1. The term was first coined by the Dutch climate scientist Paul Crutzen in 2001.
2. For the dating, personal communication, David Wengrow.
3. It’s hard to avoid asking oneself, “Where did we go wrong to end up here?” That question is far too ambitious for me to tackle. One thing stands out, however, and that is that our trouble is largely of our own making. This, in turn, suggests a medical analogy. More than two-thirds of hospitalizations in industrial countries, it is claimed, are for iatrogenic illnesses: medical conditions that result from previous medical interventions and therapy. One might say that our current environmental ills are largely iatrogenic. If so, the first step is perhaps to elicit a long and deep medical history that might help us trace the origins of our current complaints.
4. In the first millennium BCE—later than the period on which I focus—when nomadic pastoralism is combined with the rearing of horses, a new kind of nonsedentary, grassland empire becomes possible, exemplified by the Mongols and, much later in the New World, by the Comanche. For such unique polities see, Pekka Hämäläinen, “What’s in a Concept? The Kinetic Empire of the Comanches,” History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013): 81–90, and Mitchell, Horse Nations.
5. The only sensitive exploration of this topic I know of is Bruce Chatwin’s fine book written about Australia, The Songlines (London: Cape, 1987). The Roma, aka Gypsies, are a modern example of determined mobility—so much so that the famous Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen proposed after World War II issuing them what would have been the first “European” passports.
6. Urban populations, before the revolution in sanitation (sewage and clean water) of the mid-nineteenth century and before vaccination and antibiotics, generally had such high rates of mortality that they grew only by large-scale in-migration from the countryside.
7. In fact, it seems that such sites of wild stands and/or cultivated but nondomesticated grains and the periodic gatherings to harvest the grains and store them were common enough for them to be misinterpreted as permanent, sedentary communities cultivating fully domesticated crops. See in this connection the careful argument of Asouti and Fuller, “Emergence of Agriculture in Southwest Asia.”
8. For perhaps the best and most detailed summaries of the current state of knowledge, see Fuller et al., “Cultivation and Domestication Has Multiple Origins,” and Asouti and Fuller, “Emergence of Agriculture in Southwest Asia.”
9. Algaze, “Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia.”
10. A good many nomadic peoples did have scripts (often borrowed from sedentary peoples), but they typically wrote on perishable material (bark, bamboo leaves, reeds) and for nonstate purposes (such as memorizing spells and love poetry). The heavy clay tablets of the southern alluvium of Mesopotamia are decidedly the writing technology of a sedentary people, and that is why so much of it survives.
11. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State.”
12. See McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse.
13. See Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
1. C. K. Brain, The Hunters or the Hunted? An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), cited in Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization.
2. Cronon, Changes in the Land.
3. For this still disputed contention, see William Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change 16 (2003): 261–293, and R. J. Nevle et al., “Ecological-Hydrological Effects of Reduced Biomass Burning in the Neo-Tropics After AD 1600,” Geological Society of America Meeting, Minneapolis, October 11, 2011, abstract.
4. Zeder, “The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40.” Although I concentrate here on fire as a tool for landscape modification, hunting, and cooking, fire was used as a tool for hardening wooden tools, for splitting stones, for shaping weapons, and for raiding beehives long before the Neolithic revolution. See Pyne, World Fire.
5. Jones, Feast, 107.
6. Wrangham, Catching Fire, 40–53.
7. At this point a reader might ask why it was that Homo sapiens was a more successful invasive than Homo neanderthalensis, who, after all, had fire and cooking as well. One answer, different from that of higher fertility, is proposed by Pat Shipman. She suggests that the decisive difference rests with another tool, the domesticated wolf that allowed Homo sapiens to become a vastly more efficient hunter of big game rather than largely a scavenger. She makes a persuasive case that “wolf-dogs” had been tamed—or had attached themselves to Homo sapiens—more than thirty-six thousand years ago, when the two hominids lived in close proximity. She claims that this was also the time when most large game animals, owing to Homo sapiens’ use of dogs for hunting, were in steep decline or extinct. Much of her argument hinges on the disputed temporal and spatial overlap of the two subspecies and the hunting grounds they contested. Why Homo neanderthalensis did not then also domesticate the wolf is a mystery to me. See The Invaders.
8. For both fire and cooking, see Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, and Wrangham, Catching Fire.
9. Anders E. Carlson, “What Caused the Younger Dryas Cold Event,” Geology 38, no. 4 (2010): 383–384, http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/38/4/383.short?rss=1&ssource=mfr. Although the dating of the beginning of the Younger Dryas and Lake Agassiz’s turn east from the Mississippi drainage do not quite match, it does seem likely that some pulse of glacial melt was responsible for the cold snap.
