In Remembrance of a modern Anarchist: David Graeber

Jul 18, 2025

David’s autobiography: https://davidgraeber.org/about-david-graeber/

Chapter 10 excerpted from “The Dawn Of Everything: The New History Of Humanity” by David Graeber

Why the State Has No Origin

The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics

The quest for the ‘origins of the state’ is almost as long-standing, and hotly contested, as the pursuit of the ‘origins of social inequality’ – and in many ways, it is just as much of a fool’s errand. It is generally accepted that, today, pretty much everyone in the world lives under the authority of a state; likewise, a broad feeling exists that past polities such as Pharaonic Egypt, Shang China, the Inca Empire or the kingdom of Benin qualify as states, or at least as ‘early states’. However, with no consensus among social theorists about what a state actually is, the problem is how to come up with a deﬁnition that includes all these cases but isn’t so broad as to be absolutely meaningless. This has proved surprisingly hard to do.

Our term ‘the state’ only came into common usage in the late sixteenth century, when it was coined by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, who also wrote, among many other things, an inﬂuential treatise on witchcraft, werewolves and the history of sorcerers. (He is further remembered today for his profound hatred of women.) But perhaps the ﬁrst to attempt a systematic deﬁnition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be deﬁned as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this deﬁnition has since come to be identiﬁed with the sociologist Max Weber). On this deﬁnition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf.

Von Ihering’s deﬁnition worked fairly well for modern states. However, it soon became clear that for most of human history, rulers either didn’t make such grandiose claims – or, if they did, their claims to a monopoly on coercive force held about the same status as their claims to control the tides or the weather. To retain von Ihering and Weber’s deﬁnition one would either have to conclude that, say, Hammurabi’s Babylon, Socrates’ Athens or England under William the Conqueror weren’t states at all – or come up with a more ﬂexible or nuanced deﬁnition. Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their ﬁrst appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, ofﬁcially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage (a line of thinking very much in the tradition of Rousseau). This deﬁnition brought Babylon, Athens and medieval England back into the fold, but also introduced new conceptual problems, such as how to deﬁne exploitation. And it was unpalatable to liberals, ruling out any possibility that the state could ever become a benevolent institution.

For much of the twentieth century, social scientists preferred to deﬁne a state in more purely functional terms. As society became more complex, they argued, it was increasingly necessary for people to create top-down structures of command in order to co-ordinate everything. This same logic is still followed in essence by most contemporary theorists of social evolution. Evidence of ‘social complexity’ is automatically treated as evidence for the existence of some sort of governing apparatus. If one can speak, say, of a settlement hierarchy with four levels (e.g. cities, towns, villages, hamlets), and if at least some of those settlements also contained full-time craft specialists (potters, blacksmiths, monks and nuns, professional soldiers or musicians), then whatever apparatus administered it must ipso facto be a state. And even if that apparatus did not claim a monopoly of force, or support a class of elites living off the toil of benighted labourers, this was inevitably going to happen sooner or later.

This deﬁnition, too, has its advantages, especially when speculating about very ancient societies, whose nature and organization has to be teased out from fragmentary remains; but its logic is entirely circular. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state.

Actually, almost all these ‘classic’ theoretical formulations of the last century started off from exactly this assumption: that any large and complex society necessarily required a state. The real bone of contention was, why? Was it for good practical reasons? Or was it because any such society would necessarily produce a material surplus, and if there was a material surplus – like, for instance, all that smoked ﬁsh on the Paciﬁc Northwest Coast – then there would also, necessarily, be people who managed to grab hold of a disproportionate share?

As we’ve already seen in Chapter Eight, these assumptions don’t hold up particularly well for the earliest cities. Early Uruk, for example, does not appear to have been a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the word; what’s more, 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, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don’t seem to qualify as ‘states’ either. If there is a good ethnographic parallel for these latter groups it might be 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.

