Origin Story, page 21
But population growth was never steady. Everywhere, it was interrupted by catastrophes. Disease, famine, war, and death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—flourished in the agrarian era. As mentioned earlier, unlike nomadic camps, villages accumulated waste and attracted vermin, so diseases spread fast. Where new diseases appeared—infections for which people had no immunity, such as smallpox—it was not uncommon for half the population to die. Farmers were also more vulnerable to famine than foragers were, because they relied on so few crops. When food began to run out, weeds, acorns, and tree bark could support people only for so long, and the very young and very old suffered most and died first. As populations grew, villages fought over land, water, and other resources. Their battles summoned the Third Horseman, war, who could be even more ruinous than disease and famine and often worked alongside them. Humans had always fought, but in farming societies more people were involved, and weapons became more lethal as fighters acquired metal spears, chariots, and siege engines. The Fourth Horseman, death, rode behind the other three.
For better or worse, human history had entered a more dynamic era in which change was the one constant. As human communities grew in numbers, size, and complexity, they laid the foundations for the agrarian civilizations that have dominated the past five thousand years of human history.
CHAPTER 9
Agrarian Civilizations
In those days the dwellings of Agade were filled with gold,
its bright-shining houses were filled with silver,
into its granaries were brought copper, tin, slabs of lapis lazuli, its silos bulged…
its quays where the boats docked were all bustle…
its walls reached skyward like a mountain…
the gates—like the Tigris emptying its water into the sea,
holy Inanna opened its gates.
—SUMERIAN POEM, TRANSLATED BY S. N. KRAMER
Farming villages and their populations provided most of the human and material resources for the agrarian civilizations that have dominated the past five thousand years of human history. Look behind the imperial armies and cities, the temples and pyramids, the trade caravans and shipping fleets, the literature and art, the philosophies and religions of agrarian civilizations, and you will find, in the background, often far from the heartlands, thousands of farming communities, as well as a large and even poorer population of vagrants and the dispossessed, many of whom were slaves. People from these underclasses produced most of the grains and meat, many of the linens and silks, and much of the labor (both free and unfree) needed by the great cities. Their produce and labor paid for the causeways and palaces and temples and the silks, wines, and jewelry of the rich, while their men and horses served in the armies. Agrarian civilizations mobilized the human and material wealth and the energy produced by farming villages to build social structures much more awesome and complex than any earlier human communities. Like all living organisms, they mobilized information, too, because more information gave them access to more energy and more resources.
The appearance of agrarian civilizations represents another threshold of increasing complexity. However, agrarian civilizations were built on foundations created by the evolution of farming communities over several millennia, so we will treat their appearance not as an entirely new threshold but as a second phase of the threshold that gave us agriculture.
To understand the emergence of agrarian civilizations, we will focus not on the histories of particular civilizations but rather on the questions we have posed throughout our modern origin story: What were the Goldilocks conditions for this new form of complexity? What were the new emergent properties of agrarian civilizations? And what were the flows of energy that sustained those new properties?
Surpluses, Hierarchies, and a Division of Labor
Despite famines, diseases, and wars, farming villages multiplied and spread throughout the Holocene because most years they produced more than they needed. They turned energy from sunlight into surplus wealth. This is very different from foraging societies, which stored knowledge but rarely felt any need to store surplus goods because the food and raw materials they needed were all around them. Why work as a farmer, asked modern foragers in the Kalahari Desert, when there are so many mongongo nuts to eat?1 In foraging societies, the slow accumulation of knowledge encouraged migration into new environments rather than the accumulation of material goods. By contrast, farming societies had to store goods, and in large quantities, because many plants and animals were harvested over just a few weeks but eaten or processed over a year or more. So all farming communities had households, barns, sheds, and fields full of produce waiting to be consumed.
As productivity increased, surpluses began to exceed the annual needs of those who produced them. Surplus people, surplus food, surplus goods, and surplus energy represented new forms of wealth, which raised the question: Who was going to control (and enjoy) this wealth? Over time, surplus wealth would be mobilized by small but powerful minorities, and the structures they built to mobilize surplus wealth, often using crude forms of coercion, would form the muscles and sinews of agrarian civilizations.
Surplus wealth meant surplus people. As productivity rose, not everyone needed to farm, so new social roles appeared. Many people became vagrants or slaves, but other nonfarmers ended up controlling much of society’s surplus wealth because they could specialize in useful social roles. They could become full-time priests or potters or soldiers or philosophers or rulers. Specialists became expert at their limited roles. But the division of labor also created new forms of dependence. As social roles multiplied, human societies, like the first metazoans, became more networked, more differentiated, more interdependent, and more complex. And new linking structures arose, the social equivalents of skeletons, muscles, and nervous systems.