10. Zeder, “The Origins of Agriculture.”
11. Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities.” For subsequent, but more truncated, versions of her findings see Pournelle, Darweesh, and Hritz, “Resilient Landscapes”; Hritz and Pournelle, “Feeding History.” Pournelle’s thesis is foreshadowed—but with far less hard evidence—by others, for example, Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 65–66; Matthews, The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, 86. For a deeper historical and geological view, as well as a recasting of Gordon Childe’s “oasis theory of civilization,” see Rose, “New Light on Human Prehistory.”
12. See, among others, Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 32–37.
13. The process is beautifully described by Azzam Awash as follows: “It was not coincidental that agriculture first developed in the natural renewable fertility of the grasslands surrounding the marshes. What the Sumerians did was invent an ingenious irrigation system which their Marsh Arab inheritors continued using. Following the peak of the floods, they broadcast seeds on the higher lands that first start emerging as the floodwaters recede. These higher lands get covered twice a day as a result of the tidal actions of the Gulf that slows the flow in the Tigris and Euphrates causing a ‘backup’ of the water. The seeds thus get irrigated automatically without having to open canals or pump water. As the seedlings grow, however, the water recedes too far to allow for irrigation, and thus the seedlings are transplanted from the higher land into the low lying fields/grasslands. The irrigation system continues to provide water twice a day well into the early days of summer. By the time the floodwaters have receded, the roots of the seedling would tap into the groundwater and are in no need of the hard labor of irrigation.” “The Mesopotamian Marshlands: A Personal Recollection,” in Crawford, The Sumerian World, 640.
14. Latin American specialists will recognize the similarities between this pattern of adjacent ecological zones and subsistence security with the concept of a “vertical archipelago” of ecological zones in the Andean state made famous by John V. Murra. See, for example, Rowe and Murra, “An Interview with John V. Murra.”
15. Sherratt, “Reviving the Grand Narrative,” 13.
16. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 111.
17. H. R. Hall, A Season’s Work at Ur, Al-Ubaid, Abu-Shahrain (Eridu) and Elsewhere . . . , quoted in Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities,” 129.
18. For a perceptive analysis of this process and this logic, see D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed.
19. Smith, “Low Level Food Production.”
20. Zeder, “The Origins of Agriculture,” S230–S231.
21. Zeder, “After the Revolution,” 99.
22. Endicott, “Introduction: Southeast Asia,” 275. Endicott and Geoffrey Benjamin term this shift “respecialization.”
23. Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, 241.
24. The term is used by Ian Hodder in The Domestication of Europe. Although I find Hodder’s concept of the “domus” helpful to think with, the late Andrew Sherratt was quite correct to observe that “a will to sedentism” could not be posited as a causal force in human affairs. See Sherratt, “Reviving the Grand Narrative,” 9–10.
25. Porter, Mobile Pastoralism, 351–393.
26. The question of “storage,” including “social storage” and reciprocity as a means to cope with a variable environment, is examined from many angles in Halstead and O’Shea, Bad Year Economics.
27. For a careful analysis, see Rowley-Conwy and Zvelibil, “Saving It for Later.”
28. Park, “Early Trends Toward Class Stratification.”
29. As with many ideas, I discovered that this one too was not original with me! See Manning, Against the Grain, 28.
1. Zeder, “Introduction,” 8. Zeder claims that there is evidence for humans “actively tilling and tending wild stands of einkorn and rye at both Abu Hureyra and nearby Mureybet during the late epi-Paleolithic 15,000–13,000 BCE.” For a documented and enlightening view of the transition from hunting and gathering to fixed-field cultivation, see Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates.
2. Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, 387. The authors point to the “now dominant weeds of dry cereal cultivation”—clovers, medicks, and wild fenugreek relatives, a wall barley, small-seeded grasses, twitches, and gromwell (bugloss family)—that appear in quantity in the Middle East in ancient seed remains, which they label a sure sign of cultivation.
3. Lest one think such heroics are confined to Homo sapiens, the little fish-eating auk managed, by colonizing northern Greenland in large numbers, to create enough soil with its wastes to create an attractive habitat for small mammals whose presence, in turn, attracted larger predators, including the polar bear.
4. See Catherine Fowler, “Ecological/Cosmological Knowledge and Land Management Among Hunter-Gatherers,” in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, 419–425.
5. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth.