Recall, here, that Haida, Tlingit and the rest not only lacked anything that could be called a state apparatus; they lacked any kind of formal governmental institutions.¹

One might then argue that ‘states’ ﬁrst emerged when the two forms of governance (bureaucratic and heroic) merged together. A case could be made. But equally we might ask if this is really such a signiﬁcant issue in the ﬁrst place? If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it’s equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a ‘state’ and another isn’t? Are there not more interesting and important questions we could be asking?

In this chapter we are going to explore the possibility that there are. What would history look like if – instead of assuming that there must be some deep internal resemblance between the governments of, say, ancient Egypt and modern Britain, and our task is therefore to ﬁgure out precisely what it is – we were to look at the whole problem with new eyes. There is no doubt that, in most of the areas that saw the rise of cities, powerful kingdoms and empires also eventually emerged. What did they have in common? Did they, in fact, have anything in common? What does their appearance really tell us about the history of human freedom and equality, or its loss? In what way, if any, do they mark a fundamental break with what came before?

IN WHICH WE LAY OUT A THEORY CONCERNING THE THREE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DOMINATION, AND BEGIN TO EXPLORE ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN HISTORY

The best way to go about this task, we suggest, is by returning to ﬁrst principles. 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. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?

Recall how Rousseau, in his famous thought experiment, felt that everything went back to private property, and especially property in land: in that terrible moment when a man ﬁrst threw up a barrier and said, ‘This territory is mine, and mine alone’, all subsequent forms of domination – and therefore, all subsequent catastrophes – became inevitable. As we’ve seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and as a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon – indeed, if ‘the West’ has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms. So, to begin a thought experiment of a slightly different kind, it might be good to start right here. What are we really saying when we say that the power of a feudal aristocracy, or a landed gentry, or absentee landlords is ‘based on land’?

Often we use such language as a way of cutting through airy abstractions or high-minded pretensions to address simple material realities. For example, the two dominant political parties in nineteenth-century England, the Whigs and the Tories, liked to represent themselves as arguing about ideas: a certain conception of free-market liberalism versus a certain notion of tradition. An historical materialist might object that, in fact, Whigs represented the interests of the commercial classes, and the Tories those of the landowners. They are of course right. It would be foolhardy to deny it. What we might question, however, is the premise that ‘landed’ (or any other form of) property is itself particularly material. Yes: soil, stones, grass, hedges, farm buildings and granaries are all material things; but when one speaks of ‘landed property’ what one is really talking about is an individual’s claim to exclusive access and control over all the soil, stones, grass, hedges, etc. within a speciﬁc territory. In practice, this means a legal right to keep anyone else off it. Land is only really ‘yours’, in this sense, if no one would think to challenge your claim over it, or if you have the capacity to summon at will people with weapons to threaten or attack anyone who disagrees, or just enters without permission and refuses to leave. Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory – just within a much smaller territory than a nation state.

All this might sound a little abstract, but it is a simple description of what happens in reality, as any reader who has ever tried to squat a piece of land, occupy a building or for that matter overthrow a government will be keenly aware. Ultimately, everyone knows it all comes down to whether someone will eventually be given orders to remove you by force, and if it does, then everything comes down to whether that someone is actually willing to follow orders. 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.

So does that mean property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) ‘from the barrel of a gun’ – or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them?

No. Or not exactly.

To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also ﬂaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?

Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest conﬁdants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.

Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.

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.² The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well ﬁnd hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).

Today, it is quite commonplace – for instance, in parts of Africa and Papua New Guinea – to ﬁnd initiation ceremonies that are so complex as to require bureaucratic management, where initiates are gradually introduced to higher and higher levels of arcane knowledge, in societies where there are otherwise no formal ranks of any sort. Even where such hierarchies of knowledge do not exist, there will obviously always be individual differences. Some people will be considered more charming, funny, intelligent or physically attractive than others. This will always make some sort of difference, even within groups that develop elaborate safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t (as, for instance, with the ritual mockery of successful hunters among ‘egalitarian’ foragers like the Hadza).

