called aboriginal people (orang asli) of the Malay Peninsula and hill peoples in northern Thailand can recall their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about much-dreaded slave raids.[133] Provided that we keep in mind the various forms bondage can take over time, one is tempted to assert: “No slavery, no state.” Moses Finley famously asked, “Was Greek Civilization based on Slave Labour?” and answered with a resounding and well-documented yes.[134] Slaves represented a clear majority—perhaps as much as two-thirds—of Athenian society, and the institution was taken completely for granted; the issue of abolition never arose. As Aristotle held, some peoples, owing to a lack of rational faculties, are, by nature, slaves and are best used, as draft animals are, as tools. In Sparta, slaves represented an even larger portion of the population. The difference, to which we shall return later, was that while most slaves in Athens were war captives from non-Greek-speaking peoples, Sparta’s slaves were largely “helots,” indigenous cultivators conquered in place by Sparta and made to work and produce communally for “free” Spartans. In this model the appropriation of an existing, sedentary grain complex by militarized state builders is far more explicit. Imperial Rome, a polity on a scale rivaled only by its easternmost contemporary, Han Dynasty China, turned much of the Mediterranean basin into a massive slave emporium. Every Roman military campaign was shadowed by slave merchants and ordinary soldiers who expected to become rich by selling or ransoming the captives they had taken personally. By one estimate, the Gallic Wars yielded nearly a million new slaves, while, in Augustinian Rome and Italy, slaves represented from one-quarter to one-third of the population. The ubiquity of slaves as a commodity was reflected in the fact that in the classical world a “standardized” slave became a unit of measurement: in Athens at one point—the market fluctuated—a pair of working mules was worth three slaves. *** SLAVERY AND BONDAGE IN MESOPOTAMIA In the earlier, less documented, and smaller city polities of Mesopotamia the existence of slavery and other forms of bondage is beyond question. Finley assures us, “The pre-Greek world—the world of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians . . .—was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the west has come to understand the concept.”[135] What is very much in question, however, is the extent of slavery per se, the forms it took, and how central it was to the functioning of the polity.[136] The general consensus has been that while slavery was undoubtedly present, it was a relatively minor component of the overall economy.[137] On the basis of my reading of the admittedly scarce evidence, I would dispute this consensus. 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 export trade good, textiles; it supplied a disposable proletariat for the most onerous work (for example, canal digging, wall building); and it was both a token of and a reward for elite status. The case for the importance of slavery in the Mesopotamian polities is, I hope to show, convincing. When other forms of unfree labor, such as debt bondage, forced resettlement, and corvée labor, are taken into account, the importance of coerced labor for the maintenance and expansion of the grain-labor module at the core of the state is hard to deny. Part of the controversy over the centrality of slavery in ancient Sumer is a matter of terminology. Opinions differ in part because there are so many terms that could mean “slave” but could also mean “servant,” “subordinate,” “underling,” or “bondsman.” Nevertheless, scattered instances of purchase and sale of people—chattel slavery—are well attested, though we do not know how common they were. The most unambiguous category of slaves was the captured prisoner of war. Given the constant need for labor, most wars were wars of capture, in which success was measured by the number and quality of captives—men, women, and children—taken. Of the many sources of dependent labor identified by I. J. Gelb—household-born slaves, debt slaves, slaves purchased on the market from their abductors, conquered peoples brought back and forcibly settled as a group, and prisoners of war—the last two appear to be the most significant.[138] Both categories represent the booty of war. On one list of 167 prisoners of war there appeared very few Sumerian or Akkadian (that is, indigenous) names; the vast majority had been taken from the mountains and from areas to the east of the Tigris River. One ideogram for “slave” in third-millennium Mesopotamia was the combination of the sign for “mountain” with the sign for “woman,” signifying women taken in the course of military forays into the hills or perhaps bartered by slave takers in exchange for trade goods. The related ideogram “man” or “woman” joined to “foreign land” is also thought to refer to slaves. If the purpose of war was largely the acquisition of captives, then it makes more sense to see such military expeditions more in the light of slave raids than as conventional warfare. The only substantial, documented slave institution in Uruk appears to have been the state-supervised workshops producing textiles that engaged as many as nine thousand women. They are described as slaves in most sources but also may have included debtors, the indigent, foundlings, and widows—perhaps like the workhouses of Victorian England. Several historians of the period claim that both women and juveniles taken as prisoners of war, complemented by the wives and children of debtors, formed the core of the textile workforce. Analysts of this large textile “industry” stress how critical it was to the position of elites, who were dependent for their power on a steady flow of metals (copper in particular) and other raw materials from outside the resource-poor alluvium. This state enterprise provided the key trade good that could be exchanged for these necessities. The workshops represented a sequestered “gulag” of captive labor that supported a new strata of religious, civil, and military elites. Nor was it insignificant demographically. Various estimates put the Uruk population at around forty thousand to forty-five thousand in the year 3,000 BCE. Nine thousand textile workers alone would represent at least 20 percent of Uruk’s inhabitants, not counting the other prisoners of war and slaves in other sectors of the economy. Providing grain rations for these workers and other state-dependent laborers required a formidable apparatus of assessment, collection, and storage.[139] Other Uruk documents refer frequently to unfree workers and particularly to female slaves of foreign origin. They were, according to Guillermo Algaze, a primary source of workers at the disposal of the Uruk state administration.[140] The scribal summaries of laboring groups (both foreign and native) employ the identical age and sex categories as those used to describe “state-controlled herds of domestic animals.” “It would appear, therefore, that in the minds of the Uruk scribes and in the eyes of the institutions that employed them, such laborers were conceptualized as ‘domesticated’ humans, wholly equivalent to domestic animals in status.”[141] What else can we say about the organization, work, and treatment of prisoners and slaves? An exceptional and quite detailed picture—despite fragmentary sources—is afforded by a close examination of 469 slaves and prisoners of war brought to Uruk and held in a “house of prisoners” during the reign of Rim-Anum (c. 1,805 BCE).[142] “It is most likely that houses of prisoners existed elsewhere in Mesopotamia and in other areas of the ancient Middle East.”[143] The “house” functioned as something of a labor-supply bureau. The captives represented a wide spectrum of skills and experience and were disbursed to individuals, temples, and military officers as boatmen, gardeners, harvest workers, herdsmen, cooks, entertainers, animal tenders, weavers, potters, craftspeople, brewers, road menders, grinders of grain, and so on. The house—not apparently a workhouse itself—received flour in return for the labor it provided. Care was taken to farm out small labor crews and to relocate them frequently to minimize the danger of revolt or escape. Other evidence about slaves and prisoners of war indicates that they were not well treated. Many are shown in neck fetters or being physically subdued. “On cylinder seals we meet frequent variants of a scene in which the ruler supervises his men as they beat shackled prisoners with clubs.”[144] There are many reports of captives being deliberately blinded, but it is impossible to know how common the practice was. Perhaps the strongest evidence of brutal treatment is the general conclusion by scholars that the servile population did not reproduce itself. In lists of prisoners, it is striking how many are listed as dead—whether from the forced march back or from overwork and malnutrition is not clear.[145] Why valuable manpower would be so carelessly destroyed is, I believe, less likely to be owing to a cultural contempt for war captives than to the fact that new prisoners of war were plentiful and relatively easy to acquire. The strongest circumstantial evidence for slaves and captive prisoners comes, as one might expect, from later periods after Ur III, when cuneiform texts are more abundant. Whether one can make a case for reading such evidence back to Ur III or find it applicable to our understanding of the Uruk period (c. 3,000 BCE) is highly questionable. In these later periods, much of the apparatus of slave “management” is evident. There are bounty hunters whose specialty it is to locate and return runaway slaves. The escapees are subdivided into “recent” escapees, those long-gone, “deceased” escapees, and “returned” escapees, though it seems as if few of the runaway slaves were ever recaptured.[146] Throughout these sources there are accounts of populations fleeing a city for causes as varied as hunger, oppression, epidemics, and warfare. Many captive prisoners of war are undoubtedly among them, though it is unknown whether they fled back to their place of origin, or to another town, which would surely have welcomed them, or to pastoralism. In any event, absconding was a preoccupation of alluvium politics; the later well-known code of Hammurabi fairly bristles with punishments for aiding or abetting the escape of slaves.
The slave woman was an equal of her mistress The slave walked at his master’s side The orphan was not delivered to the rich one The widow was not delivered to the powerful one The creditor did not enter one’s house He [the ruler] undid the tongue of the whip and the goad The master did not strike the slave on the head The mistress did not slap the face of the slave women He canceled the debts[147]The depiction of a utopian space, by negating the ordinary woes of the poor, weak, and enslaved, provides a handy portrait of quotidian conditions.
Finally, war helped to a great discovery—that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved; in return for his life he might be made to work. This discovery has been compared in importance to that of the taming of animals. . . . By early historic times slavery was a foundation of ancient industry and a potent instrument in the accumulation of capital. —V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes HimselfAdopting for the moment the purely strategic view of a quartermaster in charge of manpower needs can help clarify why slavery, in the form of war captives that it usually took, had several advantages over other forms of surplus appropriations. 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, gold- and silversmiths, not to mention artists, dancers, and musicians. Slave taking in this sense represented a kind of raiding and looting of manpower and skills that the slaving state did not have to develop on its own.[154] Insofar as the captives are seized from scattered locations and backgrounds and are separated from their families, as was usually the case, they are socially demobilized or atomized and therefore easier to control and absorb. If the war captives came from societies that were perceived in most respects as alien to the captors, they were not seen as entitled to the same social consideration. Having, unlike local subjects, few if any local social ties, they were scarcely able to muster any collective opposition. The principle of socially detached servants—Janissaries, eunuchs, court Jews—has long been seen as a technique for rulers to surround themselves with skilled but politically neutralized staff. At a certain point, however, if the slave population is large, is concentrated, and has ethnic ties, this desired atomization no longer holds. The many slave rebellions in Greece and Rome are symptomatic, although Mesopotamia and Egypt (at least until the New Kingdom) appeared not to have slavery on this scale. Women and children were particularly prized as slaves. Women were often taken into local households as wives, concubines, or servants, and children were likely to be quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status. Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to have been incorporated into the local society—perhaps with a new layer of recently captured slaves beneath them in the social order. If manpower-hungry polities like, say, Native American societies or Malay society historically are any indication, it is common to find pervasive slavery together with rapid cultural assimilation and social mobility. It was not uncommon, for example, for a male captive of the Malays to take a local wife and, in time, organize slave-taking expeditions of his own. Providing that slaves were constantly being acquired, such societies would remain slave societies, but, viewed over several generations, earlier captives would have become nearly indistinguishable from their captors. Women captives were at least as important for their reproductive services as for their labor. Given the problems of infant and maternal mortality in the early state and the need of both the patriarchal family and the state for agrarian labor, women captives were a demographic dividend. Their reproduction may have played a major role in alleviating the otherwise unhealthy effects of concentration and the domus. Here I cannot resist the obvious parallel with the domestication of livestock, which requires taking control over their reproduction. 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. The continuous absorption of slaves at the bottom of the social order can also be seen to play a major role in the process of social stratification—a hallmark of the early state. As earlier captives and their progeny were incorporated into the society, the lower ranks were constantly replenished by new captives, further solidifying the line between “free” subjects and those in bondage, despite its permeability over time. One imagines, as well, that most of the slaves not put to hard labor were monopolized by the political elites of the early states. If the elite households of Greece or Rome are any indication, a large part of their claim to distinction was the impressive array of servants, cooks, artisans, dancers, musicians, and courtesans on display. It would be difficult to imagine the first elaborate social stratification in the earliest states without war-captive slaves at the bottom and elite embellishment, dependent on those slaves, at the top. There were, of course, many male slaves outside the households. In the Greco-Roman world, captive enemy combatants—particularly if they had offered stiff resistance—might be executed, but many more were ransomed or brought back as war booty. A state that depends on a population of scarce producers is unlikely to squander the essential prize of early warfare. Though we know precious little about the disposition of male war captives in Mesopotamia, in the 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 pulling oars in galleys. The numbers involved were enormous, but because they worked at the sites of the resources, they were a far less visible presence—and far less a threat to public order—than if they had been near the court center.[155] It would be no exaggeration at all to think of such work as an early gulag, featuring gang labor and high rates of mortality. Two aspects of this sector of slave labor deserve emphasis. First, mining, quarrying, and felling timber were absolutely central to the military and monumental needs of the state elites. These needs in the smaller Mesopotamian city-states were more modest but no less vital. Second, the luxury of having a disposable and replaceable proletariat is that it spared one’s own subjects from the most degrading drudgery and thus forestalled the insurrectionary pressures that such labor well might provoke, while satisfying important military and monumental ambitions. In addition to quarrying, mining, and logging, which only desperate or highly paid men will undertake voluntarily, we might include carting, shepherding, brick making, canal digging and dredging, potting, charcoal making, and pulling oars on boats or ships. It is possible that the earliest Mesopotamian states traded for many of these commodities, thereby outsourcing the drudgery and labor control to others. Nevertheless, much of the materiality of state making depends centrally on such work, and it matters whether those doing it are slaves or subjects. As Bertolt Brecht, in his poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” asked:
Who built the Thebes of the seven Gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rocks? And Babylon many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times?*** BOOTY CAPITALISM AND STATE BUILDING A sure sign of the manpower obsession of the early states, whether in the Fertile Crescent, Greece, or Southeast Asia, is how rarely their chronicles boast of having taken territory. One looks in vain for anything resembling the twentieth-century German call for lebensraum. Instead, the triumphal account of a successful campaign, after praising the valor of the generals and troops, is likely to aim at impressing the reader with the amount and value of the loot. Egypt’s victory over Levantine kings at Kadesh (1,274 BCE) is not just a paean to the pharaoh’s bravery but a record of the plunder, and in particular of the livestock and prisoners—so many horses, so many sheep, so many cattle, so many people.[156] The human prisoners are, here as elsewhere, often distinguished for their skills and crafts, and one imagines that something of an inventory was made of the talent the conquerors had acquired. The conquerors were on the lookout for generic manpower and, simultaneously, for the craftsmen and entertainers who would enhance the luster of the conquerors’ courts. The towns and villages of the defeated peoples were generally destroyed so that there was nothing to go back to. In theory, the plunder belonged to the ruler, but in practice the loot was divided up, with the generals and individual soldiers taking their own livestock and prisoners to keep, ransom, or sell. Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian Wars, has several accounts of such conquests and adds that most of the wars were fought when the grain was ripe, so that it too could be seized as plunder and fodder.[157] Max Weber’s concept of “booty capitalism” seems applicable to a great many such wars, whether conducted against competing states or against nonstate peoples on its periphery. “Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit. In one form, a group of warlords might hatch a plan to invade another small realm, with both eyes fixed on the loot in, say, gold, silver, livestock, and prisoners to be seized. It was a “joint-stock company,” the business of which was plunder. Depending on the soldiers, horses, and arms that each of the conspirators contributes to the enterprise, the prospective proceeds might be divided proportionally to each participant’s investment. The enterprise is, of course, fraught, inasmuch as the plotters (unless they are merely financial backers) potentially risk their lives. To be sure, such wars may have other strategic aims, like the control of a trade route or the crushing of a rival, but for the early states, the taking of loot, particularly human captives, was not a mere by-product of war but a key objective.[158] Slaving wars were systematically conducted by many of the earliest states in the Mediterranean as a part of their manpower needs. In many cases—in early Southeast Asia and in imperial Rome—war was seen as a route to wealth and comfort. Everyone from the commanders down to the individual soldier expected to be rewarded with his share of the plunder. To the degree that men of military age were engaged in slaving expeditions, as they were in imperial Rome, it posed a problem for the labor force in grain and livestock production at home. In time, the huge influx of slaves allowed landowners—and peasant soldiers—to replace much of the agrarian labor force with slaves who were not themselves subject to conscription. Despite the relative absence of hard evidence on the extent of slavery in Mesopotamia and early Egypt, one is tempted to speculate that the slave sector erected over the grain module in the early states was, even if of modest size, an essential component in the creation of a powerful state. The pulses of captive slaves alleviated many of the manpower needs of an otherwise demographically challenged state. Perhaps most crucial was the fact that slaves, a few skilled workers excepted, were concentrated in the most degrading and dangerous labor, often away from the domus, which was central to the material and symbolic sinews of its power. If such states had had to extract such labor exclusively from their own core subjects, they would have run a high risk of provoking flight or rebellion—or both. *** THE PARTICULARITY OF MESOPOTAMIAN SLAVERY AND BONDAGE Historians and archaeologists are fond of saying, as we have noted, that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” The evidence of slavery and bondage we have examined is hardly absent, but it is sparse enough to have convinced a number of scholars that slavery and bondage were insignificant. In what follows, I hope to suggest the reasons why slavery should seem less obtrusive and central in the Mesopotamian evidence than in Greece or Rome. Those reasons have to do with the modest size and geographical reach of the Mesopotamian polities, the origins of their slave population, the possible “subcontracting” of unfree labor, the importance of corvée labor from the subject population, and the potential role of communal forms of bondage. In the course of examining the scholarship on labor in Mesopotamia, I find that in the case of at least some monumental building projects, the labor required of the subject (not slave) population may have been less than often supposed, and that it may even have been accompanied by ritual feasting on the completion of the monument.