6. For the most remarkable and brilliantly illustrated survey of the origins of agriculture with an emphasis on trade, see Sherratt, “The Origins of Farming in South-West Asia.”
7. I ignore, in this context, the weedy escapees, rather like pigs, that do manage to thrive outside the domus: oats, rye, vetch, false flax, carrot, radish, and sunflower.
8. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 172–174.
9. Of the first four-footed domesticates, the pig and the goat can and have slipped easily from the domestic sphere to “ferality” with remarkable success.
10. For an extended development of the domus in the context of Europe, see Hodder, The Domestication of Europe.
11. For the Berlaev experiments, see Trut, “Early Canine Domestication.”
12. Zeder, “Pathways to Animal Domestication.”
13. Zeder et al., “Documenting Domestication,” and Zeder, “Pathways to Animal Domestication.”
14. R. J. Berry, “The Genetical Implications of Domestication in Animals,” in Ucko and Dimbleby, The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, 207–217.
15. See T. I. Molleson, “The People of Abu Hureyra” in Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, 301–324.
16. Leach, “Human Domestication Reconsidered.”
17. The preeminent theorist of the domus as the key social unit of agrarian society is Ian Hodder. The central role he assigns the domus in the process of domestication in The Domestication of Europe is prefigured by Peter J. Wilson in The Domestication of the Human Species.
18. Leach, “Human Domestication Reconsidered,” 359.
19. Two common candidates for adaptations are the appearance of the sickle cell trait as protection against malaria, which had become epidemic owing to human changes in cultivated landscapes, and the rise of lactose tolerance, especially among pastoral nomads. More controversial are the interpretations of when blood types A, B, and AB developed and from what epidemic diseases they appear to offer some protection. See, in general, Boyden, The Impact of Civilisation on the Biology of Man.
20. Pollan, The Botany of Desire, xi–xiv.
21. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 36.
22. See Conklin, Hanunȯo Agriculture, and Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage.
23. Owen Lattimore, comparing the Mongol pastoralist with the Han farmer, puts the matter more strongly that I would, having, as a mediocre farmer, understood how complex it is to master. “As a matter of fact the Mongol, trained from childhood to be independent and to do all kinds of different things for himself, to work leather and felt, to drive a cart and handle a caravan, to be out in all weather and find his way over great distances and above all to make his own decisions for himself, promptly and in every kind of circumstance ought to be well-placed in competition with the peasant colonist who has lived in one mud hut all his life, attending without any exercise of initiative to an unchanging routine of planting and harvesting with his decisions made for him by his landlord and the calendar.” “On the Wickedness of Being Nomads,” quotation on 422.
24. Elias, The Civilizing Process.
25. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2: 1067.
1. Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, 393. This is an amazingly comprehensive and valuable survey of the richest site in Mesopotamia.
2. Burke and Pomeranz, The Environment and World History, 91, citing Peter Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr. The period Christensen is referring to falls later, but he dates the origin of such diseases to the Neolithic transition itself. See Chapter 7 and pp. 75 ff.
3. It is quite possible that advances in the recovery of genetic material will soon provide more robust evidence for such suspicions.
4. See, among others, Porter, Mobile Pastoralism, 253–254; Radner, “Fressen und gefressen werden”; Karen Radner, “The Assyrian King and His Scholars: The Syrio-Anatolian and Egyptian Schools,” in W. Lukic and R. Mattila, eds., Of Gods, Trees, Kings, and Scholars: Neo Assyrian and Related Studies in Honour of Simo Parpola, Studia Orientalia 106 (Helsinki, 2009), 221–233; Walter Farber, “How to Marry a Disease: Epidemics, Contagion, and a Magic Ritual Against the ‘Hand of the Ghost,’” in H. F. J. Horstmanshoff and M. Stol, eds., Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 117–132.
5. Farber, “Health Care and Epidemics in Antiquity.” Evidence here comes largely from Mari on the Euphrates from Uruk around the early second millennium BCE.
6. Nemet-Rejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, 80.
7. Ibid., 146. Nemet-Rejat adds, “An omen reported plague gods marching with the troops, most likely a reference to typhus.”
8. See especially Groube, “The Impact of Diseases”; Burnet and White, The Natural History of Infectious Disease, especially chapters 4–6; and McNeill, Plagues and People.
9. McNeill, Plagues and People, 51.
10. Polio is an example of an epidemic related to an excess of hygiene. In a major city in the global south like Bombay, for example, an overwhelming percentage of the children under five will have polio antibodies in their system, showing that they have been exposed to the disease, which is spread by feces and is rarely fatal to infants. For one not exposed at an early age, however, the disease contracted later in life is far more severe.
11. Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, 369.
12. Roosevelt, “Population, Health, and the Evolution of Subsistence.”
13. Nissen and Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq.
14. Dark and Gent, “Pests and Diseases of Prehistoric Crops.”
15. Ibid., 60.
16. See Lee, “Population Growth and the Beginnings of Sedentary Life.”
17. See Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments, 79 and 169, where he notes that a small change in the age of first conception or a reduction by three or four months in the interval between conceptions can, over time, make a huge difference in population growth rates. A hypothetical band of one hundred growing at a rate of 1.4 percent—that is, doubling every 50 years—would, in a mere 850 years, number thirteen million.
18. In Europe itself, it seems that only 20–28 percent of the DNA of early farmers can be traced to migration from the Near East cradles of agriculture. This implies, then, that the great bulk of early farmers were the descendants of indigenous hunter-gatherers. See Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now, 112.
Epigraphs: Sumerian text quoted in Tate Paulette, “Grain, Storage, and State-Making,” 85; Lawrence, Preface to Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.”
1. Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities,” 255.
2. Pournelle, “Physical Geography,” 28.
3. Pournelle and Algaze, “Travels in Edin,” 7–9.
4. Sumerian irrigation, where it was practiced, is now judged to have been far less centralized than previously thought, with the shorter canal work being readily organized by local communities. See Wilkinson, “Hydraulic Landscapes and Irrigation Systems,” 48. The same, it appears, was the case in Egypt as well.
5. The question of what precisely constitutes an army is not simple. In early Mesopotamia there are depictions of battles, weapons, armor, and, of course, booty and prisoners from campaigns. The texts make clear that there were both conscription and widespread efforts to avoid it. The first clear textual reference to a standing army, however, comes later under the Akkadian dynast Sargon (2,334–2,279 BCE); Nemet-Rejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, 231.
6. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 127. Definitive archaeological evidence for elite burials occurs later, around 2,700 BCE, and evidence for kings and standing armies only around 2,500 BCE. As there are few documented burials at all before 2,700 BCE, the adage “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” applies.
7. Nissen and Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq, 42.
8. Postgate, “A Sumerian City,” 83.
9. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 130.
10. Nemet-Rejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, 100.
11. As trade developed later during the second millennium BCE, strategic chokepoints on overland and riverine trade routes—places without a rural hinterland—could serve as places of state making. Much later, with the sea transport of bulk commodities, state building at privileged nodes of trade (Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam) might give birth to maritime states receiving much of their food supply by waterborne transport from considerable distances.
12. Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 475.
13. The copper and tin would have been semiprocessed, as the alluvium lacked the high-quality fuel required to smelt.
14. The obvious exceptions would be the natural “chokepoints” on overland trade routes, such as mountain passes and fords and desert oases. The Straits of Melaka, an important node of state formation in Southeast Asia, is a classic example of both water transport routes and a chokepoint, in this case commanding the early India-China maritime trade route.
15. This assertion, which I distinctly recall reading in the opening paragraphs of a history of nineteenth-century Britain, was challenged by one of my readers as a possible “urban myth.” Although I have not been able to retrieve the original citation, I can document the assertion in more substantial ways. A relatively fast stagecoach (before macadam!) was likely to average 20 miles a day. The distance from London to Edinburgh is about 400 miles; hence the trip would take about twenty days. A fast clipper ship in 1800 might travel as much as 460 miles in a single day. The distance from Southampton to Cape Town is roughly 6,000 miles; hence the trip, with fair winds, would take a little more than thirteen days. A slower clipper ship, averaging 300 miles per day, would take twenty days. In more general terms, costs by water in preindustrial Europe were estimated by one authority to be one-twentieth of overland transportation costs. For example, an overland shipment of coal in the sixteenth century lost 10 percent of its value per mile, thus making coal shipments longer than 10 miles profitless. Grain shipments, having more value per unit weight and volume, lost only 0.4 percent of their value per mile traveled, permitting shipment of up to 250 miles before they became a losing proposition. Of course, the threat of predation (highwaymen, brigands, pirates), and therefore the cost of armed escorts, would reduce appreciably these abstract econometric calculations. See Meir Kohn, “The Cost of Transportation in Pre-industrial Europe,” Chapter 5 of The Origins of Western Economic Success: Commerce, Finance, and Government in Pre-industrial Europe, January 2001, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/orgins.html,50–51.