As we’ve noted, an egalitarian ethos can take one of two directions: it can either deny such individual quirks entirely, and insist that people are (or at least should be) treated as if they were exactly the same; or it can celebrate their quirks in such a way as to imply that everyone is so profoundly different that any overall ranking would be inconceivable. (After all, how do you measure the best ﬁsherman against the most digniﬁed elder, against the person who tells the funniest jokes, and so on?). In such cases, it might happen that certain ‘extreme individuals’ – if we may call them that – do gain an outstanding, even leadership role. Here we might think of Nuer prophets, or certain Amazonian shamans, Malagasy mpomasy or astrologer-magicians, or for that matter the ‘rich’ burials of the Upper Palaeolithic, which so often focus on individuals with strikingly anomalous physical (and probably other) attributes. As those examples imply, however, such characters are so highly unusual that it would be difﬁcult to turn their authority into any sort of ongoing power.

What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state. In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are ‘sovereign’: they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates into von Ihering’s monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory. In theory, a true sovereign exercised a power that was above and beyond the law. Ancient kings were rarely able to enforce this power systematically (often, as we’ve seen, their supposedly absolute power really just meant they were the only people who could mete out arbitrary violence within about 100 yards of where they were standing or sitting at any given time). In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy. As Weber, the great sociologist of bureaucracy, observed long ago, administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘ofﬁcial secrets’ of one sort or another. This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.

The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom – it makes possible surveillance states and totalitarian regimes – but this danger, we are always assured, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it’s generally felt they really should be. Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.

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

Just as access to violence, information and charisma deﬁnes the very possibilities of social domination, so the modern state is deﬁned as a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political ﬁeld.⁴ It seems only natural, then, that we should examine history in this light too; but as soon as we try to do so, we realize there is no actual reason why these three principles should go together, let alone reinforce each other in the precise fashion we have come to expect from governments today. For one thing, the three elementary forms of domination have entirely separate historical origins. We’ve already seen this in ancient Mesopotamia, where initially the bureaucratic-commercial societies of the river valleys existed in tension with the heroic polities of the hills and their endless petty princelings, vying for the loyalty of retainers through spectacular contests of one sort or another; while the hill people, in turn, rejected the very principle of administration.

Nor is there any compelling evidence that ancient Mesopotamian cities, even when ruled by royal dynasties, achieved any measure of real territorial sovereignty, so we are still a long way here from anything like an embryonic version of the modern state.⁵ In other words, they simply weren’t states in von Ihering’s sense of the term; and even if they had been, it makes little sense to deﬁne a state simply in terms of sovereignty. Recall the example of the Natchez of Louisiana, whose Great Sun wielded absolute power within his own (rather small) Great Village, where he could order summary executions and appropriate goods pretty much as he had a mind to, but whose subjects largely ignored him when he wasn’t around.

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 can now begin to see, modern states are, in fact, an amalgam of elements that happen to have come together at a certain point in human history – and, arguably, are now in the process of coming apart again (consider, for instance, how we currently have planetary bureaucracies, such as the WTO or IMF, with no corresponding principle of global sovereignty). When historians, philosophers or political scientists argue about the origin of the state in ancient Peru or China, what they are really doing is projecting that rather unusual constellation of elements backwards: typically, by trying to ﬁnd a moment when something like sovereign power came together with something like an administrative system (the competitive political ﬁeld is usually considered somewhat optional). What interests them is precisely how and why these elements came together in the ﬁrst place.

For instance, a standard story of human political evolution told by earlier generations of scholars was that states arose from the need to manage complex irrigation systems, or perhaps just large concentrations of people and information. This gave rise to top-down power, which in turn came to be tempered, eventually, by democratic institutions. That would imply a sequence of development somewhat like this:

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:

This may well have happened in some cases – Mesopotamia, for example – but it seems unlikely to be the only way in which such developments might culminate in something that (to us at least) resembles a state. In other places and times – often in moments of crisis – the process may begin with the elevation to pre-eminent roles of charismatic individuals who inspire their followers to make a radical break with the past. Eventually, such ﬁgureheads assume a kind of absolute, cosmic authority, which is ﬁnally translated into a system of bureaucratic roles and ofﬁces.⁷ The path then might look more like this:

What we are challenging here is not any particular formulation, but the underlying teleology. All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, a form which was gradually imposed on the rest of the world after both world wars.