[159] Three obvious reasons why Third Millennium Mesopotamia might seem less of a slave-holding society than Athens or Rome are the smaller populations of the earlier polities, the comparably scarce documentation they left behind, and their relatively small geographic reach. Athens and Rome were formidable naval powers that imported slaves from throughout the known world, drawing virtually all their slave populations far and wide from non-Greek and non-Latin speaking societies. This social and cultural fact provided much of the foundation for the standard association of state peoples with civilization on the one hand and nonstate peoples with barbarism on the other. Mesopotamian city-states, by contrast, took their captives from much closer to home. For that reason, the captives were more likely to have been more culturally aligned with their captors. On this assumption, they might have, if allowed, more quickly assimilated to the culture and mores of their masters and mistresses. In the case of young women and children, often the most prized captives, intermarriage or concubinage may well have served to obscure their social origins within a couple of generations. The origins of prisoners of war is a further complicating factor. Most of the literature on slavery in Mesopotamia concerns prisoners of war who spoke neither Akkadian nor Sumerian. Yet it is evident that intercity warfare in the alluvium was common. If, in fact, a significant portion of the captives came from intercity warfare for one another’s subjects, and from hitherto independent local communities, then, given their shared culture, it is plausible that the captives would have become ordinary subjects of their captor’s city-state without much further ado—perhaps without even being formally enslaved. The greater the cultural and linguistic differences between slaves and their masters, the easier it is to draw and enforce the social and juridical separation that makes for the sharp demarcation typical of slave societies. In Athens in the fifth century BCE, for example, there was a substantial class, more than 10 percent of the population, of metics, usually translated as “resident aliens.” They were free to live and trade in Athens and had the obligations of citizenship (taxes and conscription, for example) without its privileges. Among them were a substantial number of ex-slaves. One must surely wonder whether the Mesopotamian city-states met a substantial portion of their insatiable labor needs by absorbing captives or refugees from culturally similar populations. In this case such captives or refugees would probably appear not as slaves but as a special category of “subject” and perhaps would be, in time, wholly assimilated. Just as most Western consumers never directly experience the conditions under which the material foundations of their lives are reproduced, so for the Greeks at Athens, that roughly half of the slave population working in the quarries, mines, forests, and galleys was largely invisible. On a far more modest scale the early Mesopotamian states had need of a male labor force to quarry stone, mine copper for armaments, and provide timber for construction, firewood, and charcoal. As these activities would have been carried out at a substantial distance from the floodplain, it would have been relatively invisible to subjects at the center, though not to state elites. The phenomenon known as “the Uruk Expansion”—the discovery of Uruk cultural artifacts in the hinterlands and in the Zagros Mountains—represents, it seems, a foray to create or guard trade routes for vital goods not available in the alluvium.[160] Though it is certain that slaves were seized in this expansion area, it is unclear whether Uruk directly used slaves and war captives in this primary extraction or whether it exacted tribute in these materials from subjugated communities—or, for that matter, traded grain, cloth, and luxury goods for them. In any case, such coerced labor would have taken place at arm’s length from Uruk—subcontracted perhaps to trading partners—and might therefore leave few if any cuneiform traces. Finally, there are two forms of communal bondage that were widely practiced in many early states and that bear more than a family resemblance to slavery but are unlikely to appear in the textual record as what we think of as slavery. The first of these might be called mass deportation coupled with communal forced settlement. Our best descriptions of the practice come from the neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BCE), where it was employed on a massive scale. Although the neo-Assyrian Empire falls much later than our main temporal focus, some scholars claim that such forms of bondage were used much earlier in Mesopotamia, Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, and the Hittite Empire.[161] Mass deportation and forced settlement was, in the neo-Assyrian Empire, systematically applied to conquered areas. The entire population and livestock of the conquered land were marched from the territory at the periphery of the kingdom to a location closer to the core, where they were forcibly resettled, the people usually as cultivators. Although, as in other slaving wars, some captives were “privately” appropriated and others formed into labor gangs, what was distinctive about deportation and forced settlement was that the bulk of the captive community was kept intact and moved to a site where its production could be more easily monitored and appropriated. Here, the manpower and grain–centralizing machine is at work but at a wholesale level, taking entire agrarian communities as modules and placing them at the service of the state. Even allowing for the exaggerations of the scribes, the scale of the population transfers was unprecedented. More than 200,000 Babylonians, for example, were moved to the core of the neo-Assyrian Empire, and the total deportations appear staggering.[162] There were specialists in deportations. Officials conducted elaborate inventories of the captured populations—their possessions, their skills, their livestock—and were charged with provisioning them en route to their new location with a minimum of losses. In some cases, it seems that the captives were resettled on land abandoned earlier by other subjects, implying that forced mass resettlement may have been part of an effort to compensate for mass exoduses or epidemics. Many of the captives were referred to as “saknutu,” which means “a captive made to settle the soil.” The neo-Assyrian policy is not historically novel. Though we have no idea whether it was common in Mesopotamia, it has been the practice of conquest regimes throughout history—in Southeast Asia and the New World in particular. For our purpose, however, what is most important is that these resettled populations would not necessarily have appeared in the historical record as slaves at all. Once resettled, especially if they were not markedly different culturally, they might well have become ordinary subjects, scarcely distinguishable over time from other agrarian subjects. Some of the confusion over whether earlier Sumerian terms (for example, erin) should be translated as “subject,” as “prisoner of war,” as “military colonist,” or simply as “peasant” may well derive from the various classes of subjects that reflect the origins of their “subjecthood.” A final genre of bondage that is historically common and also might not appear in the historical record as slavery is the model of the Spartan helot. The helots were agricultural communities in Laconia and Messinia dominated by Sparta. How they came to be so dominated is a matter of dispute. Messinia seems to have been conquered in war, but some claim that the helots were either those who chose not to participate in warfare or who were collectively punished for an earlier revolt. They were, in any case, distinguished from slaves. They remained in situ as whole communities, were annually humiliated in Spartan rituals, and like the subjects of all archaic agrarian states were required to deliver grain, oil, and wine to their masters. Aside from the fact that they had not been forcibly resettled as war deportees, they were in all other respects the enserfed agricultural servants of a thoroughly militarized society. Here, then, is another archaic formula by which the necessary manpower-and-grain complex was assembled that could serve as the surplus-yielding module of state building. It is conceivable, but quite unknowable, that some of the Mesopotamian city-states originated in the conquest or displacement of an agrarian population in situ by an external military elite. In this context, Nissen cautions us to heavily discount the rhetoric stigmatizing nonstate peoples and urges us to recall the constant interchange between mountains and lowlands. He claims, “Even the massive settlement of the Mesopotamian plain of the middle of the fourth millennium may have been part of this process.” “Tempted by the written record we have . . . internalized the viewpoint of the lowland inhabitants.”[163] The fact that the place names Ur, Uruk, and Eridu are not Sumerian in origin hints at the possibility of an incursion—or the seizure of control by the militarized faction of an existing agrarian society. It is also conceivable that the grain core was expanded and replenished by the forced resettlement of war captives from the hinterland and from other cities. In either of these cases, such early societies would not have appeared superficially to be slave societies. And in fact, they would not have been slave societies in quite the Athenian or Roman sense. Yet the central role of bondage and coercion in creating and maintaining the grain-and-manpower nexus of the early agrarian state would be perfectly evident. *** A SPECULATIVE NOTE ON DOMESTICATION, DRUDGERY, AND SLAVERY States, we know, did not invent slavery and human bondage; they could be found in innumerable prestate societies. What states surely did invent, however, are large-scale societies based systematically on coerced, captive human labor. Even when the proportion of slaves was far less than in Athens, Sparta, Rome, or the neo-Assyrian Empire, the role of captive labor and slavery was so vital and strategic to the maintenance of state power that it is difficult to imagine these states persisting long without it. What if we were, as a fruitful conjecture, to take seriously Aristotle’s claim that a slave is a tool for work and, as such, to be considered as a domestic animal as an ox might be? After all, Aristotle was serious. What if we were to examine slavery, agrarian war captives, helots, and the like as state projects to domesticate a class of human servitors—by force—much as our Neolithic ancestors had domesticated sheep and cattle? The project, of course, was never quite realized, but to see things from this angle is not entirely far-fetched. Alexis de Tocqueville reached for this analogy when he considered Europe’s growing world hegemony: “We should almost say that the European is to the other races what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys.”[164] If we substitute for “Europeans” “early states,” and for “other races” “war captives,” we do not greatly distort the project, I think. The captives, individually and collectively, became an integral part of the state’s means of production and reproduction, a part, if you will, along with the livestock and grain fields of the state’s own domus. Pushed even farther, I believe the analogy has an illuminating power. Take the question of reproduction. At the very center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s or animal’s reproduction, which entails confinement and a concern for selective breeding and rates of reproduction. In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor. It would be instructive, but alas impossible, to know, in the light of the epidemiological challenges of early state centers, the importance of slave women’s reproduction to the demographic stability and growth of the state. The domestication of nonslave women in the early grain state may also be seen in the same light. A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general. 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. Over and above the drudgery of plough agriculture, the military, ceremonial, and urban needs of the new state centers required forms of labor in terms of both kind and scale that had no precedent. Quarrying, mining, galley oaring, road building, logging, canal digging, and other menial tasks may have been, even in more contemporary times, the sort of work performed by convicts, indentured laborers, or a desperate proletariat. It’s the sort of work away from the domus that “free” men—including peasants—shun. Yet such dangerous and heavy work was necessary to the very survival of the earliest states. If one’s own agrarian population could not be made to do this work without risking desertion or rebellion, then a captive, domesticated, alien population must be made to do it. That population could be acquired only by slavery—the long-standing, ultimately unsuccessful, and last attempt to realize Aristotle’s vision of the human tool. CHAPTER SIX ** 6. Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly HE more one reads about the earliest states, the greater one’s astonishment at the feats of statecraft and improvisation that brought them into being in the first place. Their vulnerability and fragility were so manifest that it is their rare appearance and even rarer persistence that requires explanation. The image conjured by early state building is that of the four- or five-tiered human pyramid attempted by schoolchildren. It usually collapses before it is completed. When, against the odds, it is built to the apex, the audience holds its breath as it sways and trembles, anticipating its inevitable collapse. If the tumblers are lucky, the last one, representing its peak, has a fleeting moment to pose in triumph for the spectators. To pursue the metaphor a bit farther, the individual segments of the pyramid are, taken singly, quite stable; we might call them the elementary units or building blocks. The elaborate structure they create, however, is wobbly and ramshackle. That it soon falls apart is hardly surprising; what’s remarkable is that it was done at all. As a political structure assembled atop a settled farming community, the state shared the general vulnerabilities of sedentary grain communities in general. Sedentism was, as we have noted earlier, not a once-and-for-all achievement. Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine), archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned. The reasons for abandonment and reoccupation typically remain obscure. Possible contributing factors include climate change, resource depletion, disease, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance. The general recession of whatever modest fixed settlements existed before 10,500 BCE was almost surely due to the Younger Dryas cold snap—“the big freeze.” Another sudden and widespread demise around 6,000 BCE of a cultural complex associated with settlement, documented for the Jordan Valley and known as the Prepottery Neolithic Phase B (PPNB), has been variously attributed to climate change, disease, soil depletion, shrinking water sources, and demographic pressure. The key point is that, as a subspecies of sedentary grain communities, states were subject to the same perils of dissolution as sedentary communities in general, as well as to the fragility particular to states as political entities. Consensus about the fragility of the first archaic states seems unanimous; about the causes of this fragility there is no consensus, and what little evidence we have is rarely dispositive. Robert Adams, whose knowledge of the early Mesopotamian states is unsurpassed, expresses some astonishment at the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), in which five kings succeeded one another over a hundred-year period. Though it too collapsed afterward, it represented something of a record of stability as compared with the dizzying comings and goings of other kingdoms. Adams discerns a cycle of centralization of resources followed by an irregular but irreversible decline, which he associates with a push for decentralization and “local self-sufficiency.”[165] Norman Yoffee, Patricia McAnany, and George Cowgill, who have reexamined, far more than others, the very concept of “collapse,” believe that “concentrations of power in early civilizations were typically fragile and short-lived.”[166] Cyprian Broodbank, who has surveyed Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Mediterranean polities more generally, reaches the same conclusion, pointing to the “bewildering pattern of foundation, abandonment, expansion and shrinkage, as local or wider opportunities and adversity dictated.”[167] What might “collapse” mean, anyway—as in the phrases “the collapse of Ur III,” around 2,000 BCE; “the collapse of the Old Kingdom Egypt,” around 2,100 BCE; “the collapse of the Minoan Palatial Regime” on Crete, around 1,450 BCE? At the very least it means the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental court center. This is usually interpreted not merely as a redistribution of population but as a substantial, not to say catastrophic, loss of social complexity. If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages.[168] Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent. Taken together, such changes are often understood to be a deplorable regression away from a more civilized culture. In this respect, it is just as essential to emphasize what such events do not necessarily mean. They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization. The history of the term “collapse” and the melancholic associations it evokes are worth reflecting on. Our initial knowledge of and wonder at the archaic state come from what might be called the heroic period of archaeology, around the turn of the twentieth century, when the monumental centers of early civilizations were being pinpointed and excavated. Apart from a justified awe at the cultural, aesthetic, and architectural achievements of these early civilizations, there was something of a competitive imperial scramble to appropriate both their lineage of grandeur and their artifacts. Finally, through the schoolbooks and the museums, the prevailing standard images of these early states have become icons: the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the Athenian Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the warrior tombs at Xian. So when these archaeological superstars evaporated, it seemed as if it were the end of an entire world. What in fact was lost were the beloved objects of classical archaeology: the concentrated ruins of the relatively rare centralized kingdoms, along with their written record and luxuries. To revert briefly to the human pyramid metaphor, it was as if the apex of the assemblage, the part on which all attention was riveted, had suddenly vanished. When the apex disappears, one is particularly grateful for the increasingly large fraction of archaeologists whose attention was focused not on the apex but on the base and its constituent units. Their cumulative knowledge of shifting settlement patterns, structures of trade and exchange, rainfall, soil structure, and changing mixes of livelihood strategies allows us to see a great deal more than the apparently gravity-defying apex. From their findings we are able not only to discern some of the probable causes of “collapse” but, more important, to interrogate just what collapse might mean in any particular case. One of their key insights has been to see much that passes as collapse as, rather, a disassembly of larger but more fragile political units into their smaller and often more stable components. While “collapse” represents a reduction in social complexity, it is these smaller nuclei of power—a compact small settlement on the alluvium, for example—that are likely to persist far longer than the brief miracles of statecraft that lash them together into a substantial kingdom or empire. Yoffee and Cowgill have aptly borrowed from the administrative theorist Herbert Simon the term “modularity”: a condition wherein the units of a larger aggregation are generally independent and detachable—in Simon’s terms, “nearly decomposable.”[169] In such cases the disappearance of the apical center need not imply much in the way of disorder, let alone trauma, for the more durable, self-sufficient elementary units. Echoing Yoffee and Cowgill, Hans Nissen cautions us against mistaking “the end of a period of centralization as a ‘collapse’ and regarding the phase during which a once unified area was split up into smaller parts as a politically troubled period.”[170] Neither sedentism nor state building, which depended utterly upon it, was a once-and-for-all achievement. There are periods—protracted ones—in which large aggregations of population disappeared and in which sedentism itself was reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. From roughly 1,800 until 700 BCE—more than a millennium—settlements in Mesopotamia covered less than a quarter of their previous area, and urban settlements were only one-sixteenth as frequent as during the previous millennium. The effect was regionwide, so it cannot be associated with purely local contingencies such a harsh ruler, a local war, or a particular crop failure. Such large-scale dispersals call for larger regionwide causes, such as climate variation, invasions and displacement by pastoralists, or major disruptions in trade, or for slower-acting but still regionwide environmental deterioration that might suddenly reach a critical threshold. There seems to be no consensus on which causes were most significant, but there is no doubt that ruralization rather than urbanization dominated Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years after the fall of Ur III, apparently owing to pastoralist incursions.