The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

There were goods and industries to be administered, and a body of citizens who developed pedagogical techniques that quickly became so essential to this particular form of urban life that they remain with us to this day.

If later Sumerian temples are anything to go by, this workforce will have comprised a whole assortment of the urban needy: widows, orphans and others rendered vulnerable by debt, crime, conflict, poverty, disease or disability, who found in the temple a place of refuge and support.

For the time being, though, let us just emphasize the remarkable number of industries that developed in these temple workshops, as documented in the cuneiform accounts. Among them we find the first large-scale dairy and wool production; also the manufacture of leavened bread, beer and wine, including facilities for standardized packaging. Some eighty varieties of fish – fresh- and saltwater – appear in the administrative accounts along with their associated oil and food products, preserved and stored in temple repositories. From this we can deduce that a primary economic function of this temple sector was to co-ordinate labour at key times of year, and to provide quality control for processed goods that differed from those made in ordinary households.

Temples were established, and with them new sorts of clothing, new dairy products, wines and woollens were disseminated to local populations. While these products might not have been entirely novel, 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.

Around the same time Uruk was becoming a large city, Arslantepe was coming into its own as a regional centre of some significance, where the upper reaches of the Euphrates arc towards the Anti-Taurus Mountains, with their rich sources of metal and timber. The site may have started life as some kind of seasonal trade fair; at nearly 3,300 feet above sea level, it was likely snowed in over the winter months.

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.

Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures.

Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but ultimately hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Genghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi.

The Indus civilization had colonial outposts as far as the Oxus River in northern Afghanistan, where the site of Shortugai presents a miniature replica of its urban mother-culture: ideally placed to tap the rich mineral sources of the Central Asian highlands (lapis, tin and other gemstones and metals).

Commerce, industry and status rivalries may all thrive, but the wealth, power or prosperity being fought over is always seen as of lesser value – in the great scheme of things – than the purity of priestly caste.

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.

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: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.

Early Buddhist sanghas were meticulous in their demands for all monks to gather together in order to reach unanimous decisions on matters of general concern, resorting to majority vote only when consensus broke down.

It is also famous as a rather small volcanic island which manages to support one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture. Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of ‘water-temples’, through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.

We can insist that everyone is, or should be, precisely the same (at least in the ways that we consider important); or alternatively, we can insist that everyone is so utterly different from each other that there are simply no criteria for comparison (for example, we are all unique individuals, and so there is no basis upon which any one of us can be considered better than another).

The excavations at Shimao, on the Tuwei River, have revealed all this, along with abundant evidence for sophisticated crafts – including bone-working and bronze-casting – and warfare, including the mass killing and burial of captives, in around 2000 BC.110 Here we sense a much livelier political scene than was ever imagined in the annals of later courtly tradition. Some of it had a grisly aspect, including the decapitation of captured foes, and the burial of some thousands of ancestral jade axes and sceptres in cracks between great stone blocks of the city wall, not to be found or seen again until the prying eyes of archaeologists uncovered them over four millennia later. The likely intention of all this was to disrupt, demoralize and delegitimize rival lineages (‘all in all, you’re just another jade in the wall’).

The city wall was razed flat, and … the original functional divisions destroyed, resulting in a lack of spatial regulation. Commoners’ residential areas now covered almost the entire site, even reaching beyond the boundaries of the middle-period large city wall. The size of the city became even larger, reaching a total area of 300 hectares. In addition, the ritual area in the south was abandoned. The former palace area now included a poor-quality rammed-earth foundation of about 2,000 square metres, surrounded by trash pits used by relatively low-status people. Stone tool workshops occupied what had been the lower-level elite residential area. The city clearly had lost its status as a capital, and was in a state of anarchy.111 What’s more, there are clues that this was a conscious process of transformation, most likely involving a significant degree of violence. Commoner graves burst in on the elite cemetery, and in the palace district a mass burial, with signs of torture and grotesque violations of the corpses, appears to be evidence for what the excavator describes as an ‘act of political retribution’.

By the twelfth century, when the Mexica arrived, nobody even seems to have remembered the city’s original name. Still, the new arrivals clearly found the city – with its two colossal pyramids set against the Cerro Gordo – both alien and alluring, and far too large simply to ignore.

Teotihuacan as a place full of mountain pools and primal voids, from which the planets sprang at the beginning of time. The planets were followed by gods, and the gods by a mysterious race of fish-men, whose world had to be destroyed to make way for our own.

Archaeologists have combed through the ancient tunnels around the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, only to discover that the passages do not lead to royal tombs, or even robbed-out tomb chambers, but to chthonic labyrinths and mineral-crusted shrines: evocations of other worlds, no doubt, but not the graves of sacred rulers.10

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. In doing so it rejected both the specific visual trope of ruler and captive and the glorification of aristocratic individuals in general.

According to Pasztory, Teotihuacan was not just ‘anti-dynastic’ in spirit, it was itself a utopian experiment in urban life. Those who created it thought of themselves as creating a new and different kind of city, a Tollan for the people, without overlords or kings.

The Aztecs, for instance, employed orders of heavily armed warrior-merchants called pochteca, who also gathered intelligence on the cities where they traded.

Taking all lines of evidence into account, it seems likely that 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.

Teotihuacan had indeed changed its course away from monarchy and aristocracy to become instead a ‘Tollan of the people’.

