The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

If the calculations of a Bolivian ayllu or Basque council – or presumably a Neolithic village administration like that of Tell Sabi Abyad, and its urban successors in Mesopotamia – produced an obviously impossible or unreasonable result, matters could always be adjusted. 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.

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.

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.

The ruler was the Sun, who gave both life and order to his people. He recreated the universe each day.

Inscriptions or objects designed to project an image of cosmic power – palaces, mausoleums, lavish stelae with godlike figures announcing laws or boasting of their conquests – are precisely the ones most likely to endure, thereby forming the core of the world’s major heritage sites and museum collections today.

To understand the realities of power, whether in modern or ancient societies, is to acknowledge this gap between what elites claim they can do and what they are actually able to do.

Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece, or others of a certain scale and monumentality. All these were deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women. 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.

Without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies they fostered the growth of mathematical and calendrical knowledge. In some regions they pioneered metallurgy, the cultivation of olives, vines and date palms, or the invention of leavened bread and wheat beer; in others they domesticated maize and learned to extract poisons, medicines and mind-altering substances from plants. Civilizations, in this true sense, developed the major textile technologies applied to fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on.

By far the most frequent depictions of authority figures in Minoan art show adult women in boldly patterned skirts that extend over their shoulders but are open at the chest.

This is not surprising, since the palace societies of the mainland don’t arise from pre-existing cities but from warrior aristocracies that produced the earlier Shaft Graves of Mycenae, with their haunting gold death masks and weaponry inlaid with scenes of male fighters and hunting bands.

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.

The Neolithic, he suggests, began with flood-retreat agriculture, which was easy work and encouraged redistribution; the largest populations were, indeed, concentrated in deltaic environments, but the first states in the Middle East (he concentrates largely on these; and China) developed upriver, in areas with an especially strong focus on cereal agriculture – wheat, barley, millet – and relatively limited access to a range of other staples. The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground – unlike, say, certain tubers or legumes – grain crops were also highly visible and amenable to appropriation. Cereal agriculture did not cause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to their fiscal requirements.

Scott argued about the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, some of these ‘barbarians’ became, effectively, anarchists: organizing their lives in explicit opposition to the valley societies below, or to prevent the emergence of stratified classes in their own midst.

For most of history, he suggests, this is what rebellion typically looked like: defection to join the ranks of nearby barbarians.

‘Indian chiefs’ such as Geronimo or Sitting Bull were, in fact, tribal headmen, whose role was nothing like big men in Papua New Guinea. Most of those labelled ‘chiefs’ in the neo-evolutionist model, as we’ve already noted, look suspiciously like what we normally think of as ‘kings’ and may well live in fortified castles, wear ermine robes, support court jesters, have hundreds of wives and harem eunuchs. However, they rarely engage in the mass redistribution of resources, at least not in any systematic way.

prior to the Iberian invasion, the Americas were not in direct or regular communication with Eurasia. They were in no sense part of the same ‘world system’. This is important, because it means we do have one truly independent point of comparison (possibly even two, if we consider North and South America as separate), where it is possible to ask: does history really have to take a certain direction?

Whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway, it seems to have ended up being overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of its people. For centuries after its demise the site where the city once stood, and hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely devoid of human habitation: a ‘vacant quarter’

Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed … They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.

Ragueneau reported that the winter months in a Wendat town were largely devoted to organizing collective feasts and dramas, literally in order to make some important man or woman’s dreams come true.

members are recruited by (matrilineal or patrilineal) descent, and fellow clan members consider one another brothers and sisters whom one therefore cannot marry. Yet nobody kept track of genealogies, and there were no ancestor cults or property claims based on descent: all clan members were, effectively, equal. There wasn’t even much in the way of collective property other than certain forms of ritual knowledge, dances or chants, bundles of sacred objects and also a collection of names.

A community, moreover, was never made up of just one clan. There were usually quite a number, grouped together into two halves (or moieties), which acted as rivals and complements to one another, competing against one another in sports and burying one another’s dead. The overall effect was to efface personal histories from public contexts: since names were titles, it would be as if the head of one half of the community would always be John F. Kennedy and the other always Richard Nixon.

clans played a key role in diplomacy: not just in providing hospitality to travellers, but organizing the protocol for diplomatic missions, the paying of compensation to prevent wars, or the incorporation of prisoners, who could simply be assigned a name and thereby become a clan member in their new community – even the replacement for someone who had died in that very conflict.

The system appeared to be designed to maximize people’s capacity to move, individually or collectively, or for that matter to reshuffle social arrangements.

The treasures included quartz-crystal arrowheads, obsidian from Wyoming, mica and obsidian from the Appalachians, copper and silver from the Great Lakes, conch shells and shark teeth from Gulf of Mexico, grizzly-bear molars from the Rockies, meteoric iron, alligator teeth, barracuda jaws and more.13 Most of these materials seem to have been used for the manufacture of ritual gear and magnificent costumes – including metal-sheathed pipes and mirrors – worn by shamans, priests and a host of minor officials in a complex organizational structure,

A typical Hopewell site is a complex, mathematically aligned mix of circles, squares and octagons – all made of mud. One of the largest, the Newark Earthworks in Licking County, Ohio, which apparently functioned as a lunar observatory, extends over two square miles and contains embankments more than sixteen feet tall. The only way to create stable structures of this sort – so stable that they still exist today – was by the use of ingenious building techniques, alternating layers of earth with carefully selected gravels and sand.