[171] Quite apart from a climatological deus ex machina such as the Younger Dryas, the two-to-four-century cold snap beginning 6,200 BCE, or the Little Ice Age—events that massively constrain what is ecologically possible—it is essential to acknowledge the fundamental structural vulnerability of the grain complex on which all early states rested. Sedentism arose in very special and circumscribed ecological niches, particularly in alluvial or loess soils. Later—much later—the first centralized states arose in even more circumscribed ecological settings where there was a large core of rich, well-watered soils and navigable waterways, capable of sustaining a good number of cereal-growing subjects. Outside these rare and favorable sites for state creation, foraging, hunting, and pastoral people continued to flourish. State-making sites were above all structurally vulnerable to subsistence failures that had little to do with how adept or incompetent their rulers were. First and foremost of these structural vulnerabilities was the fact that they depended overwhelmingly on a single annual harvest of one or two cereal staples. If that harvest failed because of drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases, the population was in mortal danger—as were their rulers who depended on the surplus they produced. These populations were also, as we have seen, in far greater danger from the infectious diseases that affected them and their livestock because of crowding than were dispersed foragers. And finally, as we shall explore, the reliance of elites on a surplus, together with the logic of transportation, meant that the state relied far more heavily on the population and resources located closest to the core, a reliance that could undermine its stability. The earliest states were, then, delicate balancing acts; a lot had to go right for them to have anything but a brief life. In early Southeast Asia, for example, it was rare for a kingdom to last for more than two or three reigns—and any number of problems, not all of the kingdom’s own making, could easily bring it down. The periodic demise of most kingdoms was “overdetermined,” and because the difficulties they faced were so manifold, a coroner-archaeologist would be hard-pressed to single out a particular cause of death. *** EARLY STATE MORBIDITY: ACUTE AND CHRONIC The first pristine states in the Middle East, China, and the New World were operating in totally uncharted territory. There was no way that their founders and subjects could anticipate the ecological, political, and epidemiological perils that awaited them. Since the problems were without precedent, they were hard to fathom. Once in a while, especially when there are written sources, the reason for a state’s demise is fairly clear: a successful invasion by another culture that replaces its enemy, for example, a destructive war between states, or a civil war or insurrection within the state. More commonly, however, the reasons behind the state’s disappearance are more obscure and insidious, or else are catastrophic events, such as flood, drought, or crop failure, which may have deeper, cumulative causes. Such causes, I believe, are of particular interest to us for at least three reasons. First, unlike more contingent events like an invasion, they have a systematic character that may be linked directly to state processes. As such, they afford us a unique window on the structural contradictions of the ancient state. Second, such causes are likely to be slighted by most historical analyses, as they appear to have no direct, proximate human agent behind them and often leave no obvious archaeological signature behind to identify themselves. Evidence for their role in state mortality is speculative as well as circumstantial, but there is reason to believe their importance has been greatly underestimated. Disease: Hypersedentism, Movement, and the State We have explored at considerable length the rise of infectious diseases associated with crowding and the domestication of livestock. There is every reason to believe that the creation of states atop the Neolithic grain-and-animal complex would have greatly aggravated the exposure of early state populations to devastating epidemics. The reasons have to do with scale, trade, and warfare. The towns that first emerged on the wetland fringes of the alluvium prior to states had, at their apogee, populations on the order of five thousand. The early states, by contrast, were typically four times larger and, occasionally, ten times as great. With the increase in the order of magnitude came an increase in the magnitude of risk. If the sudden eclipse of Phase B of the Prepottery Neolithic (PPNB) around 6,000 BCE was due, as some believe, to epidemic disease, the greater scale of the early states more than two millennia later would have made them that much more prone to epidemics. The larger populations would have represented a more substantial human and animal reservoir for infectious disease, and the effect of both crowding and numbers, on the geometric logic of transmission, would have spread it quickly. Germs and parasites move with people and animals. While limited trade over some distance predated states, the volume and geographical reach of trade expanded exponentially with the rise of larger, expansive elites seeking to maximize their wealth and put it on display. States themselves required resources on a far grander scale than early sedentary communities, and resources of a different order. The result was an explosion of overland and, especially, waterborne trade. Students of early trade Guillermo Algaze and David Wengrow go so far as to refer to the “Uruk world system” around 3,500 to 3,200 BCE as an integrated world of trade and exchange stretching from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south and from the Iranian Plateau in the east to the Eastern Mediterranean in the west.[172] Uruk and its competitors required resources from afar that were not available in the alluvium: copper and tin for tools, weapons, armor, and both decorative and utilitarian objects; timber and charcoal; limestone and quarried rock for building; silver, gold, and gems for sumptuary display. In exchange for these goods the statelets of the alluvium dispatched textiles, grain, pottery, and artisanal products to their trading partners. The effect, for our purposes, of this vast enlargement of the commercial sphere is that it similarly enlarged the sphere of transmitted diseases, bringing hitherto separate pools of diseases into contact for the first time. In this respect, the “Uruk world system,” despite the grandiosity of the term, may well have prefigured, on a smaller scale, the integration of the Chinese, Indian, and Mediterranean disease pools around the year 1 BCE that is seen to have touched off the world’s first devastating pandemics, such as the sixth-century CE Plague of Justinian, which killed between thirty million and fifty million people. Trade, responsible for much of the monumental splendor of the alluvium statelets, may, ironically, have played as large a role in their disappearance. States are notorious for another activity: warfare, which has enormous epidemiological consequences. In terms of demography alone there is nothing like warfare for the mass movement and relocation of populations. An army or, for that matter, a mass of fleeing refugees or captives represents a moving module of infection, contracting and transmitting many of the diseases traditionally associated with war: cholera, typhus, dysentery, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and the like. The line of march of armies or refugees has long been known to mark a line of infection from which civilians seek, if they can, to flee. When, as in the case of ancient warfare, the major prize consists of captives who are marched back to the victor’s kingdom, the consequences for infectious diseases are much the same as with trade, but perhaps on a larger scale. Among the captives, of course, were the enemy’s four-footed livestock, which would have brought their own diseases and parasites along to the victor’s capital. How important were trade and warfare-borne diseases in the eclipse of early states? It’s impossible to know for sure, as the archaeological record provides little in the way of evidence. My hunch is that they may have been responsible for a good many of the otherwise unexplained sudden abandonments of population centers in the ancient world. Working back from what we do know about epidemics in the Roman and medieval world may help make this hunch more plausible. As the diseases of crowding were novel, there was no way early populations could know the mechanisms by which they were spread. But the knowledge that outbreaks of lethal epidemics were associated with the shipping trade, overland caravans, armies, and their captives must have taken hold very early.[173] The first instinct of a threatened townspeople would have been to isolate the first cases and wall off the town from any further contacts with the presumed sources of contamination. Quarantine and the isolation of maritime travelers (later institutionalized as lazarretti) must have arisen in one form or another along with new and dreaded epidemics. At the same time, even the earliest town dwellers must have understood that flight and dispersal from the site of a lethal epidemic represented the best hope of avoiding becoming infected. Their instinct was to scatter as quickly as possible to the countryside (where they were undoubtedly feared), and the earliest states would have been hard-pressed to stop them. If this understanding of the response to early epidemics is broadly correct, then it provides a plausible scenario for disease-driven disappearance of major settlements. Once the epidemic was established, and assuming for the moment that the bulk of the population remained in the urban center, it might well kill enough of the population to destroy the city’s viability as a state center. On the more realistic assumption that most of the population would have managed to flee, the result, though less lethal, would nevertheless have emptied out the urban center on which the state depended. Either scenario could, in short order, extinguish the state center as a node of power. The second scenario, however, need not entail a significant decline in the total population but rather its dispersal to safer, more rural locations. In one documented example, a devastating plague in the 1,320s BCE that came to Egypt from the Hittites sparked a famine, as surviving cultivators resisted taxes and often deserted their fields, while unpaid soldiers turned to banditry.[174] There is no way of knowing for certain how frequently epidemics brought down the earliest states, but, amplified by warfare, invasions, and trade, diseases were a prominent cause of deurbanization in late Imperial Rome and in medieval Europe. In 166 CE Roman troops returning from a campaign in Mesopotamia brought home an infectious disease that may have killed a quarter to a third of Rome’s population.[175] Ecocide: Deforestation and Salinization That the first states were pristine creations deserves to be foregrounded in any analysis of their rise and demise. As earlier noted, there was no way that their subjects or elites could have foreseen that the unique assemblage of grain, people, and animals they presided over might have the epidemiological consequences they experienced. In a similar fashion, no one could have anticipated that the unprecedented burden of this assemblage would also generate unique and unsustainable demands on the surrounding environment. Of the environmental limits that were most likely to threaten the existence of the state, I examine two of the most important: deforestation and salinization.[176] Each is well documented in the ancient world from the earliest times. They differ, for the most part, from epidemic diseases in that they operate on a longer term; they are more gradual or, better put, more insidious than sudden. An epidemic, one imagines, was capable of devastating a city in a matter of weeks. A shortage of fuelwood or the gradual siltation of canals and rivers resulting from deforestation was more a matter of gradual economic suffocation—quite as lethal but far less spectacular. The southern Mesopotamian alluvium was itself the natural erosive product of the Tigris and Euphrates, moving soil from the upper watershed and depositing it on the floodplain. Early agrarian societies depended, in this sense, on the dividend of nutrients transported downstream for millennia by the rivers. With the growth of large settlements, however, this process entered a new phase, as the need grew for timber and firewood not available in the wetlands of the alluvium. There is abundant evidence for the deforestation of the Euphrates upstream from Mari at the beginning of the third millennium BCE, owing to some combination of deforestation for timber and fuel with overgrazing.[177] The early state’s appetite for wood was nearly insatiable and far exceeded what even a sizable sedentary community might have required. In addition to clearing land for agriculture and grazing, and the need for wood for cooking and heating, house construction, and pottery kilns, the early state required huge quantities of wood for metallurgy, iron smelting, brick making, salt curing, mining supports, shipbuilding, monumental architecture, and lime-plaster—this last requiring huge amounts of fuelwood to prepare. Given the difficulties of transporting wood any appreciable distance, a state center would have very quickly have exhausted the modest supplies close to its core settlement. Located, as virtually all early states were, on a navigable waterway, usually a river, it could take advantage of the buoyancy of wood and the current of the river to cut timber on the banks upstream from the center. The practicalities of logging and transportation again dictated that trees be felled as close to the river as possible to minimize labor. As the nearby upstream banks were deforested, the wood had to come from farther and farther upstream and/or from smaller trees that could be more easily gotten to the bank, where they could be floated downstream. There is abundant evidence for deforestation in the classical world from the Athenian quest for naval timber in Macedonia and the shortage of timber in the Roman Republic.[178] Much earlier, by 6,300 BCE, in the Neolithic town of Ain Ghazal, there were no more trees within walking distance of the settlement, and fuelwood had become scarce. As a result, the community dispersed into scattered hamlets, as did a good many other Jordan Valley Neolithic settlements when they exceeded the carrying capacity of their local woodlots.[179]
The history of the peasants is written by the townsmen The history of the nomads is written by the settled The history of the hunter-gatherers is written by the farmers The history of the nonstate peoples is written by the court scribes All may be found in the archives catalogued under “Barbarian Histories”LOOKED at from outer space in 2,500 BCE, the very earliest states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley (for example, Harrapan) would have been scarcely visible. In, say, 1,500 BCE there would have been a few more centers (Maya and the Yellow River), but their overall geographical presence may actually have shrunk. Even at the height of the Roman and early Han “superstates,” the area of their effective control would have been stunningly modest. With respect to population, the vast majority throughout this period (and arguably up until at least 1600 CE) were still nonstate peoples: hunters and gatherers, marine collectors, horticulturalists, swiddeners, pastoralists, and a good many farmers who were not effectively governed or taxed by any state.[205] The frontier, even in the Old World, was still sufficiently capacious to beckon those who wished to keep the state at arm’s length.[206] States, being largely agrarian phenomena, would, with the exception of some intermontane valleys, have looked like small alluvial archipelagoes, located on the floodplains of a handful of major rivers. Powerful as they might become, their sway was ecologically confined to the well-watered, rich soils that could support the concentration of labor and grain that was the basis of their power. Outside this ecological “sweet spot,” in arid lands, in swamps and marshes, in the mountains, they could not rule. They might mount punitive expeditions and win an engagement or two, but rule was another thing. Most early states of any duration probably consisted of a directly ruled core region, a penumbra of peoples whose incorporation depended on the varying power and wealth of the state, and a zone quite outside its reach. For the most part, states did not seek to rule fiscally sterile areas beyond the core that would not normally repay the cost of governing them. Instead, states sought military allies and proxies in the hinterland and traded to obtain the scarce raw materials they needed. The hinterland was not simply an ungoverned—or better put, a not-yet-governed—zone, but rather a zone governed, from the perspective of the state center, by “barbarians” and “savages.” Though hardly precise Linnaean categories, “barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who might, 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. When Aristotle wrote of slaves as tools, one imagines that he had in mind “savages” and not all barbarians (for example, Persians). The lens of “domestication” in general is useful for making sense of “barbarians” from the perspective of state centers. The grain growers and bondspeople at the state core are domesticated subjects, while foragers, hunters, and nomads are wild, savage, undomesticated peoples: barbarians. Barbarians are to domesticated subjects as wildlife, vermin, and varmints are to domesticated livestock. They are uncaptured at the very least and, at worst, represent a nuisance and threat that must be exterminated. In turn, weeds in the cultivated field are to domesticated crops as barbarians are to civilized life. They are a nuisance, and they and the birds, mice, and rats who appear uninvited at the harvest supper in the fields are a danger to the state and civilization. Weeds, varmints, vermin, and barbarians—the “undomesticated”—threaten civilization in the grain state. They must either be mastered and domesticated or, failing that, exterminated or rigorously excluded from the domus. I should make it crystal clear, once again, that I am using the term “barbarian” in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek sense. “Barbarian” and its many cousins—“savage,” “wild,” “raw,” “for- est people,” “hill people”—are terms invented in state centers to describe and stigmatize those who had not yet become state subjects. In the Ming Dynasty the term “cooked,” referring to assimilating barbarians, meant, in practice, those who had settled, had been registered on the tax rolls, and who were in principle governed by Han magistrates—in short, those who were said to have “entered the map.” A group that was identical in language and culture would often be divided into “raw” and “cooked” fractions entirely on the basis of whether they were outside or inside state administration. For the Chinese as for the Roman, the barbarians and tribes began precisely where taxes and sovereignty stopped. Let’s understand, then, that henceforth, when I use the term “barbarian,” it is merely an ironic shorthand for “nonstate peoples.” *** CIVILIZATIONS AND THEIR BARBARIAN PENUMBRA We have seen in great detail how the early state was radically unstable for internal structural, epidemiological, and political reasons. It was also vulnerable to predation from other states. But I wish to argue here that the threat posed by barbarians was perhaps the single most important factor limiting the growth of states for a period measured more in millennia than in centuries. From the Amorite incursions into Mesopotamia, through the Greek “dark age,” the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, and the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty in China, and perhaps beyond, the barbarian presence was the greatest danger to the state’s existence and, at the very least, the crucial constraint on its growth.[207] I am speaking less of the barbarian “stars”—the Mongols, the Manchu, the Huns, the Mughals, Osman—than of the countless bands of nonstate peoples who gnawed relentlessly with raids on sedentary, grain-farming communities. Many of the nonstate, raiding peoples were themselves at least semisedentary: for example, Pathans, Kurds, Berbers. The way we can best conceptualize this activity, I believe, is to see it as an advanced and lucrative form of hunting and foraging. Sedentary communities represented, for mobile foragers, an irresistible site for concentrated gathering. Some idea of the pickings they offered can be gained by this inventory of the loot from a large (ultimately unsuccessful!) hill raid on a lowland settlement in western India in late colonial times: 72 bullocks, 106 cows, 55 calves, 11 female buffaloes, 54 brass and copper pots, 50 pieces of clothing, 9 blankets, 19 iron ploughs, 65 axes, ornaments, and grain.