Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The world’s population in 10,000 BCE, according to one careful estimate, was roughly 4 million.

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.”

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.34

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.

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?