Specialists were generally more dependent on the linking structures than farmers, who could usually feed themselves. Archaeologists can track the evolution of a division of labor. In Mesopotamia, pottery provides the classic case study. The earliest Mesopotamian pots are simple and idiosyncratic, and most were probably made in ordinary farming households. But from about six thousand years ago, we find special workshops with potter’s wheels. Potters produced large quantities of standardized bowls, plates, and jugs and sold them over wide areas. These wares look like the work of full-time professionals who had invested in specialist equipment and long apprenticeships. Specialization encouraged new skills and techniques, so it was both a measure and a driver of technological change. For example, potters needed furnaces to fire their pots, and over time they built more efficient furnaces that operated at higher temperatures and yielded better finishes. But better furnaces were just what was needed to separate copper, tin, or iron from the ores in which they were embedded so the metals could be molded, bent, or hammered into household goods, ornaments, and weapons. Coppersmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, and blacksmiths all used technologies pioneered by professional potters.
As surpluses grew, specializations multiplied. Five thousand years ago, in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, someone compiled a list of a hundred different special roles, the Standard Professions List. It was obviously important and widely known, because similar lists were copied by trainee scribes for many centuries. Organized hierarchically, the list includes kings and courtiers, priests, tax collectors and scribes, silver workers and potters, and even entertainers such as snake charmers. Potters and snake charmers, unlike farmers, did not produce food or leather or fibers, so they fed and clothed themselves and their families by exchanging their products and services for food and other necessities. This is why trade and markets and accounting devices such as coins and writing were as vital to complex societies as arteries and veins are to human bodies. They made it possible to transfer objects and the energy flows they represented, from person to person and from group to group. Even the religious specialists we describe as priests had to trade their spiritual services for food and other necessities. Where we find temples, we also find donations and gifts.
The degree of specialization was limited by the productivity of agriculture and by the number of extra people that each farmer could feed. In most agrarian civilizations it took about ten farmers to support one nonfarmer. That is why most people had to farm. Even in the first cities, most people grew crops in their backyards or outside the city walls. But while farmers made up most of the population and provided most of society’s resources, specialists became increasingly important as societies became more interdependent. Farmers began to buy trinkets or farm tools and found they had to deal with peddlers, tax collectors, landlords, and overseers. Various different specialists moved goods and resources between towns and cities, produced the coins used in markets and the metal plows and swords used by farmers and soldiers, kept the accounts, policed the laws, prayed to the gods on everyone’s behalf, or organized and ruled others. Specialists provided the struts and bracing for agrarian civilizations. That’s why, eventually, they ended up organizing and dominating the rest of society.
As specialization increased, so did inequality. The earliest farming communities were reasonably egalitarian, even when they exceeded the ancient community maximum of 150 to 200 people. The Neolithic town of Çatalhüyük (in modern-day Turkey) flourished eight to nine thousand years ago, and it shows little variation in the size of domestic dwellings, even though its population may have reached several thousand. Eventually, however, we start finding wealthy minorities, and more and more of them. To take one random example: There is a six-thousand-year-old burial site near Varna on the Black Sea that contains more than two hundred tombs. Many of the dead were buried with nothing or with just a few simple objects, but about 10 percent of the graves held much more; one contained over a thousand objects, most of them made of gold, including bracelets, copper axes, and even a penis sheath.2 This is a very familiar triangle of wealth, with an elite population of about 10 percent and one person at the very top, while most people lived close to subsistence. When archaeologists find small children buried with great wealth, they can be sure that there are not just hierarchies but hierarchies that cross generations, because children could not have attained high status on their own. These are signs of aristocracies and castes. Large building projects, such as palaces and pyramids and ziggurats and temples, also tell us that someone had the power to organize the labor of many others.
As gradients of power and privilege steepened, new social struts were needed to sustain them. Someone had to police markets, punish pickpockets and thieves, count tax payments, and organize peasants, vagrants, and slaves into the work gangs that built palaces and maintained canals. Complex societies also needed religious specialists to ensure that their gods protected them from disease and provided plenty of rainfall. When these structures failed, everyone was affected, and that is why most of the time, even those at the bottom of the heap usually obeyed their overlords.
Anthropologists have studied the emergence of hierarchies in modern small-scale societies, such as those of Melanesia in the western Pacific. Here, powerful figures, known to anthropologists as big men or chiefs, built their power on respect and the loyal support of family, allies, and followers. But their power was always precarious. If they failed to distribute enough wealth and privilege to maintain the loyalty of their followers, they could swiftly lose their power, their wealth, and sometimes their lives. Why follow someone who cannot coerce you and from whom you receive no benefits?
Eventually, in larger societies, there appeared much more powerful leaders; they ruled over hundreds of thousands of people and controlled such huge flows of wealth that they and their allies could buy the muscle needed to impose their will by force when necessary. Indeed, the use of force to extract labor or produce or wealth became ubiquitous in agrarian civilizations. That is why slavery and forced labor were common in agrarian civilizations. And the methods used to extract wealth and labor from peasants show that their condition was often little better than that of slaves. A wonderful document from Egypt, written late in the second millennium BCE, gives some insight into the methods routinely used to make peasants surrender surplus resources.3 The author, a scribe, explains why it is good to be a scribe. Think of the hard labor of a peasant, the long hours spent working the fields in the heat and cold or looking after livestock or mending farming equipment and buildings. And then imagine what can happen when the tax collectors turn up with armed bodyguards.