[208] The period between the first appearance of states and their hegemony over nonstate peoples 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—so long as those states were not too strong. States were juicy sites for plunder and tribute. Just as the state required a sedentary grain-growing population for its predations, so did this concentration of settled people, with their grain, livestock, manpower, and goods, serve as a site of extraction for more mobile predators. When the predator’s mobility was enhanced by camels, horses, stirrups, or swift boats of shallow draft, the range and effectiveness of their raids was greatly extended. The returns to barbarian life would have been far less attractive in the absence of these concentrated foraging sites. If we think of the carrying capacity of barbarian ecology, my argument is that it was enhanced by the existence of petty states in much the same way that it would have been enhanced by a propitious stand of wild cereals or a migration of game. It would be hard to tell whether the microparasites of sedentary communities or the outbreaks of macroparasitic raiders contributed more to the limits on the growth of states and their populations. Setting precise dates to the “golden age of barbarians” is surely a fool’s errand. The history and geography of any particular area is likely to yield a very different configuration of state-barbarian relations, and one that is likely to shift over time. The Amorite “incursions” into Mesopotamia around 2,100 BCE may have represented a notable peak of barbarian “troubles,” but it was surely not the only occasion on which the Mesopotamian city-states faced trouble from their hinterlands. And here we should recall that virtually all of our knowledge of barbarian “threats” comes from state sources—sources that might well have self-interested reasons to downplay or, more likely, to overdramatize the threat and to define the term “barbarian” narrowly or widely. Conscious of the complexities, Barry Cunliffe bravely ventures to propose that, in the Mediterranean at least, the barbarian disruption of the ancient state world lasted for more than a millennium until 200 BCE. Within this period he identifies particularly the century between 1,250 and 1,150 BCE as the time when “the whole edifice of centralized, bureaucratic, palace-based exchange fell apart.”[209] The virtual abandonment of many state centers at this time is often attributed to the so-called sea people invaders, perhaps of Mycenaean and Philistine origin, about whom little is known.[210] They raided Egypt in 1,224 BCE and again in 1,186 BCE, along with nomads from the desert to the west of the Nile. At about the same time, fortifications and towers proliferate in the northern Mediterranean, presumably to defend against raiders moving by land and by sea. Over the course of this long millennium a large proportion of the Mediterranean population had been displaced not once but several times. By the second century BCE, Cunliffe judges, “an all-pervading ethos of raiding had largely subsided,” but not before the Celts had raided as far as Delphi.[211] At the end of this period, on the other side of the Eurasian continent, the Qin and Han Dynasties were having their own troubles with the Xiongnu tribal confederacy over control of the lands within the large “Ordos loop” of the Yellow River. In the middle of the continent, Bennett Bronson claims that the relative absence of any strong states in the Indian subcontinent was due largely to the many powerful nomadic raiding groups that prevented states from consolidating. From the fourth century BCE until 1600 CE, “the entire northern two-thirds of the subcontinent produced exactly two moderately durable, region-spanning states: the [Chandra] Gupta and the Mughal,” Bronson writes. “Neither of these nor any of the smaller northern states lasted longer than two centuries and anarchical interregna were everywhere prolonged and severe.”[212] Owen Lattimore, the pioneer of border studies in the context of China’s relationship with its powerful, militarized, nomadic fringe to the north, sees a more general, continental pattern. He points to state walls and fortification against nonstate peoples springing up from western Europe through central Asia into China, and lasting until the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. It seems a rather extravagant claim, but, coming as it does from Lattimore, it merits pondering. “There was a linked chain of fortified northern frontiers of the ancient civilized world from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The earliest frontier walls appear to have been in the Iranian sector. The walled frontiers of the western Roman Empire in Britain and on the Rhine and Danube faced forest, upland, and meadow tribes, now pastoral nomads.”[213] The greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians, however, was less as sites 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. As a state grew in population and wealth, so too did its commercial exchange with nearby barbarians. In the first millennium BCE there was a veritable explosion in seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean that exponentially increased the volume and value of trade. The greater part of the “barbarian economy” in this context was devoted to supplying lowland markets with raw materials and goods they required, much of which was in turn destined for reexport to other ports. A good part of what barbarians supplied was livestock in the most expansive sense of the term: cattle, sheep, and above all slaves. In return they received textiles, grain, iron- and copperware, pottery, and artisan luxury items, much of it too from “international” trade. Barbarian groups that controlled one or more of the major trading routes (usually a navigable river) to a major lowland center could reap large rewards and became, in turn, conspicuous sites of luxury, talent, and, if you will, “civilization.” Plunder of and trade with the state, then, made economic life on the state’s margins more viable and lucrative than it could otherwise have been. But plunder and trade were not simply alternative modes of appropriation; as we shall see, they were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft. *** BARBARIAN GEOGRAPHY, BARBARIAN ECOLOGY “Barbarians” are certainly not a culture or a lack thereof. Neither are they a “stage” of historical or evolutionary progress in which the highest stage is life in the state as taxpayer, in line with the historical discourse of incorporation shared by the Romans and Chinese. For Caesar incorporation meant moving from tribal (friendly or hostile) to “provincial” and perhaps eventually to Roman. For the Han it meant progressing from “raw” (hostile) to “cooked” (friendly) and perhaps eventually to Han. The intermediate steps “provincial” and “cooked” were specific categories of administrative and political incorporation to be followed, in ideal circumstances, by cultural assimilation. Put clinically and structurally, “barbarian” is best understood as a position vis-à-vis a state or empire. Barbarians are a people adjacent to a state but not in it. As Bronson puts it, they are simply “on the outside looking in.”[214] Barbarians did not pay taxes; if they had a fiscal relationship with the state at all, they were expected to offer tribute as a collectivity. Describing state geography and ecology in the ancient world is relatively easy on account of the agrarian and demographic requirements of state making. States were likely to arise only in rich, well-watered, bottomland soils. Until the last half of the first millennium BCE, when larger, sail-driven ships could transport larger cargoes longer distances, states had to hug the grain core quite tightly. 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. The barbarian zones most often referred to are the mountains and steppes. In fact, almost any area that was difficult to access, illegible and trackless, and unsuitable for intensive farming might qualify as a barbarian zone. Thus uncleared dense forest, swamps, marshes, river deltas, fens, moors, deserts, heath, arid wastes, and even the sea itself have been cast into this category by state discourse. A great many apparently ethnic names turn out to be, when translated literally, a description of a people’s geography, applied to them by state discourse: “hill people,” “swamp dwellers,” “forest people,” “people of the steppes.” The only reason pastoral nomads of the steppe, mountain people, and sea people figure so prominently in state discourse about barbarians is that such peoples were not only out of reach but were also the most likely to pose a military threat to the state itself. The figurative and often literal limit of a state’s reach was often demarcated by a state-erected physical boundary between “civilized” and “barbarian” zones. The first great wall of this kind was the 250-kilometer-long “wall of the land” built around 2,000 BCE between the Tigris and Euphrates by command of Sumerian king Sulgi. Though it is typically described as a wall to keep the barbarian Amorites out (a task at which it failed), Anne Porter and others believe it had the additional purpose of keeping the southern Mesopotamian taxpaying cultivators in.[215] For the early Roman Empire, the barbarians “began” on the east bank of the Rhine, beyond which the Roman legions never ventured after their catastrophic defeat in the battle of Teutoburg Forest (9 CE). The Balkans, “a land of mountains and valleys cut by countless streams and with few large areas of flat land,” were similarly marked by a boundary (limes) of fortifications.[216] Barbarian geography corresponded with what is distinctive about barbarian ecology and demography. As a residual category it describes modes of subsistence and settlement that are not those of the state grain core. In a Sumerian myth, the goddess Adnigkidu is admonished not to wed a nomad god, Martu, as follows: “He who dwells in the mountains . . . having carried on much strife . . . he knows not submission, he eats uncooked food, he has no house where he lives, he is not interred when he dies . . .” One can scarcely imagine a more telling mirror image of life as a grain-producing, domus-based state subject.[217] The Record of Rites (Liji) of the Zhou Dynasty contrasts the barbarian tribes who ate meat (raw or cooked) instead of the “grain food” of the civilized. Among the Romans, the contrast between their diet of grain and the Gallic diet of meat and dairy products was a key marker of their claim to civilized status. Barbarians were dispersed and highly mobile, and lived in small settlements. They might be shifting cultivators, pastoralists, fisher folk, hunter-gatherers, foragers, or small-scale collector-traders. They might even plant some grain and eat it, but grain was unlikely to be their dominant staple as it was for state subjects. They were, by virtue of their mobility, their diverse livelihoods, and their dispersal, unsuitable raw material for appropriation and state building, and it was for precisely these reasons that they were called barbarians. Such distinctions admitted of differences in degree, and this, in turn, served to demarcate, for the state, those barbarians who were plausible candidates for civilization from those who were beyond the pale. To Roman eyes, the Celts, who cleared land, raised some grain, and built trading towns (oppida), were “high-end” barbarians, while acephalous, mobile hunting bands were irredeemable. Barbarian societies can, like the oppida Celts, be quite hierarchical, but their hierarchy is generally not based on inherited property and is typically flatter than the hierarchy found in agrarian kingdoms. The vagaries of geography often meant that the central grain-core territory was fragmented by, say, hills and swamps, in which case the state’s core might include several “unincorporated” barbarian areas. A state often bypassed or hopped over recalcitrant zones in the process of knitting together nearby arable areas. The Chinese, for example, distinguished between “inner barbarians,” who were in such quarantined areas, and “outer barbarians,” at the frontiers of the state. The civilizational narratives of the early states imply, if they don’t state directly, that some primitives, through luck or cleverness, domesticated crops and animals, founded sedentary communities, and went on to found towns and states. They left primitivism behind for state and civilization. The barbarians, according to this account, are the ones who did not make the transition, those who remained outside. After this great divergence there were two spheres: the civilized sphere of settlement, towns, and states on the one hand and the primitive sphere of mobile, dispersed hunters, foragers, and pastoralists on the other. The membrane between the two spheres was permeable, but only in one direction. Primitives could enter the sphere of civilization—this was, after all, the grand narrative—but it was inconceivable that the “civilized” could ever revert to primitivism. We now know this view to be, on the historical evidence, fundamentally wrong. It is mistaken for at least three reasons. First, it ignores the millennia of flux and movement back and forth between sedentary and nonsedentary modes of subsistence and the many mixed options in between. Fixed settlement and plough agriculture were necessary to state making, but they were just part of a large array of livelihood options to be taken up or abandoned as conditions changed. Second, the very act of establishing a state and its subsequent enlargement was itself typically an act of displacement. Some of the preexisting population may have been absorbed, but others, perhaps a majority, may have moved out of range. Many of a state’s adjacent barbarian populations may well have been, in effect, refugees from the state-making process itself. Third, once states were created, as we have seen, there were frequently as many reasons for fleeing them as for entering them. If, as the standard narrative suggests, people are attracted to the state for the opportunities and security that it offers, it is also true that high rates of mortality coupled with flight from the state sphere were sufficiently offsetting that slaving, wars for capture, and forced resettlement seemed integral to the manpower needs of the early state. The key point for our purposes is that, once established, the state was disgorging subjects as well as incorporating them. Causes for flight varied enormously—epidemics, crop failures, floods, salinization, taxes, war, and conscription—provoking both a steady leakage and occasionally a mass exodus. Some of the runaways went to neighboring states, but a good many of them—perhaps especially captives and slaves—left for the periphery and other modes of subsistence. They became, in effect, barbarians by design. Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine primitives” who stubbornly refused the domus, but ex–state subjects who had chosen, albeit often in desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length. This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism.”[218] The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery. Places of refuge where they accumulated over time became “shatter zones,” as their linguistic and cultural complexity reflected that they were peopled by various pulses of refugees over an extended period. The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called “going over to the barbarians,” is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot. 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. Similarly, many Greeks and Romans joined the Huns and other Central Eurasian peoples, where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home.[219]Such voluntary self-nomadization was neither rare nor isolated. For China’s Mongol frontier, Owen Lattimore, as noted earlier, has made the case most forcefully that the purpose of the Great Wall(s) was as much to keep the Chinese taxpayers inside as to block barbarian incursions and that, nonetheless, a great many taxpaying Han cultivators had “distanced themselves” from state space—especially during times of political and economic disorder—and “attached themselves quite readily to barbarian rulers.”[220] Lattimore, as a student of frontiers in general, quotes a scholar of the late Western Roman Empire who noted the same pattern there too, as “the pitiless collection of taxes and the helplessness of citizens before wealthy law-breakers” drove Roman citizens to seek the protection of Attila’s Huns.[221] “In other words,” Lattimore adds, “there were times when the law and order of the barbarians was superior to those of civilization.”[222] Precisely because this practice of going over to the barbarians flies directly in the face of civilization’s “just so” story, it is not a story one will find in the court chronicles and official histories. It is subversive in the most profound sense. The attraction of the Goths in the sixth century CE was at least as great as that of the Huns had been earlier. Totila (king of the Ostrogoths, 541–552 CE) not only accepted slaves and coloni into the Gothic army, but even turned them against their senatorial masters by promising them freedom and ownership of land. “In so doing he permitted and provided an excuse for something the Roman lower classes had been willing to do since the 3rd century”: “to become Goths out of despair over their economic situation.”[223] A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war. As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet. The existence of a large frontier—rather like migration to the New World for poor Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—provided a less dangerous avenue of relief than rebellion.[224] Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others 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 an emancipation. As the state was weakened and under threat, the temptation was to press harder on the core to make good the losses which then risked further defections in a vicious cycle. A scenario of this kind, it appears, was partly to blame for the collapse of the Cretan and Mycenaean centralized palatial state (circa 1,100 BCE). “Under bureaucratic pressure to increase yield, the peasantry would despair and move away to fend for themselves, leaving the palace-dominated territory depopulated, much as the archaeological evidence suggests,” Cunliffe writes. “Collapse would follow quickly.”[225] We return briefly to the imperative of manpower. The early state was successful to the extent that it could amass an appropriation zone consisting of grain growers packed together on productive soil. Holding that population in place or, failing that, replenishing losses was the key to statecraft. Confinement could help. “The only way to avoid losing population, power and wealth to central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at the frontier cities, and attack steppe peoples as often as necessary to destroy them or keep them away.”[226] Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject. That tribality is above all a relationship to the state is captured nicely by the Roman practice of reverting to the use of former tribal names to describe provincial populations that had broken away and rebelled against Rome. The fact that barbarians who menaced states and empires and therefore made it into the history books bear distinct names—Amorites, Scythians, Xiongnu, Mongols, Alamanni, Huns, Goths, Junghars—conveys an impression of cohesion and cultural identity that is usually wildly at odds with the facts. These groups were all loose confederacies of disparate peoples brought together briefly for military purposes and then characterized by the threatened state as a “people.” Pastoralists in particular have remarkably flexible kinship structures, allowing them to incorporate and shed group members depending on such things as available pasture, number of livestock, and the tasks at hand—including military tasks. Like states, they too are typically manpower hungry and therefore quickly work refugees or captives into the lineage kinship structure. For the Romans and the Tang Dynasty, tribes were territorial units of administration, having little or nothing to do with the characteristics of the people so designated. A great many of the so-called tribal names were simply place names: a particular valley, a range of hills, a stretch of river, a forest. In some cases the term might designate the character of the presumed group—for example, a group the Romans called Cimbri, which means “robbers” or “brigands.” The aim of both the Romans and Chinese was to find or, failing that, simply to designate a leader or chief who would subsequently be responsible for the good behavior of his people. Under the Chinese system (tusi) of “using barbarians to rule barbarians” a tributary chief was appointed, given titles and privileges, and held accountable by Han officials for “his people.” Over time, of course, such an administrative fiction might take on an autonomous existence of its own. Once in place the fictions were institutionalized by courts, tribute payments, lower native officials, land records, and public works, structuring that part of native life that involved contact with the state. A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule. *** RAIDING After a raid by people from beyond the alluvium, a well-to-do resident of Ur wrote the following lament:
He who came from the highland has carried my possessions to the highlands. . . . The swamp has swallowed my possessions. . . . Men ignorant of silver have filled their hands with my silver. Men ignorant of gems have fastened my gems around their necks.[227]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.[228] To be sure, the state is often no richer than its periphery, but as we have seen, the decisive difference is that the wealth of the state, or any sedentary community, is all conveniently stacked up in a confined space, while the wealth of the periphery is widely dispersed. Mobile raiders, especially if they are mounted, have the military initiative. They can arrive at a time and place of their choosing and in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the weakest point of a settled community or to intercept a trading caravan. If they are numerous enough, they can take a fortified community. Their advantage lies in lightning raids; they are unlikely, for example, to lay siege to a fortified city, as the longer they stay put the longer a state has to mobilize against them, thus nullifying their tactical advantage. Under premodern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons, mobile armies of pastoralists have generally been superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of states.[229] Even in regions without pastoralists and horses, the general pattern seems to be that more mobile peoples—hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, and boat people—tend to dominate and extract tribute from sedentary horticulturalists and farmers.[230] The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture,” cited in my introduction, is significant. It gestures, I think, in the direction of an important truth about the parasitic quality of raiding. The granaries of a sedentary community may represent two or more years of agrarian toil that raiders can appropriate in a flash. Penned or corralled livestock are, in the same sense, living granaries that can be confiscated. And since the booty of a raid also typically included slaves to ransom, keep, or sell, they too represented a concentrated store of value and productivity—reared at considerable expense—that could be taken away in a day. From an even broader perspective, however, one might say that one parasite was displacing another, inasmuch as the raiders were confiscating and dispersing the accumulated assets of what had been, until then, a concentrated site of appropriation reserved exclusively for the state.[231] Barbarian raiders were, for their part, relatively safe from retaliation by the state. Being mobile and dispersed, they could usually simply melt away, often into the hills, swamps, and trackless grasslands, where state armies followed at their peril. State armies might be effective against fixed objectives and sedentary communities but were largely helpless campaigning against acephalous bands with no central authority with whom to negotiate or to defeat in battle. Another way of expressing the relative immunity of, say, Mongol raiders from Chinese counterattack is to note the absence, as Lattimore does, of nerve centers in the grasslands.[232] If we are to believe the words that Herodotus puts in the mouth of a Scythian interlocutor, nomad raiders were quite conscious of the military advantages of having no fixed property. “For we Scythians have no towns or planted lands, that we might meet you the sooner in battle, [otherwise] fearing that the one [town] be taken or the other [crops] be wasted.”[233] In the Mediterranean in the late second millennium BCE, the danger to states came less from grasslands and deserts than from the sea. Like the steppe or desert, the navigable sea offers unique opportunities for seaborne raiders to surprise coastal communities and sack them or, in some cases, to take them over as rulers. Sea nomads preyed on the huge growth in Mediterranean trade by piracy as well, the equivalent of the pastoralists preying on overland caravans. The king of Ugarit, near present-day Latakia in Syria, describes an attack on his kingdom when his own chariots and ships were absent: “Behold the enemy’s ships came here; my cities were burned and they did evil things in my country”; “The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.”[234] In addition to their well-known attacks on Egypt and the Levant, naval raiders were probably responsible for the destruction of palatial Crete and the imperial Hittite heartland.[235] They were the precursors to other famed seaborne raiders such as the Vikings and the “sea gypsies” (orang laut) of Southeast Asia. Contemporary piracy in the Arabian Sea suggests that even today, speed, mobility, and surprise can, for a time at least, tactically prevail over “quasi-sedentary” container ships. Little is known about the “sea pirates.” They may well have often operated out of Cyprus and have been responsible for several waves of attacks over more than a century. Like pastoralist raiders, they were an extremely heterogeneous lot in terms of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In state documents and chronicles they appear as a source of terror and dread. Modern research, however, has rehabilitated them as not just raiders but city builders in many of the realms they captured. There is a deep and fundamental contradiction to raiding that, once grasped, suggests why it is a radically unstable mode of subsistence, one that is likely under most circumstances to evolve into something quite different. Carried to its logical conclusion, raiding is self-liquidating. If, say, raiders attack a sedentary community, carrying off its livestock, grain, people, and valuables, the settlement is destroyed. Knowing its fate, others will be reluctant to settle there. If raiders were to make a practice of such attacks, they would, if successful, have killed all the “game” in the vicinity or, better put, “killed the goose that lays the golden egg.” Much the same is true for raiders or pirates who attack caravans or shipping lanes. If they take everything, either the trade is extinguished or, more likely, it finds another, safer route. Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” In return for a portion of the trade goods, harvest, livestock, and other valuables, the raiders “protect” the traders and communities against other raiders and, of course, against themselves. The relationship is analogous to endemism in diseases in which the pathogen makes a steady living from the host rather than killing it off. As there are likely to be a plurality of raiding groups, each group is likely to have particular communities it “taxes” and guards. Raiding, often quite devastating, still occurs, but it is most likely to be an attack by raiders on a community protected by another raiding community. Such attacks represented a form of indirect warfare between rival raiding groups. Protection rackets that are routine and that persist are a longer-run strategy than one-time sacking and therefore depend on a reasonably stable political and military environment. In extracting a sustainable surplus from sedentary communities and fending off external attacks to protect its base, a stable protection racket like this is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself.[236] Ancient states as a whole, in addition to building walls and raising armies of their own, often resorted to paying off powerful barbarians not to raid. The payments might take many forms. They might, to save face, be described as “gifts” in exchange for formal submission and tribute. They might consist in awarding a raiding group a monopoly over the control of trade in a particular location or over a particular commodity. They might be disguised as payment to a militia that would ensure peace at the border. In return for the payment, the raiders would agree to plunder only enemies of their allied state, and the state, for its part, would often recognize the raider’s independence in a particular territory. Over time, if the arrangement lasted, the raider’s protected zone might come to resemble a provincial, quasi-autonomous government.[237] Relations between the (Eastern) Han Dynasty around 200 CE and its nomadic raiding neighbors, the Xiongnu, is an illuminating example of political accommodation. The Xiongnu would make lightning raids and retreat back to the steppes before state forces could retaliate. Soon afterward, the Xiongnu would dispatch envoys to the court promising peace in return for favorable terms for border trade or direct subsidies. The arrangement would be sealed by a treaty in which the nomads appear as tributaries and make the appropriate performance of allegiance in return for large subsidies. The “reverse” tribute was enormous: one-third of the annual government payroll went to buying off the nomads. Seven centuries later, under the Tang, officials were delivering half a million bolts of silk to the Uighurs annually on similar terms. On paper it may have looked as if the nomads were tributary inferiors to the Tang emperor, but the actual flow of revenue and goods suggests the opposite in practice. The nomads were, in effect, collecting bribes from the Tang in exchange for not attacking.[238] One imagines that such protection rackets were more common than the documents allow, inasmuch as they were likely to be secrets of state which, if fully revealed, would risk contradicting the public facade of an all-powerful state. Herodotus notes that the Persian kings paid annual tribute to the Cissians (residents of Susa in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains at the edge of the Mesopotamian alluvium) lest they raid the Persian heartland and endanger its overland caravan trade. The Romans, after several defeats in the fourth century BCE, paid the Celts one thousand pounds of gold to prevent raiding, a practice they would repeat with the Huns and Goths. If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. It is this module that both is the basis for state formation and is equally essential for barbarian accumulation. It is the prize. One-time plunder raiding is likely to kill the host altogether, while a stable protection racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible with the long-run productivity of the grain core. *** TRADE ROUTES AND TAXABLE GRAIN CORES The earliest substantial communities were already dependent on trade and exchange with other ecological zones. The consolidation of larger states only increased this dependence. Given the early constraints on transportation, the juxtaposition in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of high plateau, intermontane valleys, piedmont steppe, and alluvium, along with navigable water, made possible a “vertical economy” of beneficial exchange.[239] Ur and Uruk were possible only by virtue of products from higher altitudes: stone, ores, oils, timber, limestone, soapstone, silver, lead, copper, grindstones, gems, gold, and, not least, slaves and captives. Most of these products were floated down watercourses. The longer and more navigable the river, the larger the potential polity. Smaller Mediterranean polities were miniature replications of this pattern. They were typically located on the alluvium of a river near the coast and on adjacent uplands and could thereby command trade and exchange for the whole watershed. “This combination was favored over time, thanks to its unrivalled ability to harness and integrate the food-mobilizing and wealth acquiring openings of both land and sea.”[240] The barbarian “stars” best known to history were no different in kind from earlier and smaller nonstate peoples—hunters and gatherers, swiddeners, coastal foragers, herdsmen—who raided small states and traded with them. What was unique was the unprecedented magnification of scale: of the confederations of mounted warriors, of the wealth of the lowland states, and of the volume and reach of trade. The emphasis on raiding in most histories is understandable in view of the terror it evoked among elites of the threatened states who, after all, provide us with the written sources. This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end in itself. Christopher Beckwith’s emphasis on trade routes is illuminating:
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.[241]The early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims; both sought to dominate the grain-and-manpower core with its surplus. The Mongols, among other raiding nomads, compared the agrarian population to ra’aya, “herds.”[242] Both sought to dominate the trade that was within reach. Both were slaving and raiding states in which the major booty of war and the major commodity in trade were human beings. In this respect they were competing protection rackets. The linkage between raiding and trading is reflected in the Celtic fringe of the Roman Empire, particularly in Gaul. In Republican Rome, the Celts, as noted, were often paid off in gold for not raiding. Over time the Celtic towns (oppida) became, in effect, multiethnic trading posts along river routes to the Empire, dominating trade in that sector. In return for grain, oil, wine, fine cloth, and prestige goods, they might send raw materials, woolens, leather, salt pork, trained dogs, and cheeses to the Romans.[243] The potential rewards for dominating land- and waterborne trade expanded exponentially as the trade itself expanded in the same fashion. That expansion had in part to do with technical factors such as improvement in boatbuilding, sail rigging, and navigation out of sight of the coast. Above all, of course, it depended on the substantial growth of both population and polities around the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the major rivers leading to them. Dating the expansion of trade is relatively arbitrary, but Barry Cunliffe notes that by around 1,500 BCE, major centers of population in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were major consumers of products from distant markets, and Crete had become a major naval power in the Mediterranean on the basis of that trade.[244] Three hundred years later the notorious “sea people” appeared to dominate the urban coastal centers of Cyprus and to have eclipsed the older agrarian states in the control of trade. Originally, trade in such treasured commodities such as gold, silver, copper, tin, precious stones, fine textiles, cedar wood, and ivory had been monopolized, as far as possible, by the elites of the agrarian states. But by 1,500 BCE that monopoly had been broken, and, in any event, the volume and variety of goods had swollen beyond recognition. Trade over long distances was hardly new. Even before the Neolithic, valued commodities, so long as they were small and light, were exchanged over great distances: obsidian, precious and semiprecious stones, gold, carnelian beads. What was new was not so much the range of the trade but the fact that it had come increasingly to include bulk commodities moved long distances across the entire Mediterranean. Egypt became the “breadbasket” of the eastern Mediterranean, shipping grain to Greece and later to Rome. What is crucial as well is that the market for goods that were raised, grown, collected, and foraged outside the agrarian core had an exponentially larger potential market. Goods from the mountains, high plateaus, marine fringes, and marshes that might previously have circulated locally were now traded “worldwide.” Beeswax and bitumen, used to caulk ships, were in great demand. Aromatic woods such as camphorwood and sandalwood, as well as aromatic resins such as frankincense and myrrh, were much prized. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this transformation. Suddenly the periphery and semiperiphery of the early states were the sites of valuable commodities for which there was now an appreciable market. Foraging, hunting, and marine collecting became lucrative commercial activities. A few brief analogies can help clarify what this shift meant. In the ninth century CE, with the growth of trade links between China and Southeast Asia, hunting and foraging in the forests of Borneo exploded. Some claim that the island, hitherto virtually unpopulated, was peopled by forest collectors hoping to take advantage of the trading opportunities in camphorwood, gold, hornbill ivory, rhinoceros horn, beeswax, rare spices, feathers, edible birds’ nests, tortoise shells, and so on. A second analogy, much later, might be the worldwide demand for ivory—in the North Atlantic mainly for piano keys and billiard balls—that set off a myriad of intertribal wars for control of the trade and, not incidentally, destroyed much of the elephant population. The trade in beaver pelts in North America is another case. Today, the demand in the Chinese and Japanese market for ginseng root, caterpillar fungus, and matsutake mushrooms has made foraging a commercial activity that occasionally resembles the Klondike gold rush.[245] On a smaller but no less revolutionary scale for their epoch, the various peripheries of the agrarian states became valuable commercial landscapes—in some ways more valuable than the alluvium itself—thoroughly enmeshed in Mediterranean-wide trade networks. The possibilities for hunters, foragers, and marine collectors had never been more promising. Central Eurasia had a wealth of products to trade for goods from the agrarian states, especially once shipping opened distant markets. Beckwith provides an extensive list of such products recorded by early travelers. The list is enormous, but an abbreviated version will illustrate its variety: copper, iron, horses, mules, furs, hides, wax, amber, swords, armor, fabrics, cotton, wool, carpets, blanket cloth, felt, tents, stirrups, bows, fine woods, linseed, nuts, and, never absent from the list, slaves.[246] Raiding by nomadic groups, which resembled warfare by agrarian states, is best understood as a means of acquiring tributary communities and of dominating the trade that circulated through them. It was not a result of nomadic poverty, still less a desire for shiny objects. All nomadic societies were complex in the sense that they practiced some agriculture as well as herding and had a substantial artisan class, so that they were not normally in need of staple cereals or technical expertise from the agrarian states. The barbarians, broadly understood, were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage—and in many cases direct charge—of the explosion in trade. 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. As trade grew, mobile nonstate peoples were able to dominate the arteries and capillaries of that trade and exact tribute for doing so. Mobility was, if anything, even more critical with respect to seaborne trade across the Mediterranean. These nomads of the sea were, one archaeologist explains, in all probability seamen who originally hired out their services to the established agrarian kingdoms in “official trade.” As the scale of trade and its opportunities grew, they became an increasingly independent force capable of imposing themselves as coastal polities, raiding, trading, and exacting tribute on the model of their landward counterparts.[247] *** DARK TWINS State and nonstate peoples, agriculturalists and foragers, “barbarians” and “civilized” are twins, both in reality and semiotically. Each member of the pair conjures up its partner. And despite abundant historical evidence to the contrary, the peoples who have historically identified themselves as belonging to the ostensibly more “evolved” member of each pair—state people, agriculturalists, the “civilized”—have taken their identity as essential, permanent, and superior. The most tendentious of these pairs, the civilized-barbarian pair, are born together as twins. Lattimore has articulated this “dark twin” thesis most clearly:
Not only the frontier between civilization and barbarism, but barbarian societies themselves, were in large measure created 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 people who had land and displaced others and the effect on those who were displaced [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.[248]Although Lattimore ignores the millions of nonstate foragers, shifting cultivators, and marine collectors who were not pastoralists, he does capture the parallel evolution of nomadism and states. These nomads, most especially those on horseback who “plagued” state centers, are best seen simply as the strongest competitors of the state for control of the agrarian surplus.[249] 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.”[250] In the most robust cases, such as the itinerate state founded by Genghis Khan, the largest contiguous land empire in world history, and the “Comanche Empire” in the New World, we would be better advised to think of them as “horseback states.”[251] The relationship between a nomadic periphery and an adjacent state could take any number of forms and was, in any case, highly volatile. At the predatory end it might simply consist of occasional raids punctuated by retaliatory expeditions by state armies. Caesar’s brutal campaigns in Gaul might be considered a rare example of a successful expedition that, despite many subsequent uprisings, extended Roman rule. In other cases, such as the Xiongnu, Uighurs, and Huns, the relationship might involve bribes, subsidies, and a kind of reverse tribute. Such arrangements, under which the barbarians received part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding, might be thought of as a de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians. Under relatively stable conditions, such an equilibrium might approximate the frontier protection-racket model described earlier. Conditions, however, were rarely so stable with respect either to statecraft or to the often fragmented, fractious nomadic polity. Two other “solutions” were possible, each of which, in effect, dissolved the dichotomy itself. The first was for the nomadic barbarians to conquer the state or empire and become a new ruling class. Such was the case at least twice in China’s history—the Yuan and Manchu/Qing Dynasties—and with Osman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. The barbarians became the new elite of the sedentary state, living at the capital and operating the state apparatus. As the Chinese proverb has it, “You can conquer a kingdom on horseback, but to rule it, you have to dismount.” The second alternative is far more common but less remarked upon, and that is for the nomads to become the cavalry/mercenaries of the state, patrolling the marches and keeping the other barbarians in check. In fact, it is the rare state or empire that has not recruited units from among the barbarians, often in return for trade privileges and local autonomy. Caesar’s pacification of Gaul was accomplished largely with Gallic troops. In this case, rather than conquering the state, the barbarians became part of the military arm of an existing state along the lines of, say, the Cossacks or the Gurkhas. This pattern, in the colonial setting, has been called “indigenous sub-imperialism.”[252] On a large scale the use of mercenaries poses its own risks for a sedentary state, as the Tang discovered when they, in effect, hired the Turkic Uighurs to suppress the huge An Lushan Rebellion. The consensus among most “barbarian specialists” seems to be that nomadic pastoralists require sedentary communities as depots of manpower and revenue as well as trading outlets. Nomadic pastoralists have been known to forcibly resettle agricultural populations to create such depots. Furthermore, according to this view, barbarian confederations operate as “shadow empires” adjacent to and parasitic on large sedentary polities. Their quasi-derivative status is emphasized by the fact that they tend to disappear when their host collapses. As Nikolay Kradin puts it, “The degree of centralization among nomads is in direct proportion to the extent of the neighboring agricultural civilization. . . .”