What if this wasn’t true?

What we are going to do here is to see what happens if we approach the history of some of the world’s ﬁrst kingdoms and empires without any such preconceptions. Along with the origins of the state, we will also be putting aside such similarly vague and teleological notions as the ‘birth of civilization’ or the ‘rise of social complexity’ in order to take a closer look at what actually happened. How did large-scale forms of domination ﬁrst emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day?

Let’s start by examining those few cases in the pre-Columbian Americas which even the greatest sticklers for deﬁnition tend to agree were ‘states’ of some kind.

ON AZTECS, INCA AND MAYA (AND THEN ALSO SPANIARDS)

The general consensus is that there were only two unambiguous ‘states’ in the Americas at the time of the Spanish conquest: the Aztecs and the Inca. Of course, that is not how the Spanish would have referred to them. Hernán Cortés, in his letters and communications, wrote of cities, kingdoms and occasionally republics. He hesitated to refer to the Aztec ruler, Moctezuma, as an ‘emperor’ – presumably so as not to risk rufﬂing the feathers of his own lord, the ‘most Catholic emperor Charles V’. But it would never have occurred to him to ponder whether any of these kingdoms or cities qualiﬁed as ‘states’, since the concept barely existed at the time. Nonetheless, this is the question which has preoccupied modern scholars, so let us consider each of these polities in turn.

We will begin with an anecdote, recorded in a Spanish source not long after the conquista, about the raising of children in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, shortly before it fell to Spanish forces: ‘at birth boys were given a shield with four arrows. The midwife prayed that they might be courageous warriors. They were presented four times to the sun and told of the uncertainties of life and the need to go to war. Girls, on the other hand, were given spindles and shuttles as a symbol of their future dedication to homely tasks.’⁸ It is hard to say how widespread this practice was, but it points to something fundamental in Aztec society. 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. How far back this erosion of female political power went among the Aztecs is unclear (certain lines of evidence, such as the obligation for high-ranking advisors at court to take on the cultic role of Cihuacóatl – or ‘Snake Woman’ – suggest not far at all). What we do know is that masculinity, often expressed through sexual violence, became part of the dynamics of imperial expansion.⁹ Indeed, the rape and enslavement of conquered women were among the primary grievances reported to Cortés and his men by Aztec subjects in Veracruz,¹⁰ who by 1519 were willing to take their chances with a band of unknown Spanish freebooters.

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.

Theirs seems to have been a ‘capturing society’ not unlike some of the other, more recent Amerindian societies we’ve explored, but on an inﬁnitely greater scale. Enemies taken in war were kept, nurtured to ensure their vitality – sometimes in luxurious circumstances – but then ﬁnally killed by ritual specialists to repay a primordial debt of life to the gods, and presumably for any number of other reasons too. At Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor the result was a veritable industry of pious bloodletting, which some Spanish observers took as clear proof that the Aztec ruling classes were in league with Satan.¹¹

This is how the Aztecs attempted to impress their neighbours, and it is still how they impress themselves on the human imagination today: the image of thousands of prisoners, waiting in line to have their hearts torn out by masked god-impersonators, is, admittedly, difﬁcult to get out of one’s head. In other respects, however, the sixteenth-century Aztecs seemed to the Spaniards to present a rather familiar picture of human government; certainly, more familiar than anything they encountered in the Caribbean or in the swamps and savannahs of Yucatán. Monarchy, ranks of ofﬁcialdom, military cadres and organized religion (however ‘demonic’) were all highly developed. Urban planning in the Valley of Mexico, as some Spaniards remarked, seemed superior to what was found in their Castilian cities back home. Sumptuary laws, no less elaborate than in Spain, kept a respectable distance between governing and governed, dictating everything from fashion to sexual mores. Tribute and taxation were overseen by calpixque who, appointed from among the ranks of commoners, were unable to turn their knowledge of administration into political power (a preserve of noblemen and warriors). In the conquered territories local nobles were kept in place, obedience being assured by a patronage system that tied them to sponsors at the Aztec court. Here too the Spaniards found resonance with their practice of aeque principali, which granted autonomy to newly acquired territories so long as their local headmen supplied annual tithes to the Crown.¹²

