The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

For a long time, his notion of ‘heroic societies’ fell into a certain disfavour: there was a widespread assumption that such societies did not really exist but were, like the society represented in Homer’s Iliad, retroactively reconstructed in epic literature. But as archaeologists have more recently discovered, there is a very real pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior.

All these cultures were aristocracies, without any centralized authority or principle of sovereignty (or, maybe, some largely symbolic, formal one). Instead of a single centre, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. ‘Politics’, in such societies, was composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life.

all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing,

they also rejected commerce.

Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains,

further evidence that Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence

of ruling classes and managerial elites;

Let’s consider, for a moment, what archaeology tells us about wealth distribution at Mohenjo-daro. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no concentration of material wealth on the Upper Citadel. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Because of its lack of royal sculpture, or indeed other forms of monumental depiction, the Indus valley has been termed a ‘faceless civilization’.

The varna system is about as ‘unequal’ as any social system can possibly be, yet where one ranks within it has less to do with how many material goods one can pile up or lay claim to than with one’s relation to certain (polluting) substances – physical dirt and waste, but also bodily matter linked to birth, death and menstruation – and the people who handle them. All this creates serious problems for any contemporary scholar seeking to apply Gini coefficients or any other property-based measure of ‘inequality’ to the society in question.

Even the largest cities, like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, yield no evidence of spectacular sacrifices or feasts, no pictorial narratives of military prowess or celebrations of famous deeds, no sign of tournaments in which anyone vied over titles and treasures, no aristocratic burials.

Indus civilization wasn’t some kind of commercial or spiritual arcadia; nor was it an entirely peaceful society.96 But neither does it contain any evidence for charismatic authority figures: war leaders, lawgivers and the like.

Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley. Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense?

how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history:

But the important thing here is that even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe or Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote);

Contrasts between the expansion of Uruk and the Ukrainian mega-sites illustrate this point with particular clarity. Both appear to have developed an ethos of explicit egalitarianism – but it took strikingly different forms in each.

It’s important to stress that we are not arguing that the very first cities to appear in any region of the world were invariably founded on egalitarian principles

In each of the cases we’ve considered so far – Ukrainian mega-sites, Uruk Mesopotamia, the Indus valley – a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites. In short, archaeological research has shifted the burden of proof on to those theorists who claim causal connections between the origins of cities and the rise of stratified states, and whose claims now look increasingly hollow.

Overall, one might be forgiven for thinking that history was progressing uniformly in an authoritarian direction. And in the very long run it was; at least, by the time we have written histories, lords and kings and would-be world emperors have popped up almost everywhere (though civic institutions and independent cities never entirely go away).

Taosi fell into clearly distinct social classes. Commoner tombs were modest; elite tombs were full of hundreds of lacquered vessels, ceremonial jade axes and remains of extravagant pork feasts. Then suddenly, around 2000 BC, everything seems to change.

Here, on the banks of the Fen River, we might conceivably be in the presence of evidence for the world’s first documented social revolution,

Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized.

urban revolutions of the political kind – may well be a lot more common in human history than we tend to think.

we can no longer doubt that these existed.

the question of what sort of city Teotihuacan was, and how it was governed. Pose this question to a specialist in the study of Mesoamerican history or archaeology (as we often have done), and you’ll likely get the same reaction: a roll of the eyes and a resigned acknowledgement that there’s just something ‘weird’ about the place. Not merely because of its exceptional size, but because of its stubborn refusal to conform to expectations of how an early Mesoamerican city should have functioned.

All the evidence suggests that Teotihuacan had, at its height of its power, found a way to govern itself without overlords – as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan. Yet it did so with a very different technological foundation, and on an even larger scale.

the ‘standard package’ of Mesoamerican kingship, associated with ancient cities throughout the region

In Teotihuacan, all this seems to have been strikingly absent.

nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find

even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate – unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec, where this is a constant theme.

making all the figures in a given scene exactly the same size.

What we have, she argued, with highland Teotihuacan and the lowland Maya, is nothing less than a case of conscious cultural inversion – or what we’ve been calling schismogenesis – but this time on the scale of urban civilizations.

Teotihuacan, in Pasztory’s view, created a new tradition of art to express the ways in which its society was different from that of its contemporaries elsewhere in Mesoamerica.

If the visual arts of Teotihuacan celebrated anything, Pasztory insisted, then it was the community as a

whole and its collective values, which – over a period of some centuries – successfully prevented the emergence of ‘dynastic personality cults’.

The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines.

bring to the surface this neglected strand of Mesoamerican social history: one of urban republics, large-scale projects of social welfare, and indigenous forms of democracy that can be followed down to the time of the Spanish conquest and beyond.

History is also full of stories of adventurous travellers who either find themselves taken into some alien society and miraculously transformed there into kings or embodiments of sacred power:

Worldwide, a remarkably large percentage of dynastic histories begin precisely this way, with a man (it’s almost always a man) who mysteriously appears from somewhere far away.

these progenitors of Maya dynasties were originally members of groups that specialized in long-distance travel – traders, soldiers of fortune, missionaries or perhaps even spies – who, perhaps quite suddenly, found themselves elevated to royalty.

the images and records from places like Tikal tell us more about Maya concepts of royal power than they do about Teotihuacan itself, where not a shred of compelling evidence for the institution of kingship has yet been found. The ‘Mexican’ princes of the Maya lowlands, bedecked in regalia and seated on thrones, were engaging in exactly the sort of grandiose political gestures that had no place in their putative homeland.

But after AD 300, when the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was desecrated, their construction continued apace, until most of the city’s 100,000 or so residents were effectively living in ‘palatial’, or at least very comfortable, conditions.

In other words, few were deprived. More than that, many citizens enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own. Teotihuacan had indeed changed its course away from monarchy and aristocracy to become instead a ‘Tollan of the people’.

early Spanish accounts of the Mexican highlands provide some extraordinarily suggestive material – including descriptions of indigenous cities which, to European eyes, could only be understood as republics, or even democracies.

Cortés estimated the population of Tlaxcala and its rural dependencies at 150,000.

Also, the ‘order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa for there is no supreme overlord.’45

by 1519 he had considerable experience in identifying Mesoamerican kings and either recruiting or neutralizing them, since this is largely what he had been doing since his arrival on the mainland. In Tlaxcala, he couldn’t find any. Instead, after an initial clash with Tlaxcalteca warriors, he found himself engaged with representatives of a popular urban council whose every decision had to be collectively ratified.

We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to ‘Indians’ their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practised in Europe itself.

What Salazar describes in these remarkable passages is evidently not the workings of a royal court but of a mature urban parliament, which sought consensus for its decisions through reasoned argument and lengthy deliberations – carrying on, when necessary, for weeks at a time.