The imperial and quasi-imperial organization of the nomads in Eurasia first developed after the ending of the “axial age” from the middle of the first millennium BCE at the time of the mighty agricultural empires (Qin in China, Maur in India, the Hellenistic states of Asia Minor, the Roman Empire in Europe) and in those regions . . . where the nomads were forced into contact with highly organized, agricultural, urban societies.[253]Kradin and others include among the pairs that arise and fall together the Xiongnu and the Han, the Turkish Khaghanat and the Tang, the Huns and the Romans, the “sea people” and the Egyptians, and perhaps the Amorites and the Mesopotamian city-states. Presumably the Yuan and Manchu Dynasties do not count in this series, as they swallow the sedentary kingdom rather than disappearing. It is all too characteristic, though no less deplorable, that so much ink is devoted to the barbarian states and the empires they bedeviled. Like a capital city that dominates the news, they dominate the historical coverage. A more evenhanded history would chronicle the relationship of hundreds of smaller states with thousands of nearby nonstate peoples, not to mention the relation of predation and alliance between those nonstate peoples. In his account of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars, for example, Thucydides discusses dozens of different hill and valley peoples: those with kings and without kings, those with whom Athens has relations of alliance, tribute, or enmity. Each of those pairs, were their histories known, would add immeasurably to our understanding of the relations between states and their nonstate neighbors. *** A GOLDEN AGE? There is, I believe, a long period, measured not in centuries but in millennia—between the earliest appearance of states and lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago—that might be called a “golden age for barbarians” and for nonstate peoples in general. For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern nation-state did not yet exist. Physical movement, flux, an open frontier, and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period. Even the exceptional and often short-lived empires of this long epoch (the Roman, Han, Ming, and in the New World the Mayan peer polities and the Inka) could not impede large-scale population movements in and out of their political orbit. Hundreds and hundreds of petty states formed, thrived briefly, and decomposed into their elementary social units of villages, lineages, or bands. Populations were adept at modifying their subsistence strategies when circumstances dictated—abandoning the plough for the forest, the forest for swiddening, and swiddening for pastoralism. While the increase in population would have, by itself, encouraged more intensive subsistence strategies, the fragility of the state, its exposure to epidemics, and a large nonstate periphery would not have allowed us to discern anything like state hegemony until, say, 1600 CE at the earliest. Until then a large share of the world’s population had never seen a (routine) tax collector or, if they had seen one, still had the option of making themselves fiscally invisible. There is no particular need to insist on the quasi-arbitrary date of 1600 CE. It roughly marks the end of the great Eurasian barbarian waves: the seaborne Vikings from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Tamerlane’s great kingdom of the late fourteenth century, and the conquests of Osman and his immediate successors. Between them they destroyed, plundered, and conquered hundreds of polities large and small and displaced millions of people. They were also great slaving expeditions; among the major prizes of such campaigns were precious metals and human beings for sale. It is not so much that such raiding mixed with trade disappeared after 1600 CE as that it became more fragmented. Edward Gibbon, a comparatively rare voice with something to say on behalf of pagans, wondered whether there were any “barbarians” left in Europe in the late eighteenth century. (He might have considered the Barbary pirates, Macedonia, or the highland Scots, or have noticed that the Europeans had joined the Arabs in scouring the slaving ports of the African continent for slaves.) Outside Europe and the Mediterranean the pattern of raiding, trading, and slaving remained a major activity in the Malay world and in upland Southeast Asia among hill peoples. As states and durable gunpowder empires grew, the ability of nonstate peoples to raid and dominate small states shrank at a pace that depended greatly on the region and its geography. The earliest states, because of the opportunities they opened for trade, supplemented by raiding and protection rackets, represented a qualitatively new environment for nonstate peoples. Now a good deal of the world around them was valuable; they could participate fully in the new opportunities for trade without becoming a subject of the state. There would have been periods when leaving behind the plough of a state subject to take up foraging, pastoralism, and marine collecting would have represented a rational economic calculation as well as a bolt for freedom. In such moments, it is likely that the proportion of barbarians vis-à-vis state subjects would have grown because life at the periphery had become more, not less, attractive. 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 ratio between foragers and farmers. Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of 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 the waves of history were supposed to have rolled a long time ago. There are, however, two deeply melancholy aspects of the golden age of barbarians. Each has directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life. Many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other nonstate peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core. So pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia that one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups raided their weaker and more dispersed neighbors. In so doing they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians. The second melancholy aspect of the new livelihoods at the periphery afforded by states was, as previously noted, the sale of their martial skills to states as mercenaries. One would be hard put to find an early state that did not enlist nonstate peoples—sometimes wholesale—in their armies, to catch runaway slaves, and to repress revolts among their own restive populations. Barbarian levies had as much to do with building states as with plundering them. 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Abu Hureyra site, 93–94, 108 Abu Salabikh, 120 acorns, 69, 90 acute community infections, 102 Adam and Eve, 10, 72 Adams, Robert, 185, 200–201, 212 Adnigkidu (Sumerian goddess), 229 Africa, 5 agriculture: abandonment of, 211 “backs-to-the-wall” theory of, 71–72 beginnings of, 3, 46, 58, 75 biological changes linked to, 86 diet altered by, 10, 107–108 difficulties of, 10, 18, 19–21, 31, 35, 52, 65, 93, 152, 181 diseases linked to, 102, 105, 107, 109–110, 115 drudgery of, 72, 93, 95, 148, 152, 153, 181, 255 in Europe, 135 fertility rates linked to, 113–114 flood-retreat, 20, 66, 72, 93, 120, 124 fragility of, 96, 112–113 hunting and gathering combined with, 62, 248 labor-intensiveness of, 66, 96, 111, 127, 154 land cleared for, 23, 39, 67, 90, 105, 196, 199, 200 in Mesopotamia, 125 migration vs. sedentism and, 10, 34, 61 pastoralism and, 136 rituals linked to, 92, 133 social evolutionists’ view of, 65 soil and water needed for, 122 state formation dependent on, xi, 231 traditional view of, 7–9, 44, 47, 68, 91, 94–95 unfree labor used for, 29, 120, 178–179 water transport linked to, 134 Ain Ghazal, 197–198, 201 Akkad, 14, 207–208, 209, 215 Alamanni, 235 alewives, 53 Algaze, Guillermo, 12, 160, 192 Amara, 48 amaranth, 268 n. 19 Amazon, 39, 69–70 Amorites, 208, 222, 224, 228, 235, 252 diet of, 136–137 Ur III collapse attributed to, 214–215 walled defenses against, 138, 228 amphibians, 65 amygdala, 81 Anatolia, 11, 245 Andes, 260 n. 14 anemia, 84, 109 Angkor Wat, 186, 202 An Lushan Rebellion, 251 Annales School, 5 antelope, 88 Anthropocene epoch, 2–3, 19–20 Antonine plague, 21, 99 ants, 69 aphids, 111 Aristotle, 29, 156, 180, 182, 221 arthritis, 81–82 arthropods, 105 Art of Not Being Governed, The (Scott), xi, xi Athens, 120 Attila, 233 auroch, 94 Australia, 39 Awash, Azzam, 260 n. 13 Babylon, 157, 177, 215 bacteria, 18, 78, 82, 104, 105, 111 Balkans, 229 bamboo, 13, 57, 69 bananas, 76 barbarians, xii, xii,, xiv, xiv, 126, 128, 174, 215 in China, 30, 134–135, 138, 221–222, 225, 227, 229, 230, 233, 236, 241, 250–251 diet of, 136–137, 229–230 geography and ecology of, 228–229 golden age of, 32–33, 35, 219–256 hierarchy of, 230 as mercenaries, 35, 251, 256 migration toward, 232–234 “savages” vs., 220–221 trade with, 34–35, 226, 248 as twins of the “civilized,” 35, 248–249 ubiquity of, 14, 32. See also hunting and gathering; nomadism, nomads; pastoralism, pastoralists Barbary pirates, 254 Barfield, Thomas J., 249 bark-ringing, 70 barley, 12, 17, 23, 55, 71, 110, 206 fermentation of, 65 genetic changes in, 73 in Mesopotamia, 71, 128 nutritional value of, 109, 129 records of, 142, 143–144 salt tolerance of, 200 seasonality of, 90, 91 taxation of, 131 transport of, 134 for unfree labor, 29, 132 vulnerability of, 74, 111 baskets, 11, 41, 89 Basra, xiii, xiii Battle of Kadesh, 171 Battle of Teutoburg Forest, 229 bears, 68 beavers, 38, 40, 68 Beckwith, Christopher, 232–233, 234, 244, 247 bedbugs, 19 beechnuts, 90 beer, 29, 65, 120, 144 bees, 69 beeswax, 246, 247 Berbers, 33–34, 223, 237 beriberi, 109 berries, 17, 38, 90 bird flu, 105 birds, 43, 70, 75, 78, 94, 112 crops and grain consumed by, 74, 96, 111, 221 diseases of, 100–101, 105 domestication of, 100–101 hunting of, 37, 41, 49, 50, 53–54, 64, 65, 88 migration of, 10, 54, 63, 64, 65, 88, 101 in wetlands, 10, 49, 50, 53, 56 bison, 50 bitter vetch, 44 bitumen, 246 Black Death, 21 blood types, 262–263 n. 19 “booty capitalism,” 172 Borneo, 246–247 Borobudur, 202 Boserup, Esther, 20, 71–72, 153 bow and arrow, 39 brain size, 17, 42, 80–81 Brasidas (Spartan general), 154 Brazil nuts, 69 Brecht, Bertolt, 171 Bronson, Bennett, 225, 227 Broodbank, Cyprian, 185, 214 browse, 17, 38, 70 bubonic plague, 99 bulrush, 50 Caesar, Julius, 9, 227, 236, 250, 251 camels, 77, 104 canals: for irrigation, 121, 122 in Mesopotamia, 56 siltation of, 195, 199 state formation and, 23, 128, 204 for transportation, 117, 122, 147 unfree labor used for, 29, 46, 157, 170, 181 carbohydrates, 109, 114 carbon dioxide, 39 caribou, 50, 53 Carneiro, Robert, 267 n. 16 carrying capacity, 72, 95, 198, 201, 223 cassava, 130 cattle, 44, 77, 83, 87–88, 103, 104 Celts, 9, 35, 225, 230, 242, 245 Chandra Gupta, 225 charcoal, 42, 54, 170, 176, 192, 198, 205 Charlemagne, Emperor, 15 Chayanov, A. V., 152 chickenpox, 102 chickens, 18, 100–101, 103, 105 chickpeas, 12, 44, 132, 133 Childe, V. Gordon, 166–167 chimpanzee, 40–41 China, xiv, xiv, 5, 44, 186, 190, 219 barbarians in, 30, 134–135, 138, 221–222, 225, 227, 229, 230, 233, 236, 241, 250–251 chronology of, 28 crop domestication in, 129 flooding in, 199 forced resettlement in, 166 Great Wall of, 30, 138, 233 infectious diseases in, 105 political rivalries in, 140 rationing in, 210 self-nomadization in, 233 slavery in, 166–167 Southeast Asian trade links with, 246–247 state formation in, 14, 24, 124, 128 taxation in, 131, 134–135, 138, 146–147, 221–222, 233 Warring States in, 140, 144–145, 203 wetlands reengineered in, 56 written records in, 144–146 Xiongnu raids in, 241–242 chokepoints, 266 n. 14 cholera, 102, 193 Cimbri, 236 Cissians, 242 Clastres, Pierre, 232 climate change, 16, 31, 97, 120–121, 184, 188 club