Like the Spanish Habsburgs, who became their overlords, the Aztec warrior aristocracy had risen from relatively humble origins to create one of the world’s largest empires. Even their Triple Alliance paled, however, when compared with what the conquistadors found in the Peruvian Andes.

In Spain, as in much of Eurasia, mountains offered refuge from the coercive power of kings and emperors; rebels, bandits and heretics hid out in the highlands. But in Inca Peru, everything seemed to work the other way round. Mountains formed the backbone of imperial power. This upside- down (to European eyes) political world, conceived atop the Andean Cordillera, was the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu, meaning ‘quarters closely bound’.¹³

More precisely, Tawantinsuyu refers to the four suyus or major administrative units of the Sapa Inca’s domain. From their capital at Cuzco, where it was said even grass was made of gold, Inca of royal blood extracted periodic mit’a – a rotating labour tribute, or corvée – from some millions of subjects distributed across the western littoral of South America, from Quito to Santiago.¹⁴ 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. Nevertheless, if Tawantinsuyu is to be considered a state, it was still very much a state in formation.

Just as the popular image of the Aztecs turns on mass carnage, popular images of the Inca tend to portray them as master administrators: as we’ve seen, Enlightenment thinkers like Madame de Grafﬁgny and her readers formed their ﬁrst impression of what a welfare state, or even state socialism, might be like by contemplating accounts of the empire in the Andes. In reality, Inca efﬁciency was decidedly uneven. The empire, after all, was over 2,500 miles long. In villages at any appreciable distance from Cuzco, Chan Chan or other centres of royal power, the imperial apparatus made, at best, a sporadic appearance and many villages remained largely self-governing. Chroniclers and ofﬁcials like Juan Polo de Ondegardo y Zárate were intrigued to discover that while typical Andean villages did indeed have a complex administrative apparatus, that apparatus appeared to be entirely home-grown, based on collective associations called ayllu. In order to accommodate imperial demands for tribute or corvée labour, local communities had merely tweaked these collectives slightly.¹⁵

The imperial centre of the Inca Empire forms a stark contrast with that of the Aztec. Moctezuma, despite his grandeur (his palace contained everything from an aviary to quarters for troupes of comic dwarfs), was ofﬁcially just the tlatoani or ‘ﬁrst speaker’ in a council of aristocrats, and his empire ofﬁcially a Triple Alliance of three cities. For all the bloodthirsty spectacle, the Aztec Empire was really a confederation of noble families.

Indeed, the spectacle itself seems to have been at least partly rooted in the same spirit of aristocratic one-upmanship that spurred Aztec nobles to compete in public ball games, or for that matter philosophical debate. The Inca, in contrast, insisted their sovereign was himself the incarnate Sun. All authority derived from a single point of radiance – the person of Sapa Inca (Unique Inca) himself – cascading downwards through ranks of royal siblings. The Inca court was an incubator, a hothouse for sovereignty.

Compressed within its walls were not only the household of the living king and his sister, who was also his Coya (queen), but also the administrative heads, chief priests and imperial guard of the kingdom, most of them blood relatives of the king.

Being a god, the Sapa Inca never really died. The bodies of former kings were preserved, wrapped and mummiﬁed, much like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt; like the pharaohs, too, they held court from beyond the grave, receiving regular offerings of food and clothing from their former rural estates – though unlike the mummiﬁed bodies of Egyptian pharaohs, which at least remained conﬁned to their tombs, their Peruvian equivalents were wheeled out to attend public events and sponsored festivals.¹⁶ (One reason why each new ruler was obliged to expand the empire was precisely this: they only inherited the old ruler’s army. His court, lands and retainers remained in the dead Inca’s hands.) This extraordinary concentration of power around the Inca’s own body had a ﬂip side: royal authority was extremely difﬁcult to delegate.

