The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

In summary, the transition from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate period was not so much a shift from ‘order’ to ‘chaos’ – as Egyptological orthodoxy once had it – as a swing from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘charismatic politics’ as different ways of framing the exercise of power.

In ancient Egypt, as so often in history, significant political accomplishments occur in precisely those periods (the so-called ‘dark ages’) that get dismissed or overlooked because no one was building grandiose monuments in stone.

At this point it should be easy enough to understand why ancient Egypt is so regularly held out as the paradigmatic example of state formation.

it’s the only case from a suitably distant phase of history that perfectly fits the model of what should have happened.

It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’;

In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration.

Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong.

In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters.

Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.

We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example).

This, however, raises the interesting question of where and when such technologies did first arise, and for what reason. Here there’s some surprising new evidence too. Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities.

What you find, in the fifth millennium BC, is the gradual disappearance from village life of most outward signs of difference or individuality, as administrative tools and other new media technologies spread across a large swathe of the Middle East.

In fact this entire period, lasting around 1,000 years (archaeologists call it the ‘Ubaid, after the site of Tell al-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq), was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction – in other words, to prevent the emergence of obvious differences in status, both within and between villages. Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.

Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.

The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok. This is not the place to outline a history of money and debt131 – only to note that it’s no coincidence that societies like those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia were, simultaneously, commercial and bureaucratic.

Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence.

What’s important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity.

As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.

the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.

how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized.

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.

Much like the search for the ‘origins of inequality’, seeking the origins of the state is little more than chasing a phantasm.

The fact that our planet is, at the present time, almost entirely covered by states obviously makes it easy to write as if such an outcome was inevitable. Yet our present situation regularly leads people to make ‘scientific’ assumptions about how we got here that have almost nothing to do with the actual data.

For example, it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government – military, administrative and judicial – pass into the hands of full-time specialists.

However, almost none of the regimes we’ve been considering in this chapter were actually staffed by full-time specialists. Most obviously, none seem to have had a standing army. Warfare was largely a business for the agricultural off-season. Priests and judges rarely worked full-time either; in fact, most government institutions in Old Kingdom Egypt, Shang China, Early Dynastic Mesopotamia or for that matter classical Athens were staffed by a rotating workforce whose members had other lives as managers of rural estates, traders, builders or any number of different occupations.

It’s not clear to what degree many of these ‘early states’ were themselves largely seasonal phenomena

This doesn’t mean these kingdoms weren’t real: they were capable of mobilizing, or for that matter killing and maiming, thousands of human beings. It just means that their reality was, in effect, sporadic. They appeared and then dissolved away.

play farming

play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well?

possible that both these processes, when they did happen, were ultimately driven by something else, such as the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women’s power within the household.

cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power

If ‘the state’ means

anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively...

the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter, he argued, we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does’.138 We can now see that these points apply just as forcefully to ancient political regimes as they do to modern ones – if not more so.

what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins.

There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart.

Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

Sacrifice, as we’ve seen, is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach – whether that be an ideal of world order, the Mandate of Heaven or blessings from insatiable gods. Is it any wonder that in some circles the very idea of ‘civilization’ has fallen into disrepute? Something very basic has gone wrong here.

Cities, in turn, were thought to imply states. But as we’ve seen, that is not the case historically, or even etymologically.

If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.

such a history might well begin with those geographically expansive ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’ that archaeologists can now trace back into periods far earlier than kingdoms or empires, or even cities.

As we’ve been showing throughout this book, in all parts of the world small communities formed civilizations in that true sense of extended moral communities.

A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization.

What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

Whatever was happening during the Bronze Age on Crete, the largest and most southerly of the Aegean islands, it clearly doesn’t quite fit the scholarly playbook of ‘state formation’.

The problem is that, unlike palatial societies of roughly the same age – such as those of Zimri-Lim at Mari on the Syrian Euphrates, or in Hittite Anatolia to the north, or Egypt – there is simply no clear evidence of monarchy on Minoan Crete.

Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant to this conclusion?

All this unfolds to the undulating rhythms of the sea, the eternal backdrop to this garden of life, and all with a remarkable absence of ‘politics’, in our sense, or what Dempsey calls the ‘self-perpetuating, power-hungry ego’. What these scenes celebrate, as he eloquently puts it, is quite the opposite of politics: it is the ‘ritually induced release from individuality, and an ecstasy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, “standing beyond oneself”) – a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies’. There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players. Crete of the palaces was the realm of Homo ludens. Or perhaps, better said, Femina ludens – not to mention Femina potens.155

The process usually called ‘state formation’ can in fact mean a bewildering number of very different things.

there seem to be both logical and historical constraints on the variety of ways in which power can expand its scope; these limits are the basis of our ‘three principles’ of sovereignty, administration and competitive politics.