rush, 50 Code of Hammurabi, 162 coercion: calibration of, 152–153 record keeping underlying, 139–140 state formation dependent on, 25, 27, 29, 179 Weberian view of, 118. See also unfree labor collapse, of states, 112, 183, 204, 207–210, 251 climate change linked to, 31 “dark ages” linked to, xii, xii,, xiii, xiii, 213 disease linked to, xiv, xiv, 21, 31, 97 documentation lacking for, 16 frequency of, 27, 29, 203, 213 of Maya, 30 in Mesopotamia, 122 self-inflicted, 212–213, 234 types of, 31–32, 185–188 of Ur III Dynasty, 185, 214–215 walled settlements and, 137, 202 colonialism, 151 Comanche, 8 commensals, 19, 73, 78, 82, 103, 104, 105–106 conquistadores, 151 conscription, 21, 23, 139, 173 flight from, 32, 203, 211, 217, 232 in Greece, 175 during Qin Dynasty, 147 records needed for, 142–143, 146 contagion, 98–99 convicts, 29, 181 cooking, 17, 40–43, 84, 91, 196 copper, 125, 192, 223, 243, 247 elites dependent on, 159 labor used to mine, 170, 176 trade in, 226, 245 coppicing, 70 corvée labor, 23, 32, 143, 144, 152, 158, 164 canals dug and maintained by, 121, 199 in Mesopotamia, 174 records of, 141 Cossacks, 251 Cowgill, George, 185, 187 cowpox, 104 Crete, 24, 185, 210, 234, 239, 245 cribra orbitalia, 108 crop failure, 109, 123, 153, 188, 190, 201, 216, 217, 231 crop rotation, 112 crowding, 20, 85 among animals, 77–78, 84, 189 climate and, 60 of crops, 109–111 diseases linked to, 78, 84, 97, 100–103, 105, 106, 107, 110–111, 191, 193 among humans, 81, 83, 189 crows, 73 Crutzen, Paul, 257 n. 1 cuneiform, 13, 24, 141, 143, 161, 176 Cunliffe, Barry, 224–225, 234, 245 Cyprus, 239, 245 daffodils, 76 dark ages, xii, xii,, xiii, xiii, 213–218, 222 day lilies, 76 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 210 décrue (flood-retreat) agriculture, 20, 66, 72, 93, 120, 124 deer, 38, 88, 94 deforestation, 19, 31, 195–200 delayed-return theory, 65–66 Delphi, 225 density-dependent diseases, 102 desert kites, 77 diphtheria, 21 dogs, 18, 73, 76, 81, 86, 103, 104 domestication: of animals, x, x, 11, 18, 20, 44, 49, 63, 70, 76–83, 169, 180, 181, 191 barbarism vs., 230, 255 definitions of, xii, xii–xiii, 11–12, 18–19, 70 environmental of fire, 37–43 epidemiological effects of, 103–105, 109, 111–112 of Homo sapiens, 18–19, 83–90 impact of, 20 of plants, x, x, 12, 17, 22, 24, 44–45, 61, 66, 69, 71–76, 90–91, 117, 129, 135, 155 sedentism followed by, xi, xi, 46, 100 state formation preceded by, 7, 58–59, 155 states characterized by, 5, 17, 18 of unfree human subjects, 155, 160, 166, 169, 180–182, 221 of whole environments, 70–71 donkeys, 77, 83 drainage, 47, 134 drought, 30, 31, 62, 112, 189, 190, 212–216 ducks, 18, 53, 103, 105 dysentery, 102, 193 eels, 53, 90 Egypt, xiv, xiv, 30, 44, 56, 66, 124, 127–128, 134, 185, 219, 239, 245, 252 chronology of, 27, 215 forced resettlement in, 176–177 grain exported by, 246 nomarchs in, 215–216 plague in, 194 pyramids and mummies of, 186 records of, 209 sea people’s invasion of, 224 slavery in, 29, 164–165, 168, 173 state formation in, 14, 24 sumptuary laws in, 208 einkorn wheat, 73 elective affinity, 117 elephants, 39, 68 Elias, Norbert, 91 elk, 38 emmer wheat, 73 Engels, Friedrich, 9 England, 56 Eninnu temple, 164 Epic of Gilgamesh, 62, 98, 126, 138, 141 ergot, 111 Eridu, 44, 119, 179 Erlitou cultural area, 144 erosion, 66, 198 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 87–88 fallowing, 112 Farmer’s Almanac, 89–90 Faroe Islands, 102–103 fat, 18, 64 fatty acids, 108–109 Febvre, Lucien, 129 feces, 82, 105–106 fermentation, 41, 65 ferrets, 80 fertility, 29, 82–83, 113–114 fertilizer, 70 filaraisis, 102 Finlay, Moses, 156, 157 fire, xiii, xiii accidental, 16 cooking with, 17, 40–43, 84, 91, 196 domestication of, xii, xii, 17, 20, 37–43 early uses of, 3, 11, 19 for landscape sculpting, 17, 38, 40, 41, 66, 68, 69, 70, 90, 110 firewood, 54, 125, 176, 196, 198, 205 fish, 10, 101 human consumption of, 48–49, 51, 53, 56, 64, 65, 70, 88–90, 108, 110, 128, 135 nutrients in, 108 processing of, 144 trade in, 34 flax, 44 fleas, 73, 105 Fletcher, Joseph, 277–278 n. 45 flood-retreat (décrue) agriculture, 20, 66, 72, 93, 120, 124 floods: deforestation linked to, 31 folk memory of, 59–60 in Mesopotamia, 49–50 rice cultivation and, 133 settlements vulnerable to, 97, 122–123, 189, 190, 199–200, 201, 212, 213, 231–232 soils deposited by, 124. See also rainfall foodwebs, 22, 41, 48, 59, 89, 90, 108, 113, 255 fossil fuels, 1, 2 “founder crops,” 44 1491 (Mann), xii, xii foxes, 79, 82 Frederik the Great, king of Prussia, 130 fruits, 41, 69, 112 fermentation of, 65 fire and, 17, 38 seasonality of, 89, 90 sedentism linked to, 51 fungi, 42, 96, 110, 111 Gallic Wars, 157 Garden of Eden, 10, 72 Gaul, 229, 245, 250, 251 gazelle, 50, 53, 77, 88, 94, 101 geese, 18, 53, 103 Gelb, I. J., 158 Genghis Khan, 250 Germans, 9 Gibbon, Edward, 210, 254 Gilgamesh, 119 Epic of, 62, 98, 126, 138, 141 glaciation, 43 goats, 11–12, 20, 44, 50, 77–78 diseases of, 104 as food source, 18 in Mesopotamia, 63, 71, 127 gold, 42, 125, 167, 192, 242–247 Goths, 210, 233–234, 235, 242 gracilization, 86 grains: dietary effects of, 84–86, 114 disease and parasites afflicting, 98, 105, 110–111, 113, 191, 195 domestication of, 11, 17, 44, 46, 58, 69, 71, 72, 155 fermentation of, 65 foraging of, 11, 66, 89 genetic changes in, 73–74 as marker of civilization, 136–137, 229–230 measurement of, 129, 131, 144–145 mythology of, 7, 92 political power based on, 204–208, 220, 223, 234–235, 237 processing of, 83, 91, 96, 160, 163 salinization and, 200 seasonality of, 90, 130–133 seizure of, 33–34, 130, 171, 215, 223, 240 soil exhaustion and, 201 state formation dependent on, 116, 117, 120, 121–122, 124, 128–130 storage of, 63, 123, 134, 138, 205 swidden cultivation of, 135–136 taxation of, xiii, xiii, 21–24, 33, 56, 116, 118, 123, 128–134, 140–141, 211, 212 trade in, 34, 54, 125, 132, 176, 192, 245, 246 transport of, 54, 133–134, 205 unfree labor and, 152–153, 156, 158, 173, 177, 178–179, 181 wetland cultivation of, 49, 55, 56 grasses, 67 grave goods, 57 Great Wall of China, 30, 138, 233 Greece, xiv, xiv, 15, 24, 30, 147–148, 171 dark age in, 216–217, 222 in Peloponnesian Wars, 172, 252 records of, 209 self-nomadization in, 233 slavery in, 29, 156, 157, 168, 174, 175 taxation in, 154, 175 warring city-states in, 203 grindstones, 11, 89, 163, 243 grouse, 38 guanaco, 82 Guangdong, China, 105 gum disease, 82 Gurkhas, 251 Gypsies (Roma), 257–258 n. 5 Hall, H. R., 56 Hammurabi, 162 Han Dynasty, xiv, xiv, 124, 156, 166, 219, 253 barbarians vs., 227, 233, 236 Xiongnu vs., 241–242, 252 Hangzhou Bay, 56 hare, 38 Haripunjaya, 56 Harlan, Jack, 11 Harrapan, 14, 56, 219 Heine, Peter, 109–110 helminthes, 104 helots, 29, 30, 156, 178, 180 Hemudu, 56 hepatitis, 107 herd behavior, 77 Herodotus, 238, 242 herpes, 102 herring, 53, 90 hides, 34, 247 hippocampus, 81 Hittites, 176, 194, 239 Hoabinhians, 56 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 27 Hochschild, Adam, 155–156 Hodder, Ian, 261 n. 24, 262 n. 17 Homo erectus, 17, 37, 68 honey, 34, 125 horses, 77, 83, 104, 166, 172 Huns, 222, 233, 235, 242, 250, 252 hunting and gathering, 5, 18, 20, 40, 55, 101, 105, 112, 134, 153, 223, 249 absence from archaeological record of, 13, 110 adaptability of, 61–67, 135 agriculture combined with, 62, 248 by barbarians, 229 diet and, 10, 84, 107–108 durability of, 59, 113 fertility rates linked to, 83, 113–114 looting combined with, 223, 237, 244 relative ease of, 18, 71 resources for, 50, 60, 93, 95 sedentism combined with, 64, 95 sedentism resisted by, 8 state formation incompatible with, 22, 49 timing and rhythm of, 52–53, 88, 90 tools used in, 89 traditional view of, 7, 9–10, 65 ubiquity of, 14, 217, 219–220. See also barbarians; nomadism, nomads; pastoralism, pastoralists Hussein, Saddam, 56 hypoplasis, 108 hypothalamus, 81 Ibn Khaldun, 126 Iliad (Homer), 148, 216 immunity, 102, 106–107, 238 indentured servants, 29 India, 44 Industrial Revolution, 2, 5 Indus Valley, 24, 44, 128, 219 influenza, 101, 104 Inkas, 128, 140, 253 insects, 68–69, 70, 78, 96, 105, 111 Iran, 43, 226 Iraq, 56 iron deficiency, 84, 108–109 irrigation, 57, 116, 117, 122, 147 effects of, 31, 200–201 emergence of, 22 labor-intensiveness of, 121 natural, 50 of rice, 22, 128, 129, 133, 134 state formation linked to, xi, xi, 46–47, 55, 125, 199 Isin, 119 ivory, 245, 247 Japan, 184, 247, 267 n. 17 Jastorf culture, 135 Jericho, 24, 199 Jōmon, 267 n. 17 Junghars, 235 Justinian plague, 21, 99, 192 Kadesh, Battle of, 171 Khaganat, 252 Kish, 119, 140 Koch, Robert, 106 Kolbert, Elizabeth, xii, xii Kradin, Nikolay, 251–252 Kurds, 223 kwashiorkor, 109 Laconia, 178 Lagash, 119, 121 Lake Agassiz, 43 Lake Titicaca, 56 Lamentation over Ur, 208 Larsa, 201 Last Glacial Maximum, 5 Latakia, 239 late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps, 18, 73, 84, 96–113 La Tène zone, 135 Latin America, 155 Lattimore, Owen, 30, 125, 138, 212, 225–226, 233–234, 238, 249, 263 n. 23 Lawrence, D. H., 116 Leach, Helen, 85–86 Lee, Richard, 113 leeches, 73 legumes, 17, 22, 44, 103, 129, 132–133 lentils, 12, 22, 44, 65, 73, 129, 132, 133 leprosy, 102 Levant, 44 agriculture in, 115 homo sapiens in, 5 military campaigns in, 165, 171, 239 rainfall and vegetation in, 59–60 sedentism in, 43 state formation delayed in, 24 state fragility in, 185, 214 lice, 73, 105 life expectancy, 9, 122 limbic system, 81, 86 Lindner, Rudi, 136 Linear B, 148, 216 literacy, 15, 147–148, 185–186 Little Ice Age, 39, 60, 188 livestock, 1, 3, 19, 38, 46, 58, 63, 64, 73, 77, 87, 88, 169, 204, 212, 226, 235 diseases afflicting, 21, 31, 103, 105, 112–113, 122–123, 189, 191, 193 early rearing of, 43 as form of wealth, 29 labor required for rearing, 95, 96 overgrazing by, 201 raiding of, 33, 237, 238, 240 records of, 141, 144, 165, 177 wars and, 123, 138, 171–172, 173, 177, 180, 223 wild fauna displaced by, 92 llamas, 82 Locke, John, 9, 27 locusts, 112–113 loess, 18, 122, 124–125, 189 longue durée, 5 Macedonia, 197, 254 maize, 23, 55, 75, 90, 128, 131, 133 malaria, 102, 200, 212, 262–263 n. 19 Malay Peninsula, 156, 254 malnutrition, 97 Manchu, 222 Manchu Dynasty, 250, 252 manioc, 21, 130 Mann, Charles, xii, xii Mari, 99 Martu (Sumerian god), 229 Maya, xiv, xiv, 14, 15, 24, 30, 44, 203, 219, 253 Mayshar, Joram, 268 n. 23 McAnany, Patricia, 185 McNeil, J. R., 200 McNeill, William, 217 measles, 21, 102, 103, 104, 107 Melville, Herman, 53 meningitis, 106 menopause, 114 Mesopotamia, xi, xi,, xiii, xiii, 10, 25, 48, 72, 89, 145, 245 agro-pastoralism in, 93 archaeological sites in, 45 chronology of, 26 deforestation in, 199 domesticated animals in, 77 flood-retreat agriculture in, 66 food rationing in, 132 forced resettlement in, 176–179 government stability in, 185, 215 grain cultivation in, 91, 128, 131, 163, 201, 211 infectious disease in, 97, 98, 100, 195 labor needs in, 170–171, 174, 175–178 quasi-sedentism in, 61–62, 64 ruralization vs. sedentism in, 188 slavery in, 29–30, 157–158, 160, 168, 173–179, 243 state formation in, 2, 3, 14, 23–24, 30, 71, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 140–142, 219 taxation in, 7, 134, 142–143, 207, 228–229 walled towns in, 137 wars in, 154, 165, 170, 203, 222, 224 water resources in, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59–60, 95, 127–128, 195–196, 200, 243 Messinia, 178–179 Mexico, 56 mice, 19, 73, 76, 78, 79–80, 104 migration: of birds, 10, 53–54, 63, 64, 65, 88, 101 of fish, 10, 53, 64, 65 of game, 50, 53, 63, 65, 77, 223 human, 61, 119–120, 184, 234 mildew, 111 milk, 18, 76 millet, 21, 109, 128, 131 Ming Dynasty, 221–222, 253 mining, 29, 170, 176, 181, 196 mites, 73 Mithen, Steven, 199 mollusks, 50, 65, 112 Mongols, 222, 225, 233, 235, 238, 244, 257 n. 4 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 9 mortality: among domesticated animals, 82–83 human, 95, 102, 106, 108, 119, 155, 170, 210, 231 infant, 107, 113, 168 