The most important ofﬁcials were ‘honorary Inca’ who, while not directly related to the sovereign, were allowed to wear the same ear ornaments and were otherwise seen as an extension of his personage. Statue doubles or other substitutes might also be employed – there was an elaborate ritual protocol surrounding these – but to do anything important, the Sapa Inca’s personal presence was required, meaning the court was continually on the move, with the royal person being regularly carried through the ‘four quarters’ in a litter lined with silver and feathers. This, as much as the need to carry armies and supplies, required enormous investment in road systems, converting one of the world’s most complex and rugged terrains into a continuous network of well-maintained highways and stepped paths, punctuated by shrines (huacas) and way stations, stocked and staffed from the royal coffers.¹⁷ It was on one such annual tour, far from the walls of Cuzco, that the last Sapa Inca, Atahualpa, was abducted by Pizarro’s men and subsequently killed.

As with the Aztecs, consolidation of the Inca’s empire seems to have involved a great deal of sexual violence, and resulting changes in gender roles. In this case, what began as a customary system of marriage became a template for class domination. Traditionally, in those parts of the Andes where people were divided by social rank, women were expected to marry into families of higher status than their own. In doing so the bride’s lineage was said to be ‘conquered’ by the groom’s. What began as a kind of ritual ﬁgure of speech seems to have been turned into something more literal and systematic. In each newly conquered territory, the Inca immediately built a temple and forced a quota of local virgins to become ‘Brides of the Sun’: women cut off from their families, kept either as permanent virgins or dedicated to the Sapa Inca, for him to exploit and dispose of as he pleased. In consequence, the king’s subjects could be referred to collectively as ‘conquered women’,¹⁸ and local nobles jockeyed for position by trying to place their daughters in prominent roles at court.

What, then, of the famous Inca administrative system? It did, certainly, exist. Records were kept largely in the form of knotted strings called khipu (or quipu), described in Pedro Cieza de León’s Crónica del Perú (1553):

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.¹⁹

Spanish chroniclers provided few details, however, and after the use of khipu was ofﬁcially banned in 1583, local specialists had little incentive to commit their lore to writing. We don’t know exactly how it worked, although new sources of information are still emerging from remote Andean communities, where it turns out Inca-style khipus and their associated forms of knowledge were kept in use until much more recent times.²⁰ Scholars argue about whether khipu should be considered a form of writing. What sources we do have mainly describe the numerical system, noting the hierarchical arrangement of colour-coded knots into decimal units, from 1 to 10,000; but it seems the most elaborate string bundles encoded records of topography and genealogy, and most likely also narratives and songs.²¹In many ways, these two great polities – Aztec and Inca – were ideal targets for conquest. Both were organized around easily identiﬁable capitals, inhabited by easily identiﬁable kings who could be captured or killed, and surrounded by peoples who were either long accustomed to obeying orders or, if they had any inclination to shrug off power from the centre, were likely to do so precisely by joining forces with would-be conquistadors. If an empire is based largely on military force, it is relatively easy for a superior force of the same kind to seize control of its territory, since if one takes control of that centre – as Cortés did by laying siege to Tenochtitlan in 1521, or Pizarro by seizing Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 – everything else falls readily into place. There might be stubborn resistance (the siege of Tenochtitlan took over a year of gruelling house-to- house ﬁghting) but, once it was over, the conquerors could take over many of the mechanisms of rule that already existed and start conveying orders to subjects schooled in obedience.

Where there are no such powerful kingdoms – either because they had never existed, as in much of North America or Amazonia, or because a population had consciously rejected central government – things could get decidedly trickier.