Some are the size of small towns. They might, and often did, contain meeting houses, craft workshops and charnel houses for the processing of human remains, along with crypts for the dead. A few might have had resident caretakers, though this isn’t entirely clear. What is clear is that for most of the year these sites remained largely or completely empty. Only on specific ritual occasions did they come to life as theatres for elaborate ceremonies, densely populated for a week or two at a time, with people drawn from across the region and occasional visitors from very far away.

Some suggest that much of Hopewell ritual consisted of heroic-style feasts and contests: races, games and gambling, which – if at all like later Feasts of the Dead in the American Northeast – often ended by covering great treasures beneath carefully layered strata of soil and gravel, so that nobody (except, perhaps, gods or spirits) would ever see them again.22 Both the games and burials would, obviously, tend to militate against the accumulation of wealth – or, better put, would ensure that social differences remained largely theatrical.

The unity of the ‘Ubaid interaction sphere lay in the suppression of individual differences between people and households; in contrast, the unity of Hopewell lay in the celebration of difference.

The earthworks’ alignments often reference particular segments of the Hopewell calendar (such as the solstices, phases of the moon and so on), with people presumably having to move back and forth regularly between the monuments to complete a full ceremonial cycle.

Feasts of the Dead were also occasions for the ‘resurrection’ of names, as the titles of those who were now gone passed to the living.

There was a division between ‘white’ and ‘red’ clans: the first identified with summer, circular houses and peacemaking; the second with winter, square houses and warfare.

Most later indigenous societies had a separation between peace chiefs and war chiefs: an entirely different administration came into force in times of military conflict, then melted away as soon as matters were resolved.

In Mississippian cosmology, watery places like this were connected to the chaotic underworld – seen as the diametrical opposite of a precise, predictable celestial order – and it’s no doubt significant that some of the first large-scale construction at Cahokia centred on a processional walkway known as the Rattlesnake Causeway, designed to rise from the surrounding waters and leading towards the surrounding ridge-top tombs (a Path of Souls, or Way of the Dead).

What’s so striking about this pattern is its suggestion of an almost complete dismantling of any self-governing communities outside the city. For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much left between domestic life – lived under constant surveillance from above – and the awesome spectacle of the city itself.

Nobles could only marry commoners, and after several generations of such intermarriage the descendants of kings might lose their noble status entirely. So a pool of nobles-turned-commoners always existed from which warriors and administrators could be drawn.

there was a system of titles for heroic achievement in war, which made it possible for commoners to win their way into the nobility, a status symbolized in bird-man imagery, which also invoked the prestige of competing at chunkey tournaments.

After AD 1400 the entire fertile expanse of the American Bottom (which at the city’s height had contained perhaps as many as 40,000 people), along with the territory from Cahokia up to the Ohio River, became what’s referred to in the literature as the Vacant or Empty Quarter: a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp, occasionally traversed by hunters but devoid of permanent human settlement.

Among descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a single project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.

the Osage – a Siouan people who appear originally to have inhabited the region of Fort Ancient in the Middle Ohio River valley before abandoning it for the Great Plains – used the expression ‘moving to a new country’ as a synonym for constitutional change.

During this period the priestly orders seem largely to vanish across much of the Southeast, to be replaced by warrior micos. Occasionally, these petty rulers would become paramount in a given region, but they lacked either the ritual authority or economic resources to create the kind of urban life that existed before.

At the edge of the prairies, for example, people living in scattered homesteads began migrating seasonally, leaving the very young and old behind in the earthwork towns and taking to extended hunting and fishing in the surrounding uplands, before finally relocating entirely.

Among the Creek, for instance, the post of mico was reduced to a facilitator of the assembly and supervisor of collective granaries. Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics, in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking of caffeinated beverages.

Both tobacco and the ‘black drink’ had originally been drugs ingested by shamans or other spiritual virtuosos in intense and highly concentrated doses so as to produce altered states of consciousness; now, instead, they were doled out in carefully measured portions to everyone assembled.

qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration. It’s only important because it’s obscure. Hence in tenth-century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic or even dead languages, just as today they will have had to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more traditional means: by practice, apprenticeship or informal mentoring.

In the pre-Columbian Americas, the equivalent media revolution focused instead on the (quite literal) reformation of mathematical principles underlying the creation of complex geometrical earthworks which captured the sacred in spatial form.

Osage communities typically moved between three seasonal locations: permanent villages of multi-family lodge houses made up of perhaps 2,000 people; summer camps; and camps for the annual midwinter bison hunts.

The basic village pattern was a circle divided into two exogamous moieties, sky and earth, with twenty-four clans in all, each of which had to be represented in any settlement or camp, just as at least one representative of each had to be present for any major ritual.

Through lengthy investigation, La Flesche notes, elders determined that life and motion was produced by the interaction of two principles – sky and earth – and therefore they divided their own society in the same way, arranging it so that men from one division could only take wives from the other. A village was a model of the universe, and as such a form of ‘supplication’ to its animating power.

While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day.

periodically, particularly perplexing questions would come up: either about the nature of the visible universe, or about the application of these understandings to human affairs. At this point it was customary for two elders to retreat to a secluded spot in the wilderness and carry out a vigil for four to seven days, to ‘search their minds’, before returning with a report on their conclusions.