maternal, 113, 168 mortars, 11, 89 mosquitoes, 73, 105 Mughals, 222, 225 mulching, 70 mumps, 21, 102, 107 Murra, John V., 260 n. 14 mushrooms, 38, 89 mussels, 94 Mussolini, Benito, 56 Mycenae, 14, 224, 234 Nansen, Fridtjof, 257–258 n. 5 Nasirya, 48 Native Americans, 8, 34, 38, 107 Natufian Period, 43 natural selection, 20 Navajo, 8 Neanderthals, 42 Nemet-Nejat, Karen Rhea, 99 neo-Assyrian Empire, 176–178, 180 neotany, 80 Netherlands, 56 niche construction, 40, 68, 70 Nippur, 98, 119 Nissen, Hans J., 109–110, 118–119, 120–121, 179, 187–188 nomadism, nomads, 7, 9, 136, 138, 221, 226, 228, 250–252 advantages of, 232–233, 238 China threatened by, 212, 225, 241–242 commercial goals of, 244–245, 247–248, 249 documentation lacking for, 13 Egypt invaded by, 224 in Indian subcontinent, 225 at sea, 239, 248. See also barbarians; hunting and gathering; pastoralism, pastoralists nuclear testing, 2, 19 Nuer people, 87–88 nuts, 17, 38, 41, 51, 69, 112 “oak belt,” 69 oats, 74, 76, 90 obsidian, 34, 55, 125, 246 Odyssey (Homer), 148, 216 Old Babylonian Period, xiv, xiv Olmecs, 14 Omega fatty acids, 108–109 onager, 94 oppida, 35, 135, 230, 245 ores, 34, 54, 243 Osman I, sultan of the Turks, 222, 250, 254 Ostrogoths, 233–234 Ottoman Empire, 136, 250 overgrazing, 196, 201 ovulation, 114 oxen, 40, 180 palm trees, 69 Parthenon, 186 Pasteur, Louis, 106 pastoralism, pastoralists, 18, 123, 153, 162, 213, 253, 255 barbarism linked to, 33, 126–127, 134–135, 229, 230–231, 251 invasions by, 188, 214, 239 kinship structures of, 235 military campaigns and, 237 misconceptions of, 61–62, 64, 70–71, 126–127, 212 by Native Americans, 8 origins of, 3 persistence of, 14 as quasi-states, 249–250 specialized, 136 taxation incompatible with, 136, 211, 220. See also barbarians; hunting and gathering; nomadism, nomads Pathans, 223 Paulette, Tate, 271 n. 16 peanuts, 22 peas, 22, 44, 73, 129, 133 pellagra, 109 Peloponnesian Wars, 172, 252 periodization, xiv, xiv, 4 Persians, 32, 221, 242 Peru, 56 Philippines, 151 Philistines, 224 Phoenicians, 32, 148 pigeons, 79 pigs, 44, 86, 88 brain size of, 80–81 diet of, 50, 73 diseases of, 103, 104, 105 domesticated, 76, 77–78 pituitary gland, 81 plague, 21, 99, 101, 194 plague of Justinian, 21, 99, 192 pneumonia, 193 polecat, 80 polio, 107 politicide, 212–213 Pollack, Michael, 269 n. 33 Pollan, Michael, 87 Pontine Marshes, 56 population: control of, 150–182 growth of, 1, 6, 60–61, 94–95, 96–97, 113–115 of prestate towns, 191 porcupine, 38 porotic hyperostasis, 108 Porter, Anne, 62, 228 Postgate, J. N., 120 potatoes, 128, 130 pottery, 49, 54, 125, 192, 196, 198, 226 poultry, 104 Pournelle, Jennifer, 47, 117 prairie dogs, 68 preadaptation, 77 Prepottery Neolithic: Phase A (PPNA), 211 Phase B (PPNB), 184, 191 prisoners of war, 120, 158–162, 165, 169–172, 174–175, 178 protection rackets, 240–243, 245, 250, 254 protein, 84, 109 animal sources of, 18, 50, 53, 64, 71, 77, 82, 94 cooking’s effect on, 40 fertility diminished by, 114 vegetable sources of, 18, 63 protozoa, 104, 105–106 pruning, 70 puberty, 114 pulses, 11, 41, 73 pyrophytes, 38, 42 Qin Dynasty, xiv, xiv, 5, 14 barbarians during, 225, 250 conscription in, 147 population density during, 124 slavery during, 166 strong governance during, 30, 166, 210 written records during, 145–146 Qing Dynasty, 250 quail, 39 quarantines, 98–99, 194 quarrying, 29, 165, 170, 176, 181, 186, 192 quinoa, 268 n. 19 radioactivity, 2, 19 rainbow trout, 81 rainfall, 187, 199 irrigation complementing, 46 in Mesopotamia, 59–60, 122, 200, 211 states dependent on, 32, 125, 206 taxation and, 146. See also drought; floods rats, 73, 79–80, 82, 104, 105 rattan, 57 red deer, 94 Redman, Charles, 264–265 n. 17 reducciones, 25 reeds, 13, 50, 54, 57, 127, 128 reindeer, 77, 101 religion, 7 resettlement, 29, 124, 147, 153, 158, 231 in China, 166 in Egypt, 176– 177 in Mesopotamia, 176–179 multispecies, 18, 73, 84, 96–113 records lacking for, 16, 178 riboflavin, 109 rice, 12, 23, 55, 87 irrigated, 22, 128, 129, 133, 134 taxation of, 131 Richardson, Seth, 154–155, 215, 272 n. 36 rickets, 109 Rift Valley, 41 Rim-anum, 160 roads, 29, 54 rodents, 41, 75, 96, 111 Roma (Gypsies), 257–258 n. 5 Roman Empire, xiv, xiv, 35, 245, 252, 253 boundaries of, 135, 219, 226, 229 decline of, 148, 210, 222 diet in, 136, 229 epidemics in, 99, 193, 195 grain imported by, 134, 234 literacy in, 148 self-nomadization in, 233, 234 slavery in, 29, 156–157, 173, 174, 180 war glorified in, 172–173 Roman Republic, xiv, xiv, 24, 235–236, 250 Celts vs., 230, 242, 245 hierarchy in, 9, 227, 230 slavery in, 168, 169–170 timber shortages in, 197 root vegetables, 21–22, 33, 65, 135 r plants, 67 ruffed grouse, 38 rust, 96, 110, 111 rye, 73 sacrifices, 98 Sahlins, Marshall, 152 sailing ships, 1 St. Anthony’s Fire, 111 salinization, 31, 97, 121, 195, 200–201, 212, 232 salmon, 53 Santos-Granaros, Fernando, 155 Sargon II, king of Assyria, 99, 265 n. 5 schistosomiasis, 102 Scythians, 235, 238–239 seals, 50 “sea people,” 165, 216, 224, 228, 245, 252 secondary primitivism, 232 sedentism, x, x, 18, 60, 72, 86, 96, 136, 155, 217, 230, 244, 248 agriculture predated by, xi, xi, 46 beginnings of, 3, 5 crowding caused by, xii, xii, 1, 81, 83, 85, 100, 102, 107 diseases linked to, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110 domestication preceded by, xi, xi, 46, 100 fertility rates linked to, 113–114 among hunter-gatherers, 64, 95 idealization of, 8 impermanence of, 184, 188, 202, 214 in Mesopotamia, 10, 50, 56, 61, 64, 127 nomadism and, 212, 231 resistance to, 8 resources for, 54, 55, 56, 59, 125, 192, 196 without state formation, 7, 117, 118 traditional view of, 7, 8–9, 10, 44, 46, 47, 112 vulnerability of, 33–34, 64, 156, 184, 188–189, 222–224, 237–242, 249–252, 255 sedges, 50, 57, 65, 127 seeds, 11, 17, 38, 49, 63, 68, 70, 112 cooking of, 41 in flood-retreat agriculture, 66 of legumes, 132 storage of, 73, 96 vulnerability of, 111 of wild grain, 74 Seeing Like a State (Scott), xi, xi Sennacherib, king of Assyria, 99 sexual dimorphism, 20, 80, 85 shad, 53, 90 Shang, Yang, 145–146 Shang Dynasty, 144 sheep, 8, 11–12, 127, 171, 226 brain evolution in, 80–81 crowding and diseases of, 101, 103, 104 diet of, 50, 77–78 domestication of, 18, 20, 44, 63, 71, 76, 77, 80, 84, 87, 169, 180 sexual dimorphism in, 20, 80 shellfish, 33, 51, 56, 70, 90, 94, 128 Sherratt, 261 n. 24 Shipman, Pat, 259 n. 7 Sicily, 29 sickles, 89 siltation, 19, 23, 31, 195, 198–199, 200, 201, 212 silver, 125, 170, 172, 192, 243, 245 silver fox, 79, 82 Sima, Qian, 145–146 Simon, Herbert, 187 Sioux, 8 Sixth Extinction, The (Kolbert), xii, xii slash-and-burn cultivation. See swidden cultivation slavery, slaves: in ancient Greece, 29, 156, 157, 168, 174, 175 Aristotle’s view of, 29, 156, 180, 182, 221 barbarians as, 32, 35, 226 in China, 166–167 communal, 29 diseases afflicting, 107 documentation of, 16, 29, 142, 144, 160–161, 174, 178, 247 as domestication, xii, xii–xiii, 12, 166–167 in Egypt, 29, 164–165, 168, 173 escaped, 161–162, 204, 232, 233, 256 hierarchy of, 169 labor by, 121, 170, 176 in Mesopotamia, 29–30, 157–158, 160, 168, 173–179, 243 modern, 155–156, 218, 254 nourishment of, 134, 160 number of, 155–157, 159–160 prestate, 155, 180, 202 rebellions by, 29–30, 168 in Roman Empire, 29, 156–157, 173, 174, 180 as spoils of war, 153, 158–159, 165, 172–173, 175, 182, 238 state formation dependent on, 155–156, 170–171 types of, 152–153, 155, 156, 158, 176–179 women as, 164, 168–169, 181 slugs, 111 Small, David, 273 n. 4 smallpox, 99, 102, 107 smelt, 53 Smith, Adam, 92 snails, 94, 111 social contract, 27 social Darwinism, 9 soil depletion, 184, 200–201, 212 South Africa, 37 Southeast Asia: Chinese trade links to, 246–247 migration to, 61 military campaigns in, 171, 172, 178 “sea gypsies” of, 239 slavery in, 156, 254, 255 state fragility in, 15–16, 189–190 wetlands in, 56 soybeans, 22, 129 Spain, 151 sparrows, 19, 73, 76, 78 Sparta, 29, 30, 143, 154, 156, 157, 178 Spencer, Herbert, 9 Spengler, Oswald, 9 sperm whale, 53 squirrels, 69 Srivijaya, 57, 202 standardization, 120, 144, 145–146, 157 starch, 40, 63, 90, 94, 128, 129 state landscaping, 23 statuary pigeon, 79 Steinkeller, Piotr, 271 n. 24 Straits of Melaka, 266 n. 14 Sulgi, king of Ur, 228 Sumatra, 57, 202 Sumer, xiii, xiii, 14 “dark age” in, 214 misconceptions of, 47 prisoners of war in, 175, 178 slavery in, 157–158 state formation in, 119 written records in, 141–143 sumptuary laws, 208 surveying, 21, 131, 139, 141, 142, 146 Susa, 242 swallows, 105 swidden cultivation, 22, 33, 135–136, 220, 253 banning of, 23, 153 intermittency of, 110 landscape shaped by, 67 raiding linked to, 237, 244, 249 stigmatizing of, 126–127 swine flu, 105 Syria, 43, 239 Taiwan, 61 Tamelane, 254 Tang Dynasty, 235–236, 242, 251, 252 taro, 129 taxes, 14, 35, 227, 240, 244 administration of, 13, 118, 131, 132–133, 139–140, 142, 207 in ancient Greece and Rome, 154, 175, 233 on cereal grains, xiii, xiii, 21–24, 33, 56, 116, 118, 123, 128–134, 140–141, 211, 212 in China, 131, 134–135, 138, 146–147, 221–222, 233 difficulties of, 135–136 on land, 146 in Mesopotamia, 7, 134, 142–143, 207, 228–229 resistance to, 32, 148, 194, 211, 215, 217, 232, 234 uncollected, 153 taxonomy, 89 teeth, 37, 41, 42, 84–85, 86, 108 teosinte, 75 Teotihuacan, 56 termites, 69 Teutoburg Forest, Battle of, 229 textiles, 33, 34, 144, 192, 226, 245 in Mesopotamia, 29, 157, 159 Thailand, 156 threshability, 11, 17, 74 Thucydides, 99, 154, 172, 204, 252 ticks, 19, 73 timber, 34, 54, 125–126, 170, 176, 192, 196–197, 243 tin, 125, 192, 245 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 92, 180 Totila, king of the Ostrogoths, 233–234 trachoma, 102 tractability, 80 transplantation, 70 trout, 81 tuberculosis, 99 tubers, 21–22, 33, 65, 129, 130, 135 turkey, 38 Turkey, 43 turtlebacks, 50, 128 turtles, 49, 50, 89, 94 tusi system, 236 typhoid fever, 102, 193 typhus, 99, 193 Ubaid Period, xiii, xiii, 49 Ugarit, 239 Uighurs, 242, 250, 251 Ukraine, 184 Umma, 44, 121, 142–143 unfree labor, xiv, xiv, 29, 120, 152–153, 157, 176, 178–180. See also slavery, slaves U.S. Civil War, 203–204 Ur, 44, 49, 119, 140, 179, 208 Ur III Dynasty, 120, 141, 161, 215 collapse of, 185, 214–215 salinization during, 201 slavery during, 162 strength and stability of, 23–24, 138, 143, 145, 147, 185, 210 taxation during, 134 Uruk, 12, 44, 118, 140, 176, 179, 209 laborers in, 65, 159, 160 population of, 100, 142, 159 as trade hub, 192, 243 walls surrounding, 119, 120 Uruk period, xiv, xiv, 154, 161 Vico, Giambattista, 9 Vikings, 239, 254 viruses, 102, 104, 111, 112 walls: in China, 30, 138, 225, 233 construction of, 29, 157, 203 earliest, 226, 228 functions of, 30, 138–139, 235 statehood signified by, 7, 23, 118, 119, 137–138, 202, 204 Warring States period, 140, 144–145, 203 water buffalo, 77 water lily, 50 water power, 1 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 92 weaving, 29, 41 Weber, Max, 172 weeding, 11, 19, 65–66, 70, 90 weevils, 19, 111 weights and measures, 120, 132, 145– 146, 157 weirs, 41, 66, 88 Wengrow, David, 192 wetlands, 44, 196, 200 diversity of, 24, 49, 50, 53, 56, 89, 127 reengineering of, 56 sedentism in, 10, 47, 52, 54, 125, 127 state formation incompatible with, 57, 127–128, 129 wheat, 12, 17, 23, 74, 87, 110, 131, 206 human settlement aided by, 21, 55 in Mesopotamia, 71, 91, 128 nutritional value of, 11, 109, 129 price of, 54, 130 salt intolerance of, 200 seasonality of, 90, 91 types of, 73, 75 whooping cough, 106–107 wild asses, 52 wine, 134, 178–179, 245 wool, 18, 29, 76 Wrangharn, Richard, 42 writing, 139–141, 144–145, 148–149 cuneiform, 13, 24, 141, 143, 161, 176 Xian tombs, 186 Xiongnu, 225, 235, 241–242, 250, 252 Yoffee, Norman, 185, 187 Younger Dryas period, 60, 61, 94, 184, 188, 211 Yuan Dynasty, 222, 250, 252 yuca, 21 Zagros Mountains, 176, 242 Zeder, Melinda, 58–59 Zhou Dynasty, 229 zoonoses, 84, 103–105, 106