Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

Women in grain villages had characteristic bent-under toes and deformed knees that came from long hours kneeling and rocking back and forth grinding grain.

The analogies are potentially far-reaching. One might argue that the spread of sedentism transformed Homo sapiens into far more of a herd animal than previously.

But this aggregation was not a one-species herd but an aggregation of many mammalian herds who shared pathogens and generated entirely new zoonotic diseases by the mere fact of being assembled around the domus for the first time.

We were all, one might say, crowded onto the same ark, sharing its microenvironment, sharing our germs and parasites, breathing its air.

Thus declining tooth size, facial shortening, a reduction in stature and skeletal robustness and less sexual dimorphism were evolutionary effects that had a far longer history than the Neolithic alone.

tooth-size reduction, and shortening of face and jaws and asks pointedly whether there might be a “distinctive syndrome” of domestication arising from the increasingly common environment that they share.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling.

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.

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.

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.

They understood that long-distance travelers, traders, and soldiers were likely carriers of disease.

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.

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.

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 relative immobility of sedentary humans and livestock and their wastes permits repeated infection with the same varieties of parasites.

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.

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.

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.

The literal meaning of “parasite,” from the original Greek root, is “beside the grain.”

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 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.

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,

diversity of foods. How, despite its fragility, the domus module of fixed-field agriculture became a hegemonic, agro-ecological and demographic bulldozer

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.

Nonsedentary populations typically limit their reproduction deliberately.

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.

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.

“Their waterways served less as irrigation canals than as transportation routes.”

it seems clear that urbanism, thanks to wetland abundance, was more persistent, durable, and resilient in the alluvium than anywhere else.

But there was no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population.

I am inclined to see “stateness” as a more-or-less proposition rather than strictly either/or.

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.

I propose to privilege those that point to territoriality and a specialized state apparatus: walls, tax collection, and officials.

specialist scribal class, soldiers (full-time?) with armor, and efforts at standardizing weights and measures.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ibn Khaldun noted that the Arabs could conquer lands that were flat but were stymied by mountains and ravines.

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.

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.

The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations.

Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.