16. Geographic barriers are important in still another respect. Inasmuch as the state requires an abundant population—as cultivators, laborers, soldiers, taxpayers—it helps if they have nowhere to run away to if they become dissatisfied. As Robert Carneiro argued for Mesopotamia, the population was hemmed in, or in his term circumscribed—one might as well say trapped—by a frontier of marshes, sea, arid lands, and mountains so that there was no easy way grain farmers could move away from the state. Would-be state makers had, he argued, a nearly captive population. He argued similarly for the Egyptian and early Yellow River states, bordered by deserts, as compared, say, with the Amazonian Basin or the eastern woodlands of North America. Although there is ample evidence historically of people moving from agriculture to pastoralism, to swiddening, to maritime livelihoods, and even to hunting and gathering, the existence of both geographic and ecological barriers and perhaps hostile peoples makes it easier for pristine states to hold their population on the alluvium. The problem for the Mesopotamian case is that it was relatively easy for agriculturalists to move into pastoralism when desirable and, for that matter, to move northward in the alluvium along the Tigris and/or Euphrates Valleys. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State.”
17. Once again, I am not referring here to the first sedentism but rather to the first durable populated settlements that later gave rise to the first states. The first sedentism in the alluvium was, here as elsewhere, a nonagricultural sedentism based on foraging and hunting at the seams of adjacent ecosystems with abundant resources. Perhaps the first sedentary communities in the world belonged to the coastal Jōmon culture of northeast Japan which was, at 12,000 BCE, contemporaneous with and likely earlier than the Natufian period in the Fertile Crescent. Like the ecosystem described by Pournelle, the rich marine and woodland environment amid which the Jōmon foraged was, like that of the native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, close at hand.
18. Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities,” 202.
19. The Andean crops amaranth and quinoa, in the same family of “pseudocereals,” seem not to have figured as major tax crops, perhaps because their seeds ripen irregularly over a long period. Personal communication, Alder Keleman, September 2015.
20. Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, part III, 171–200.
21. See the parallel argument by Manning, Against the Grain, chapters 1 and 2.
22. As most of the plant nutrients for irrigated rice are delivered in the irrigation water rather than by the soil, such rice cultivation requires less fallowing or animal manure than, say, wheat or maize cultivation to be sustainable for long periods.
23. I elaborated this argument about the political implications of tuber and root cultivation on the one hand and cereal cultivation on the other at great length in The Art of Not Being Governed, 64–97, 178–219. Here I distinguished “state” crops like rice and “state-evading” crops like cassava and potatoes. I argued both that states depended on grain crops on fixed fields and that populations wishing to evade taxation and state control adopted subsistence strategies such as root crops, swidden—shifting—cultivation, hunting, and foraging to place themselves outside of state control. More recently a similar but not identical argument has been made by J. Mayshar et al., “Cereals, Appropriability, and Hierarchy.” The authors note the key difference in appropriability between cereals and roots and tubers, although they fail to see that in many settings what is planted may be a political choice and that embryonic states encourage and often mandate cereal cultivation. While Mayshar et al. correctly associate cereal grains with state and hierarchy and root crops with nonstate, egalitarian societies, they wrongly take subsistence strategies as a primordial given and not the product of political institutions and political choice. Wherever there is adequate water and decent soil, many choices are possible. The authors further assert—apparently on the basis solely of institutional economics’ theory of the provision of public goods—that state creation is a benign, elite-initiated invention to defend the community’s stored grain against “robbers.” My view, by contrast, is that the state originated as a protection racket in which one band of robbers prevailed. While I am delighted to know that others have detected the important relationship between cultivar and state, I must, at the risk of seeming small-spirited, insist on my claim of paternity of this argument, inasmuch as the authors seem unaware of its articulation six years earlier.
24. McNeill, “Frederick the Great and the Propagation of Potatoes.”
25. Adams, “An Interdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City.”
26. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, 6.
27. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 56.
28. Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, 65.
29. Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States, 49. Seth Richardson (personal communication) notes that the text for this quotation is a literary piece addressed to the gods and likely to be unrepresentative.
30. Porter, Mobile Pastoralism, 324. The term “wall” may be misleading, inasmuch as it may well refer to a string of settlements—fortified or unfortified—marking the limit of political control and conceptualized as a state boundary or perimeter.
31. Wang Haicheng, Writing and the Ancient State, 98.
32. There was apparently, prior to state formation, a proto- cuneiform in use a few centuries earlier in large urban institutions—presumably temples—for recording transactions and distributions. David Wengrow, personal communication, May 2015.
