The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Chavín images, by contrast, are not for the uninitiated. Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns.

the arts of Chavín appear to be an early (and monumental) manifestation of a much wider Amerindian tradition, in which images are not meant to illustrate or represent, but instead serve as visual cues for extraordinary feats of memory.

In fact, nothing in Chavín’s monumental landscape really seems concerned with secular government at all. There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge.

For as long as anyone could remember, they said, Chavín had been a place of pilgrimage but also one of supernatural danger, on which the heads of important families converged from different parts of the country to seek visions and oracles: the ‘speech of the stones’.

The temples at Chavín contain stone labyrinths and hanging staircases which seem designed not for communal acts of worship but for individual trials, initiations and vision quests. They imply tortuous journeys ending at narrow corridors, large enough for only a single person, beyond which lies a tiny sanctum containing a monolith, carved with dense tangles of images.

The most famous such monument, a stela called ‘El Lanzón’ (‘the lance’), is a shaft of granite over thirteen feet tall, around which the Old Temple of Chavín was constructed. A well-lit replica of the stela, often assumed to represent a god who is also the axis mundi, or a central pillar connecting the polar ends of a shamanic universe, has pride of place in Peru’s Museo de la Nación; but the 3,000-year-old original still resides at the heart of a darkened maze, illuminated by thin slats, where no single viewer could ever grasp the totality of its form or meaning.

On one platform was a temple; on the other a kind of palace, the house of a ruler called the Great Sun, large enough to contain up to 4,000 people, roughly the size of the entire Natchez population at the time.

French observers were particularly struck by the arbitrary executions of Natchez subjects, the property confiscations and the way in which, at royal funerals, court retainers would – often, apparently, quite willingly – offer themselves up to be strangled to accompany the Great Sun and his closest family members in death. Those sacrificed on such occasions consisted largely of people who were, up to that point, immediately responsible for the king’s care and his physical needs – including his wives, who were invariably commoners (the Natchez were matrilineal, so it was the White Woman’s children that succeeded to the throne). Many, according to French accounts, went to their deaths voluntarily, even joyfully. One wife remarked how she dreamed of finally being able to share a meal with her husband, in another world.

The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis, as if to prove his identification with a principle prior to law and, therefore, able to create it.

far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labour, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored.

According to one account, the main ritual role of the king was to seek blessings for his people – health, fertility, prosperity – from the original lawgiver, a being who in his lifetime was so terrifying and destructive that he eventually agreed to be turned into a stone statue and hidden in a temple where no one would see him.

Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.

Yet to be a royal wife was not without advantages, as the college of royal wives was effectively what substituted for an administration, maintaining connections between Fashoda and their natal villages; and it was powerful enough, if the wives came to consensus, to order the king’s execution. Then again, the reth also had his henchmen: often these were orphans, criminals, runaways and other unattached persons who would gravitate to him.

In the initial moment, the practice of ritual killing around a royal burial tends to be spectacular: almost as if the death of a ruler meant a brief moment when sovereignty broke free of its ritual fetters, triggering a kind of political supernova that annihilates everything in its path, including some of the highest and mightiest individuals in the kingdom.

Often these appear to be war captives taken from rival lineages and – unlike the retainers – their bodies were systematically mutilated, usually in mocking rearrangements of the victims’ heads. For the Shang, this seems to have been a way of denying their victims the possibility of becoming dynastic ancestors, thereby rendering the living members of their lineage unable to take part in the care and feeding of their own dead kin, ordinarily one of the fundamental duties of family life. Cast adrift, and socially scarred, the survivors were more likely to fall under the sway of the Shang court. The ruler became a greater ancestor, in effect, by preventing others from becoming ancestors at all.

On the one hand, we have a ritual that appears to be the ultimate expression of love and devotion, as those who on a day-to-day basis made the king into something king-like – fed him, clothed him, trimmed his hair, cared for him in sickness and kept him company when he was lonely – went willingly to their deaths, to ensure he would continue to be king in the afterlife. At the same time, these burials are the ultimate demonstration that for a ruler, even his most intimate subjects could be treated as personal possessions, casually disposed of like so many blankets, gaming boards or jugs of spelt.

Experiments with techniques of mummification took place long before the First Dynasty; as early as the Neolithic period, Egyptians were already mixing aromatics and preservative oils to produce bodies that could last forever and whose places of burial were the fixed points of reference in an ever-shifting social landscape.

As we’ve seen, modern Nilotic peoples, and particularly the Shilluk, show how relatively mobile societies that place great value on individual freedom might, nonetheless, prefer an arbitrary despot – who could eventually be got rid of – to any more systematic or pervasive form of rule.

the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead.87

Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge,88 as a sizeable sector of Egypt’s population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors.

‘Friends of [the king] Menkaure’ reads one such, ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ another. These seasonal work units (or phyles, as Egyptologists call them) seem to have been made up only of men who passed through special age-grade rituals, and who modelled themselves on the organization of a boat’s crew.93 Whether such ritual brotherhoods ever took to the water together isn’t clear, but there are notable parallels between the team skills used in maritime engineering and those used in manipulating multi-ton blocks of limestone and granite for royal pyramid-temples or other such monuments.94

Were ancient Egyptian boat crews the model for what have been called the world’s first production-line techniques, creating vast monuments, far more impressive than anything the world had yet seen, by dividing tasks into an endless variety of simple, mechanical components: cutting, dragging, hoisting, polishing? This is how the pyramids were actually built: by rendering subjects into great social machines, afterwards celebrated by mass conviviality.

each governed by its own charismatic warrior-king – whose special, individual qualities were said to be recognized by the gods, and physically marked in the outstanding virility and allure of his body – all vying constantly for dominance.