A good example of such decentralization is the territory inhabited by speakers of the various Maya languages: the Yucatán Peninsula and the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas to its south.²² At the time of the initial Spanish incursion, the region was divided into what seemed to the settlers an endless succession of tiny principalities, townships, villages and seasonal hamlets. Conquest was a long and laborious business, and no sooner was it completed (or at least, no sooner had the Spanish decided it was completed),²³ than the new authorities faced an apparently endless series of popular revolts.

As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down.

Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today. As the Zapatistas also show, it was in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed for centuries, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonial struggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders of indigenous tradition.

Now, this anti-authoritarian streak might come as something of a surprise to those who know the Maya as one of a triumvirate of New World civilizations – Aztecs, Maya, Inca – familiar from books on art history. Much of the art from what’s called the Classic Maya period, roughly AD 150–900, is exquisitely beautiful. Most derives from cities that once existed in what are now the tangled rainforests of Petén. On ﬁrst appraisal, the Maya in this period seem to have been organized into kingdoms much like those of the Andes or central Mexico, only smaller; but then our picture, until quite recently, was dominated by sculpted monuments and glyphic inscriptions commissioned by the ruling elites themselves.²⁴ These focus, predictably enough, on the deeds of great rulers (holders of the title ajaw), especially their conquests, as alliances of independent city-states vied for hegemony over the lowlands under the leadership of two rival dynasties – those of Tikal and the ‘snake kings’ of Calakmul.²⁵

These monuments tell us a great deal about the rituals such rulers conducted to commune with their divinized ancestors²⁶ – but precious little about what ordinary life was like for their subjects, let alone how those subjects felt about their rulers’ claims to cosmic power. If there were prophetic movements or periodic insurrections during the Classic Maya period, as there were in the colonial period, we would currently have few ways to know about them; although archaeological research may yet change this picture. What we do know is that, in the ﬁnal centuries of the Classic period, women attain a new visibility in sculpture and inscription, appearing not just as consorts, princesses and queen mothers but also as powerful rulers and spirit mediums in their own right. We also know that at some point in the ninth century the Classic Maya political system came apart, and most of the great cities were abandoned.

Archaeologists argue about what happened. Some theories assume that popular resistance – some combination of defection, mass movements or outright rebellion – must have played a part, even if most are understandably reluctant to draw too ﬁrm a line between cause and consequence.²⁷ It is signiﬁcant that one of the few urban societies which endured, even grew, was located in the northern lowlands around the city of Chichén Itza. Here, kingship seems to have dramatically changed its character, becoming a more purely ceremonial or even theatrical affair – so hedged about by ritual that any serious political intervention was no longer possible – while day-to-day governance apparently passed largely into the hands of a coalition that formed among collectives of prominent warriors and priests.²⁸ Indeed, some of what were once assumed to be royal palaces in this ‘Post-Classic’ period are now being reinterpreted as assembly halls (popolna) for local representatives.²⁹

By the time the Spaniards arrived, six centuries after the collapse of cities in Petén, Mayan societies were thoroughly decentralized, parsed into a bewildering variety of townships and principalities, many without kings.³⁰ The books of Chilam Balam, prophetic annals written down in the late sixteenth century, dwell endlessly on the disasters and miseries that befall oppressive rulers. In other words, there’s every reason to believe that the spirit of rebellion which has marked this particular region can be traced back to at least the time of Charlemagne (the eighth century AD); and that across the centuries, overbearing Maya rulers were quite regularly and repeatedly disposed of.

Undoubtedly, the Classic Maya artistic tradition is magniﬁcent, one of the greatest the world has ever seen. By comparison, artistic products from the ‘Post-Classic’ – as the period from roughly AD 900 to 1520 is known – often seem clumsy and less worthy of appreciation. On the other hand, how many of us would really prefer to live under the arbitrary power of a petty warlord who, for all his patronage of ﬁne arts, counts tearing the hearts out of living human bodies among his most signiﬁcant accomplishments? Of course, history is not usually thought about in such terms, and it is worth asking why. Part of the reason is simply the designation ‘Post-Classic’, which suggests little more than an afterthought. It may seem a trivial issue – but it matters, because such habits of thought are one reason why periods of relative freedom and equality tend to get sidelined in the larger sweep of history.