33. Nissen, “The Emergence of Writing in the Ancient Near East.” Nissen adds, “The emergence of writing as here elaborated, should by no means lead one to proclaim the invention of writing as one of the great intellectual steps taken by mankind. Its impact on intellectual life was not so sudden as to justify the differentiating of a dark ‘pre-historic’ age from bright history. By the time writing appeared, most of the steps toward a higher, civilized form of living had been taken. Writing appears merely as a by-product along the course of rapid development towards a complex life in towns and states” (360). See also Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 168, who also claims that cuneiform was not used for temple hymns, myths, proverbs, and temple dedications until at least 2,500 BCE.
34. Crawford, Ur, 88.
35. Algaze, “Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia.”
36. This account of early writing in China is drawn largely from Wang Haicheng, Writing and the Ancient State, and Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires.
37. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, 274.
38. Algaze, “Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia,” 220–222, quoting C. C. Lambert-Karlovsky. See also Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 220–237.
1. Steinkeller and Hudson, “Introduction: Labor in the Early States: An Early Mesopotamian Perspective,” Labor in the Ancient World, 1–35.
2. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics.
3. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, 1–28. Much the same logic is behind the frequently observed “backward bending supply curve for labor” in which precapitalist peoples will engage in wage work with a particular objective (sometimes called a “target income”) in mind (wedding expenses, the purchase of a mule) and will, contrary to standard microeconomic logic, work less when the wage is higher, as they will meet their objective that much sooner.
4. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, 73.
5. In agrarian societies, the patriarchal family is something of a microcosm of this situation. Holding onto the labor—physical and reproductive—of the women in the family as well as the labor of the children is central to its success, especially the success of its CEO, the patriarch!
6. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 221.
7. Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia,” 9, 20. The verb “to herd” is, I think, not inadvertent; inasmuch as absconding subjects are compared to “a scattered herd of cattle” (29). Even the wars between the major states had the purpose of reducing the enemy’s manpower, the key to successful statecraft (21–22).
8. Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.
9. Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 2.
10. For the relationship of state building to slavery and slave raiding, see my The Art of Not Being Governed, 85–94.
11. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?”
12. Ibid., 164.
13. The account immediately below is drawn from Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State; Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of the Ancient States and Civilizations; Adams, “An Interdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City”; Algaze, “Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia”; McCorriston, “The Fiber Revolution.”
14. But for a view more in line with my reading, see Diakanoff, Structure of Society and State in Early Dynastic Sumer.
15. Gelb, “Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia.”
16. Tate Paulette examines this process of assessment, collection, and storage in detail, particularly for the third-millennium alluvium settlement Fara, in “Grain, Storage, and State-Making in Mesopotamia.”
17. Algaze, “The End of Prehistory and the Uruk Period,” 81. Algaze is relying here on R. K. Englund, “Texts from the Late Uruk Period,” in Josef Bauer, Robert K. Englund, and Manfred Krebernik, eds., Mesopotamien: Späturuk-Zeit und frühdynastische Zeit (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1998), 236.
18. Algaze, “The End of History and the Uruk Period,” 81.
19. The conventional Romanization of the cuneiform term is “[e2 asīrī].”
20. Seri, The House of Prisoners, 259. The date is two centuries after Ur III, and the circumstances are somewhat exceptional, but I am assuming that many of the practices described bear a family resemblance to earlier practices; the rest of the paragraph is drawn from her account.
21. Nissen and Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq, 31.
22. Gelb, “Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia,” 90; and, later but perhaps relevant, Tenney, Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society, 114, 133.
23. Tenney, Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society, 105, 107–118.
24. Piotr Steinkeller, “The Employment of Labor on National Building Projects in the Ur III Period,” in Steinkeller and Hudson, Labor in the Ancient World, 137–236. Steinkeller and others, it should be added, take a rosy view of major monumental building projects, treating them as festive interludes during which the workforce was well fed and given plenty of entertainment and drink—rather like the cooperative harvest rituals found in the anthropological literature.
25. See, for example, Menu, “Captifs de guerre et dépendance rurale dans l’Égypte du Nouvel Empire”; Lehner, “Labor and the Pyramids”; and Goelet, “Problems of Authority, Compulsion, and Compensation.”
26. Quoted in Goelet, “Problems of Authority, Compulsion, and Compensation,” 570.
27. Nemet-Rejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, 188.
28. The event was during the reign of Ramses III. Quoted in Maria Golia, “After Tahrir,” Times Literary Supplement, February 12, 2016, p. 14.
29. The account immediately below owes much to Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires; Keightley, The Origins of Chinese Civilization; and Yates, “Slavery in Early China.”