What followed would be familiar to anyone who has participated in a process of consensus decision-making: when matters seem to come to loggerheads, rather than putting it to a vote someone proposes a creative synthesis.

To satisfy both sides of the debate, Cortés would be invited into the city, but as soon as he entered Tlaxcalteca territory the city’s leading general, Xicotencatl the Younger, would ambush him, together with a contingent of Otomí warriors. If the ambush succeeded, they would be heroes. If it failed, they would blame it on the uncouth and impulsive Otomí, make their excuses, and ally themselves with the invaders.

Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.

when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it’s not in the ‘complex’ metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, ‘heroic’ societies of the surrounding foothills,

the societies of the Northwest Coast, since there too political leadership lay in the hands of a boastful and vainglorious warrior aristocracy, competing in extravagant contests over titles, treasures, the allegiance of commoners and the ownership of slaves.

We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations.

Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so.

Revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home.

We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.

If we are seeking an ancient precedent to this aspect of modern democracy, we shouldn’t turn to the assemblies of Athens, Syracuse or Corinth, but instead – paradoxically – to aristocratic contests of ‘heroic ages’, such as those described in the Iliad with its endless agons: races, duels, games, gifts and sacrifices. As we noted in Chapter Nine, the political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty.

Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.3

The divine kingship of the Shilluk, a Nilotic people of East Africa, worked on similar lines: there were very few limits on what the king could do to those in his physical presence, but there was also nothing remotely resembling an administrative apparatus to translate his sovereign power into something more stable or extensive: no tax system, no system to enforce royal orders, or even report on whether or not they had been obeyed.

As we showed in Chapter Eight, contemporary evidence from ancient Eurasia now points to a different pattern, where urban administrative systems inspire a cultural counter-reaction (a further example of schismogenesis), in the form of squabbling highland princedoms (‘barbarians’, from the perspective of the city dwellers),6 which eventually leads to some of those princes establishing themselves in cities and systematizing their power: Administration Charismatic Politics Sovereignty (by schismogenesis)

Women still occupied important positions in Tenochtitlan as merchants, doctors and priestesses; but they were excluded from an ascendant class of aristocrats whose power was based on warfare, predation and tribute.

Male nobility among the Aztecs or Mexica seem to have viewed life as an eternal contest, or even conquest – a cultural tendency which they traced back to their origins as an itinerant community of warriors and colonizers.

Exercising a degree of sovereignty over eighty contiguous provinces and countless ethnic groups, by the end of the fifteenth century the Inca had achieved something like the ‘universal monarchy’ (monarchia universalis) that the Habsburgs, rulers of numerous scattered territories, could only conjure in their dreams.

In each provincial center they had accountants who were called ‘knot-keepers/orderers’ [khipukamayuqs], and by means of these knots they kept the record and account of what had been given in tribute by those [people] in that district, from the silver, gold, clothing, herd animals, to the wool and other things down to the smallest items, and by the same knots they commissioned a record of what was given over one year, or ten or twenty years and they kept the accounts so well that they did not lose a pair of sandals.

at Thebes between 754 and 525 BC – spanning the Third Intermediate and Late periods – a series of five unmarried, childless princesses (of Libyan and Nubian descent) were elevated to the position of ‘god’s wife of Amun’, a title and role which acquired not just supreme religious, but also great economic and political weight at this time. In official representations, these women are given ‘throne names’ framed by cartouches, just like kings, and appear leading royal festivals and making offerings to the gods.34 They also owned some of the richest estates in Egypt, including extensive lands and a large staff of priests and scribes. To have a situation in which women not only command power on such a scale, but in which this power is linked to an office reserved explicitly for single women, is historically unusual.

In some parts of the Americas, competitive sports served as a substitute for war. Among the Classic Maya, one was really an extension of the other. Battles and games formed part of an annual cycle of royal competitions, played for life and death.

They reported how reckless commoners, carried away in the competitive fervour of the tournament, would sometimes lose all they had or even gamble themselves into slavery.44 The stakes were so high that, should a player actually send a ball through one of the stone hoops adorning the side of the court (these were made so small as to render it nearly impossible; normally the game was won in other ways), the contest ended immediately, and the player who performed the miracle received all the goods wagered, as well as any others he might care to pillage from the onlookers.

there is little evidence that the Olmec themselves ever created an infrastructure for dominating a large population. So far as anyone knows, their rulers did not command a stable military or administrative apparatus that might have allowed them to extend their power throughout a wider hinterland. Instead, they presided over a remarkable spread of cultural influence radiating from ceremonial centres, which may only have been densely occupied on specific occasions (such as ritual ball games) scheduled in concert with the demands of the agricultural calendar, and largely empty at other times of year.

they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called ‘theatre states’, where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles. Anything we might consider ‘statecraft’, from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way round.

In the central highlands arose a militarized polity known as Wari. In parallel, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, a metropolis called Tiwanaku – at 420 hectares, roughly twice the size of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro – took form, using an ingenious system of raised fields to grow its crops on the freezing heights of the Bolivian altiplano.

On the north coast of Peru, a third culture, known as Moche, displays striking funerary evidence of female leadership: lavish tombs of warrior-priestesses and queens, drenched in gold and flanked by human sacrifices.50

Real empires tend to favour styles of figural art that are both very large but also very simple, so their meaning can be easily understood by anyone they wish to impress.