One says [to the peasant]: “Give grain.” “There is none” [he says]. He is beaten savagely. He is bound, thrown in the well, submerged head down. His wife is bound in his presence. His children are in fetters. His neighbors abandon them and flee.
There is surely some caricature here, but we have plenty of evidence that extortionate methods were used in all agrarian civilizations to maintain order and to extract labor and resources from the majority of the population.
We generally refer to power structures capable of exerting this sort of control over extensive areas as states. States emerged in societies that were populous and wealthy enough to have towns and cities as well as large numbers of farming villages and plenty of surplus labor that could staff and pay for armies and bureaucracies.
From Towns to Cities and Rulers: Mobilization and a New Trophic Level
As populations and surpluses grew, so did the size of the largest human communities. And communities as well as people began to specialize. Some villages grew and acquired new roles because they were near trade routes, controlled strategic river crossings, held markets that attracted buyers and sellers from other villages, or were near important religious sites. Çatalhüyük in southern Anatolia was surrounded by good farming land, but it also had obsidian, the hard volcanic glass used to make the finest and sharpest Neolithic blades. Its inhabitants may have traded obsidian as far as Mesopotamia. Jericho, one of the oldest sites of continuous settlement anywhere in the world, was first settled in Natufian times because it had a well that never ran dry. By nine thousand years ago, Jericho had evolved into a town of perhaps three thousand people.
As towns grew, some offered new services, jobs, and goods. More people were lured to them, and over time they acquired power over the villages and towns in their hinterlands. By five thousand years ago, some large towns had turned into cities, huge, diverse communities supported by surrounding towns and villages and with large concentrations of specialists. The diversity of skills, jobs, goods, and people found in cities explains why they became technological, commercial, and political dynamos in all agrarian civilizations and why they sucked people in from the surrounding countryside.
The appearance of cities and states marks a fundamental transformation in human societies.
Traditional states were very different from modern states. Above all, they lacked the communication technologies and bureaucracies that allow modern states to reach into the lives of all their citizens. Traditional rulers could exert immense force locally, but it could take weeks or months to send an order to outlying provinces and as much time again to learn the outcome. So, away from the major population centers, the power of rulers depended on loose, hierarchical networks of local lords, who often governed their own territories as more or less independent fiefdoms. Nevertheless, the first states were a new phenomenon in human history. They all assumed the right to mobilize wealth from farming communities, towns, and cities in return for some degree of protection. As the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (1651), the right to distribute resources “belongeth in all kinds of Common-wealth, to the Soveraign power. For where there is no Common-wealth, there is… a perpetual warre of every man against his neighbor.” Traditional elites owed their power, in part, to the intrinsic weakness and isolation of traditional farming communities. As Karl Marx noted, peasants had no more unity than potatoes in a sack.4 That made them vulnerable to predation, because even weak rulers could use small numbers of enforcers to impose their will, village by village. This uneven balance of power explains why, for many thousands of years, small groups of rulers and officials successfully dominated much larger populations of farmers.
The history of the first cities, the first states, and the first agrarian civilizations is best known in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia. Here, a large cluster of cities emerged quite rapidly about fifty-five hundred years ago. The southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk is often described as the first city in human history. It was a port on the Euphrates River. Like most Mesopotamian cities, it depended on complex, well-managed irrigation systems fed by the major rivers. But it also bordered the swamps of the southern river delta. Indeed, it may have grown in a period of drying climates, which forced people from outlying villages to migrate into the cities with their well-maintained irrigation systems. Fifty-five hundred years ago, Uruk had a population of ten thousand people living on opposite banks of the river Euphrates. Two hundred years after that, it probably had as many as fifty thousand inhabitants living in an area of about two and a half square kilometers.5 At some point, the river Euphrates shifted its course and began to run around the edge of the city.
A city of fifty thousand people may not sound impressive today. But in its time, Uruk was a monster, perhaps the largest settled community that had ever existed in human history. It had two big temple complexes. That means there must have been powerful priests or kings who could mobilize the labor of thousands of people, many of them slaves. Uruk had workshops that made objects of great beauty, and it had storehouses for grain and precious goods. Accounts from a few hundred years later give us some idea of what you might have seen if you had visited Uruk when it was the capital city of King Gilgamesh, the hero of the first written epic. There would have been large temple complexes and royal palaces. You would have seen gardens and narrow streets and alleyways with workshops, inns, and shrines. The city was surrounded by a wall of burned brick, and canals led to the harbor and nearby farmlands. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the king says: “One third of the whole is city, one third is garden, and one third is field, with the precinct of the goddess Ishtar.” Archaeologists have found Uruk-style goods as far afield as Anatolia and Egypt, which suggests that Uruk’s merchants were trading over a large area.
