The search for ‘early civilisation’ in ancient societies has obscured the diverse ways in which ancient societies survived and thrived.
The task I’ve set myself here is to think about the history of civilisation before the state. Why should this be so difficult? And why is it nevertheless a task worth pursuing? The answers lie partly in a set of widespread assumptions about what constitutes a civilisation in world history. It is common, for example, to group a whole series of ancient societies together under the banner of ‘early civilisation’. The ones that usually get included are ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Classic Maya, the Aztecs, Shang China, the Inca Empire and the Yoruba kingdoms of West Africa. But when it comes to defining what these particular societies have in common, the concept of civilisation seems to drop out of the equation. Suddenly the focus shifts, without explanation, to other factors that can be easily described without any use of the term civilisation – factors such as class stratification, urbanisation, centralised (and often literate) administration, sacred kingship, economic exploitation of the many by the few and so on. ‘Civilisation’, by this point, has simply become an umbrella term for a whole cluster of other cultural attributes that are basically to do with the effective exercise of power by a small and determined elite. In other words, ‘early civilisation’ and ‘state formation’ have become indistinguishable from one another as historical and descriptive categories.
Sensing the trap of a circular argument, some anthropologists have tried, albeit tentatively, to separate these two things out. For instance, in cases of early civilisations that are made up of politically independent city-states – such as the Classical Maya or ancient Mesopotamia – the term ‘civilisation’ is sometimes used to refer to the shared cultural and cosmological milieu within which multiple states exist: a kind of overarching set of guidelines about the proper moral relationships among mortals, kings and gods that encompasses the strategic rivalries of political factions. Yet the more fundamental equation between state and civilisation as coeval stages of social development stands largely unquestioned. This might be defensible were it possible to argue that only the power of centralised states is capable of generating such large-scale patterns of cultural uniformity and moral consensus. But as we shall see, this is very far from being the case.
Also largely unquestioned are the wider historical implications of a term such as ‘early civilisation’, which must then imply that there is also such as a thing as ‘late’ or ‘developed’ civilisation. Where then would we locate the transition from one to the other? Was medieval Europe – with its sacred kingdoms and administrative elites – an early or a late civilisation? Have we, in fact, until very recently – say, until the political revolutions of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries – been living under social and political conditions that are basically analogous to those of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia? How different in structure were the ‘old regimes’ of Europe from what are sometimes described as ‘archaic states’ or ‘early civilisations’? Fencing off early civilisation as a distinct stage in human history can quickly become an arbitrary and subjective affair.
No less arbitrary, it seems, are the initial criteria on which current definitions of ‘early civilisation’ are grounded. Urbanism, for instance, was sometimes characteristic of societies that actually exhibit very little evidence for pronounced class stratification. To continue describing the appearance of 250-hectare settlements in fourth millennium BC Mesopotamia as an ‘urban revolution’ begins to look a little strange when we realise that, during the same period, the prehistoric societies of Eastern Europe – from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dniepr River – were forming settlements of over 400 hectares. The Ukrainian site of Talianki, for instance, is thought to have held something in the order of 10,000 inhabitants. What is so striking about these earliest European cities is that they achieved such immense sizes with no apparent need for centralised government, bureaucracy or a political elite. And their ground plans – forming concentric rings of similarly designed households – suggest a robustly egalitarian ethos. Yet they are usually excluded from the roster of ‘early civilisations’ and their (potentially enormous) implications for how we understand the root causes of social inequality go largely unrecognised. Studies of human political evolution seem to remain, for the most part, oblivious to the whole phenomenon and happily continue to assume that urban egalitarianism was something confined to a very brief period of mid-twentieth-century Catalonian history.
Similar points could be made about bureaucracy. Although often included as a key component within the list of attributes shared by ‘early civilisation’, complex administration in fact turns out to predate the emergence of cities and kingship by thousands of years. In Upper Mesopotamia – what is now inland Syria and northern Iraq – there is clear evidence for the use of complex bureaucratic devices, such as commodity seals and economic archives, in small-scale farming communities as far back as the 7th millennium BC. Why such devices were adopted in what must essentially have been face-to-face societies remains something of a mystery. And, again, the writers of general sourcebooks on world history seem largely content to ignore the facts and continue to describe specialised administration as a distinct evolutionary feature of urban civilisations.
It is worth adding at this point that the invention of the first writing systems was – in many parts of the world – a gradual development from these much earlier systems of bureaucratic notation, rather than a revolutionary innovation. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the case of Mesopotamian cuneiform, which has been shown to evolve from systems of numerical representation that can be traced back – on at least one interpretation – almost to the origins of farming itself.
What, then, about class or caste distinctions and other forms of social inequality? Can these be more legitimately regarded as defining criteria of ‘early civilisation’? Surely not, since archaeologists have carefully traced clear and pronounced evidence of status differentiation back to the period of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, long before the origins of sedentary life, let alone cities or literacy. Consider, for example, the exceptionally preserved site of Sungir in Russia, which offers striking evidence for the concentration of material wealth – prestigious weapons and thousands of finely worked body ornaments – within the burials of a middle-aged man and two children; or, indeed, the monumental stone temples of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, built over 10,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers, who were contemporaries and neighbours of the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent.
Deducing the political structures of prehistoric societies from their material remains is no simple task. But at the very least, such dramatic findings should lead us to question the persistence – even in quite specialised literature – of a Rousseau-like vision of the childhood of man, in which hunter-gatherer societies are still portrayed as invariably small and essentially egalitarian bands. It is worth noting in this context that, when disturbingly hierarchical features are found among hunter-gatherer societies, the tendency has been to compare them with the playing out of dominance hierarchies among chimpanzees and other higher primates, as opposed to viewing them in the perspective of other types of human political systems, such as those of early states and ‘civilisations’. The implication, whether or not the authors of such views realise it, seems to be either that hunter-gatherers are in some sense closer to chimpanzees than they are to other human beings, or that politicians as a distinct social class have more in common with chimpanzees than they do with most other human beings. I personally find the latter interpretation to be the more plausible. At a more general level, we might also ask why some people find it necessary – even in the face of contradictory evidence – to equate ‘civilisation’ with the growth of authoritarian, agro-industrial states? What is really at stake here?
From Engelsberg Ideas, here.