30. See, for example, Yates, “Slavery in Early China.”
31. Readers will perhaps have noted that mass migration to northern Europe and North America, though largely voluntary, accomplishes much the same thing in terms of making the productive life of people raised and trained elsewhere available to the country where they settle.
32. Taylor, “Believing the Ancients.” For a dissent from this position, see Scheidel, “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves.”
33. Rather than a victory, the battle seems actually to have been a standoff, although the term “Armageddon” comes to us from the clash.
34. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 173.
35. Cameron, “Captives and Culture Change.”
36. See, especially, Steinkeller, “The Employment of Labor on National Building Projects”; Richardson, “Building Larsa”; Dietler and Herbich, “Feasts and Labor Mobilization.” Richardson establishes that the amount of labor required to build, say, a city wall was a good deal less than commonly supposed. It is impossible, on the other hand, to determine the quotidian conditions of labor from the self-inflating official declarations of the sumptuous feasts given to “the people” on the completion of a temple. The social bedrock of these arguments rests on the relative ease of flight by discontented subjects. This perspective overlooks the measures taken against flight, as well as the possible ease of capturing replacements by war or purchase.
37. Algaze, “The Uruk Expansion.”
38. Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees. On the practice in early Mesopotamia, see Gelb, “Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia.”
39. Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees, 20. The scribes report 4.5 million deportees over three hundred years, though those figures seem to be grossly inflated by imperial bluster.
40. Nissen and Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq, 80.
41. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 544; quoted in Darwin, After Tamerlane, 24. Tocqueville adds, “Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity.” For a similar analogy between animal and human domestication, see also the remarkable book by Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire, 15. For a brilliant analysis of the analogy between domesticated animals and slaves in the antebellum U. S. South, see Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature.”
1. Adams, “Strategies of Maximization, Stability, and Resilience.”
2. Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, and McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse.
3. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, 356.
4. For Mycenaean Greece, David Small argues that “collapse” was actually a “devolution” into the smaller and more stable units of small-scale lineages that remained intact and were the building blocks of the larger political formations; “Surviving the Collapse.”
5. Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, 30, 60.
6. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 187.
7. Brinkman, “Settlement Surveys and Documentary Evidence.”
8. Algaze, “The Uruk Expansion,” and Wengrow, What Makes Civilization, 75–82.
9. See Harrison, Contagion, for a history of quarantine.
10. Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now, 217.
11. Better known as the Antonine plague. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 393.
12. See in this connection the important work of Radkau, Nature and Power; Meiggs, Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World; and Hughes, The Mediterranean.
13. McMahon, “North Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium BC.” For a description of the woodland assemblage of the Upper Euphrates, see Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, 51–63.
14. Deacon, “Deforestation and Ownership.”
15. Mithen, After the Ice, 87.
16. See the comparative figures for relative loss of soil and precipitation runoff for “bare soil,” “sown with millet,” “grassland,” and “ungrazed thicket” in Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments, 101.
17. Mithen, After the Ice, 50.
18. McNeill, Mountains of the Mediterranean World, 73–75.
19. Artzy and Hillel, “A Defense of the Theory of Progressive Salinization.”
20. Adams, “Strategies of Maximization, Stability, and Resilience.”
21. Nissen and Heine, From Mesopotamia to Iraq, 71.
22. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 485. Thucydides also refers to the defection of disillusioned soldiers who had thought they would make money from the campaign without having to fight.
23. The Athenian confederacy was, one might well argue, put in jeopardy by measures of desperation more than a decade earlier. In 425 BCE the Athenians tripled the levies of material and men from their tributaries, this increasing the odds of desertion.
24. I owe this insight to Victor Lieberman; see his Strange Parallels, 1: 1–40.
25. A noted metaphor of my ex-colleague Ed Lindblom.
26. Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, 260.
27. Quoted in Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now, 194.
28. David O’Connor, “Society and Individual in Early Egypt,” in Richards and van Buren, Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States, 21–35.
29. Ibid., and Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, 277.
30. Here I elaborate on the general line of skepticism originally developed in Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, and McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse.
31. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies.
32. See G. W. Bowersock, “The Dissolution of the Roman Empire,” in Yoffee and Cowgill, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, 165–175. Bowersock claims that the Empire disappeared only with the later Arab invasion.
33. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 364.
34. Riehl, “Variability in Ancient Near Eastern Environmental and Agricultural Development.”
35. Adams, “Strategies of Maximization, Stability, and Resilience,” 334.
36. Adams, The Land Behind Bagdad, 55.
37. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, 349.
38. Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia,” 16.
39. “Indeed, the land turns round as does a potter’s wheel. The robber possesses riches . . .”; Bell, “The Dark Ages in Ancient History,” 75.
40. McNeill, Plagues and People, 58–71. David Wengrow (personal communication) believes that the contact via trade and exchange throughout the area would have worked against the isolation of populations that makes possible epidemics among immunologically “naïve” populations. While this is surely true for the major population centers and the trade routes between them, it may be less true for nonstate peoples off the major trade routes and living in populations small enough that many of the common infectious diseases would not have become endemic. McNeill’s conjecture remains just that and awaits further investigation.
1. By “taxation” I mean any more or less regular charge on the production, labor, or revenue of subjects. In early states, “taxes” are likely to take the form of levies in kind (for example, from the harvest of cultivators) or the form of labor (corvée).
2. My colleague Peter Perdue, an expert on the China borderland and nonstate people generally, would put the terminal date later, at the end of the eighteenth century, when, he observes, “nearly all the frontiers of the globe had been occupied by settlers and merchants, and global commodity traders were extracting resources from all the major continents”; personal communication.
3. J. N. Postgate distinguishes, in the Mesopotamian case, “mountain” raids as compared with “pastoralist” raids, terming the latter as more likely to destroy the state; Early Mesopotamia, 9.
4. Skaria, Hybrid Histories, 132.
5. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 229.
6. For a useful summary of what we know about the “sea people” and what is in dispute, see Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition.
7. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 331.
8. Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” 208.
9. Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 486.
10. Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” 200.
11. Porter, Mobile Pastoralism, 324. As Porter has also shown, the Amorites were more a branch of Mesopotamian society than “barbarians.” They were, to be sure, challengers and usurpers but they were not “outsiders” (61).
12. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 150.
13. Quoted in volume 1 of Coatsworth et al., Global Connections, 76.
14. Clastres, La Société contre l’État.
15. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 76.
16. Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 476–481.
17. Ibid., quoting E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 185–186.
18. Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 481.
19. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8, quoted in Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 333.
20. Spartacus and his rebels, it should be noted, were seeking to leave Italy but were stopped by treachery and, finally, by Sulla’s army. For a history of state-fleeing practices in upland Southeast Asia, see my The Art of Not Being Governed.
21. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 238.
22. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 333–334.
23. Wengrow, What Makes Civilization, 99.
24. One could argue, analogously, that large herd animals, by virtue of being relatively “sedentary” and assembling in large numbers at certain times of the year, were uniquely vulnerable to “raiding,” aka “hunting,” by Homo sapiens with dogs, spears, and bows and hence likely to be among the among the first species to be threatened with extinction as soon as the population of such hunters became numerous.
25. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 321.
26. Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.
27. Perdue reminds me that the relationship between mobile raiders and sedentary creatures may also be found in the animal and insect kingdoms. They are different and, to some degree, competitive subsistence strategies.
28. Owen Lattimore, “On the Wickedness of Being Nomads.”
29. Quoted in Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 69.
30. Paul Astrom, “Continuity and Discontinuity: Indigenous and Foreign Elements in Cyprus Around 1200 BC,” in Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, 80–86, quotation on 83.
31. Susan Sherratt, “‘Sea Peoples’ and the Economic Structure of the Late Second Millennium in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, 292–313, quotation on 305.
32. This logic is worked out nicely by Charles Tilly in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.”
33. William Irons, “Cultural Capital, Livestock Raiding.”
34. Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations,” 169–170.
35. Flannery, “Origins and Ecological Effect of Early Domestication.”
36. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, 358. See also the elegant schematic application of this logic to the traditional riverine statelets in the Malay world in Bronson, “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends.”
37. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 328–329. See also Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies.
38. Fletcher, “The Mongols,” 42.
39. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 378.
40. Ibid., especially Chapter 7.
41. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
42. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 327–328.
43. Artzy, “Routes, Trade, Boats and ‘Nomads of the Sea,’” 439–448.
44. Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 504.
45. Fletcher distinguishes between, on the one hand, “steppe” no- mads, who interact far less with settled peoples and agrarian states and for whom raiding is as important as trading, and, on the other, “desert” nomads, who are more likely to have routine trading relations with sedentary communities and urban society; Fletcher, “The Mongols,” 41.
46. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires.”
47. See, in this connection, Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan, and Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire.
48. Ferguson and Whitehead, “The Violent Edge of Empire,” 23.
49. Kradin, “Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective,” 504. See also Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations,” for a similar view.