What we can now suggest, in light of these wider considerations, is that such carefully co-ordinated ritual theatres, often laid out with geometrical precision, were exactly the kinds of places where exclusive claims to rights over property – together with strict demands for unquestioning obedience – were likely to be made, among otherwise free people. If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of
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