Kings, in this case, almost never claimed to be gods themselves, but rather the gods’ vicegerents, and sometimes heroic defenders on earth: in short, delegates of sovereign power that resided properly in heaven.

To be a Classic Maya ruler (ajaw) was to be a hunter and god-impersonator of the first rank, a warrior whose body, on entering battle or during dance rituals, became host to the spirit of an ancestral hero, deity or dreamlike monsters.

In Mesopotamian cities, for instance, social class was often based on land tenure and mercantile wealth. Temples doubled as city banks and factories. Their gods might only leave the temple grounds on festive occasions, but priests moved in broader circles, making interest-bearing loans to traders, watching over armies of female weavers and jealously guarding their fields and flocks. There were powerful societies of merchants.

Hence the focus, in Classic Maya politics, on capturing high-status rivals in warfare as a form of ‘human capital’

For one thing, Shang rulers did not claim sovereignty over an extended area. They couldn’t travel safely, let alone issue commands, outside a narrow band of territories clustered on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, not far from the royal court.

Effectively, any royal decision – whether war, alliance, the founding of new cities, or even such apparently trivial matters as extending royal hunting grounds – could only proceed if approved by the ultimate authorities, who were the gods and ancestral spirits;

is very different, however, to heroic violence. In a way, it’s the opposite. In a heroic order, the warrior’s honour is based on the fact that he might lose; his reputation means so much to him that he is willing to stake his life, dignity and freedom to defend it.

Egyptian rulers, in these early periods, never represent themselves as heroic figures in this sense. They could not, conceivably, lose. As a result, wars are not represented as ‘political’ contests, which imply a match between potential equals. Instead, combat and the chase alike were assertions of ownership, endless rehearsals of the same sovereignty the king exercised over his people and which ultimately derived from his kinship with the gods.

when we speak of an absence of charismatic politics we are talking about the absence of a ‘star system’ or ‘hall of fame’, with institutionalized rivalries between knights, warlords, politicians and so on. We are most certainly not speaking about an absence of individual personalities.

When the central government split between rival centres at Herakleopolis and Thebes, such local leaders began to take over most functions of government. Often referred to as ‘warlords’, these nomarchs were in fact nothing like the petty kings of the Predynastic period. At least in their own monuments, they represent themselves as something closer to popular heroes, even saints.

I gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked; I anointed those who had no cosmetic oil; I gave sandals to the barefooted; I gave a wife to him who had no wife. I took care of the towns of Hefat [El-Mo’alla] and Hor-mer in every [crisis, when] the sky was clouded and the earth [was parched? And people died] of hunger on this sandbank of Apophis. The south came with its people and the north with its children; they brought finest oil in exchange for barley which was given to them … All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anybody to die of hunger in this nome … never did I allow anybody in need to go from this nome to another one. I am the hero without equal.

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.

the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual contexts: in Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults, Chinese oracle readings and so forth.116 So one thing we can now say with a fair degree of certainty is that bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to problems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity.

Flocks had to be pastured, a variety of cereal crops sown, harvested and threshed, as well as flax for weaving, which was practised alongside other household crafts such as potting, bead-making, stone-carving and simple forms of metalworking. And of course there were children to raise, old people to care for, houses to build and maintain, marriages and funerals to co-ordinate, and so on.

As we’ve already observed in the case of traditional Basque villages, these sorts of activity could well involve quite complicated mathematical calculations. Still, this in itself doesn’t explain why there was a need to fall back on precise systems of measurement and archiving. After all, there are untold thousands of agricultural communities across human history who juggled similarly complex combinations of tasks and responsibilities without having to create new techniques of record-keeping.

In some ways, people living in small-scale communities began to act as if they were already living in mass societies of a certain kind, even though nobody had ever seen a city.

In many ways this phenomenon was another version of the kind of ‘culture areas’ or hospitality zones that we discussed in earlier chapters, but there was a different element: affinities between distant households and families seem to have been increasingly based on a principle of cultural uniformity. In a sense, then, this was the first era of the ‘global village’.

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. Households were now built to increasingly standard tripartite plans, and pottery, which had once been a way of expressing individual skill and creativity, now seems to have been made deliberately drab, uniform and in some cases almost standardized. Craft production in general became more mechanical, and female labour was subject to new forms of spatial control and segregation.

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.

administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.

Ayllu too were based on a strong principle of equality; their members literally wore uniforms, with each valley having its own traditional design of cloth.

One of the ayllu ’s main functions was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure none grew richer than any other – indeed, to be a ‘rich’ household meant, in practice, to have a large number of unmarried children, hence much land, since there was no other basis for comparing wealth.125 Ayllu also helped families avoid seasonal labour crunches and kept track of the number of able-bodied young men and women in each household, so as to ensure not only that none were short-handed at critical moments, but also that the aged or infirm, widows, orphans or disabled were taken care of.

Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the ‘village bureaucracy’ comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable argumen...

Each ayllu appears to have had its own khipu strings, which were constantly knotted and re-knotted to keep track as debts were registered or cancelled out. It’s possible that khipu were invented for such purposes.

Community leaders became de facto state agents, and either took advantage of legalisms to get rich or tried to shield their wards and themselves if they got in to trouble. Those who were unable to meet labour debts or who tried unsuccessfully to flee or rebel, were reduced to the status of servants, retainers and concubines for Inca courts and officials.

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.