The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

People who lived in cities often came from far away.

What makes these cities strange, at least to us, is largely what isn’t there. This is especially true of technology,

the largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia – with its many technical and logistical advantages – but in Mesoamerica,

which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy.

why did so many end up living in the same plac...

Ecological factors often played a role in the formation of cities,

At least two environmental changes were at work here. The first concerns rivers.

Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.

Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds.18 Peasantries, on the other hand, were a later, secondary development.

These new findings show that archaeologists still have much to find out about the distribution of the world’s first cities. They also indicate how much older those cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation.

the countries around the Black Sea

these settlements, often referred to as ‘mega-sites’ – with their modern names of Taljanky, Maidenetske, Nebelivka and so on – dated to the early and middle centuries of the fourth millennium BC, which meant that some existed even before the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia. They were also larger in area.

Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky? The answer is largely political.

No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration – or indeed, any form of ruling class. In other words, these enormous settlements had all the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a ‘simple’, not a ‘complex’ society.

why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?

The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions

appear to have been born of ecological opportunism in the middle phase of the Holocene.

The biggest currently known – Taljanky – extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic centre; no equivalent to Uruk’s raised public district called Eanna (‘House of Heaven’) or the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro.

the mega-sites were much like most other cities, neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, but somewhere in between.

We should also consider if the inhabitants of the mega-sites consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation. This is consistent with archaeological studies of their economy, which suggest a pattern of small-scale gardening, often taking place within the bounds of the settlement, combined with the keeping of livestock, cultivation of orchards, and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. The diversity is actually remarkable, as is its sustainability.

A surplus was definitely produced, and with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things.

It’s as if every household was an artists’ collective which invented its own unique aesthetic style.

female figurines of clay.

how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan?

Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision-making.35 This would have to mean that members of individual households – or at least, their neighbourhood representatives – shared a conceptual framework for the settlement as a whole.

What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.

Unlike the Ukrainian mega-sites, or the Bronze Age cities of the Indus valley to which we’ll turn shortly, Mesopotamia was already part of modern memory before any archaeologist put a spade into one of its ancient mounds.42 Anyone who had read the Bible knew about the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria;

the Sumerians,

confirmed an expected association of ancient Mesopotamia with empire and monarchy. The Sumerians, at least on first sighting, seemed no exception.

modern archaeology and epigraphy has been to redraw this picture entirely: to show that Mesopotamia was never, in fact, an eternal ‘land of kings’. The real story is far more complicated.

The earliest Mesopotamian cities – those of the fourth and early third millennia BC – present no clear evidence for monarchy at all.

the ancient building blocks of its urban society – begin considerably before this ‘Early Dynastic’ period.

corvée. This refers to obligatory labour on civic projects

exacted from free citizens on a seasonal basis, and it has always been assumed to be a form of tax extracted by powerful rulers:

Everyone had to do corvée. Even the most powerful Mesopotamian rulers of later periods had to heave a basket of clay to the construction site of an important temple.

Times of labour mobilization were thus seen as moments of absolute equality before the gods – when even slaves might be placed on an equal footing to their masters – as well as times when the imaginary city became real,

The term used by modern scholars for this general state of affairs is ‘primitive democracy’. It’s not a very good term, since there’s no particular reason to think any of these institutions were in any way crude or unsophisticated.

The Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James once said of fifth-century Athens that ‘every cook can govern’. In Mesopotamia, or at least in many parts of it, it seems this was literally true: being a manual labourer did not exclude one from direct participation in law and politics.

In terms of day-to-day affairs, city dwellers (even under monarchies) largely governed themselves, presumably much as they had before kings appeared on the scene to begin with.

So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely.

What Uruk is really famous for is writing.

pedagogical techniques that quickly became so essential to this particular form of urban life that they remain with us to this day. To get a sense of how pervasive some of these innovations were, consider that just about anyone reading this book is likely to have first learned to read in classrooms, sitting in rows opposite a teacher, who follows a standard curriculum. This rather stern way of learning was itself a Sumerian invention, one now to be found in virtually every corner of our world.

Some details of the way these Sumerian temples organized themselves are still with us, including the quantification of human labour into standard workloads and units of time.

Sumerian officials counted all sorts of things – including days, months and years – using a sexagesimal (base-60) system from which ultimately derives (via many and varied

pathways of transmission) our own system of time-reckoning.69 In their bookkeeping records we find the ancient seedbeds of modern in...

There is no reason to think that monarchy – ceremonial or otherwise – played any significant role in the earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia. Quite the opposite, in fact.

what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guaranteeing purity and quality control.

we cannot really understand the rise of what we have come to call ‘the state’ – and specifically of aristocracies and monarchies – except in the larger context of that counter-reaction.

Arslantepe we see exactly the kind of physical infrastructure (forts, storehouses) we might expect from a society dominated by some sort of warrior aristocracy. Here we have the very beginnings of an aristocratic ethos with a long afterlife and some wide ramifications in the history of Eurasia

We are witnessing the first known emergence of what Hector Munro Chadwick famously called ‘heroic societies’ and, moreover, these societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.