This is important: let’s look at it further, before we return to our three forms of domination.

IN WHICH WE OFFER A DIGRESSION ON ‘THE SHAPE OF TIME’,³¹ AND SPECIFICALLY HOW METAPHORS OF

GROWTH AND DECAY INTRODUCE UNNOTICED POLITICAL

BIASES INTO OUR VIEW OF HISTORY

History and archaeology abound with terms like ‘post’ and ‘proto’, ‘intermediate’ or even ‘terminal’. To some degree, these are products of early-twentieth-century cultural theory. Alfred Kroeber, a pre-eminent anthropologist of his day, spent decades on a research project aimed at determining if identiﬁable laws lie behind the rhythms and patterns of cultural growth and decay: whether systematic relations could be established between artistic fashions, economic booms and busts, periods of intellectual creativity and conservatism, and the expansion and collapse of empires. It was an intriguing question but, after many years, his ultimate conclusion was: no, there were no such laws. In his Conﬁgurations of Cultural Growth (1944) Kroeber examined the relation of the arts, philosophy, science and population across human history and found no evidence for any consistent pattern; nor has any such pattern been successfully discerned in those few more recent studies which continue to plough the same furrow.³²

Despite this, when we write about the past today we almost invariably organize our thinking as if such patterns really did exist. Civilizations are typically represented either as ﬂower-like – growing, blooming and then shrivelling up – or else as like some grand building, painstakingly constructed but prone to sudden ‘collapse’. The latter term tends to be used indiscriminately for situations like the Classic Maya collapse, which did indeed involve a rapid abandonment of some hundreds of settlements and the disappearance of millions of people; but equally it’s used for the ‘collapse’ of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, where the only thing that really seems to have declined precipitously is the power of Egypt’s elites ruling from the northern city of Memphis.

Even in the Maya case, to describe the entire period between AD 900 and 1520 as ‘Post-Classic’ is to suggest that the only really signiﬁcant thing about it is the degree to which it can be seen as the waning of a Golden Age. In a similar way, terms like ‘Proto-palatial Crete’, ‘Predynastic Egypt’ or ‘Formative Peru’ convey a sense of impatience, as if Minoans, Egyptians or Andean peoples spent centuries doing little but laying the groundwork for such a Golden Age – and, it is implied, for strong, stable government – to come about.³³ We’ve already seen how this played out in Uruk, where at least seven centuries of collective self-rule (also termed ‘Predynastic’ in earlier scholarship) comes to be written off as a mere prelude to the ‘real’ history of Mesopotamia – which is then presented as a history of conquerors, dynasts, lawgivers and kings.

Some periods are dismissed as prefaces, others as postfaces. Still others become ‘intermediary’. The ancient Andes and Mesoamerica are cases in point, but probably the most familiar – and the most striking – example is again that of Egypt. Museumgoers will no doubt be familiar with the division of ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms.

Each is separated by an ‘intermediate’ period, often described as epochs of ‘chaos and cultural degeneration’. In fact, these were simply periods when there was no single ruler of Egypt. Authority devolved to local factions or, as we will shortly see, changed its nature altogether. Taken together, these intermediate periods span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history, down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal kings (known simply as the Late period), and they saw some very signiﬁcant political developments of their own.

To take just one example, 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. Yet this political innovation is little discussed, partly because it is already framed within an ‘intermediate’ or ‘late’ period that signals its transitory (or even decadent) nature.³⁵

One might assume the division into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is itself very ancient, perhaps going back thousands of years to Greek sources like the third-century BC Aegyptiaca, composed by Egyptian chronicler Manetho, or even to the hieroglyphic records themselves. Not so. In fact, the tripartite division only began to be proposed by modern Egyptologists in the late nineteenth century, and the terms they introduced (initially ‘Reich’ or ‘empire’, later ‘kingdom’) were explicitly modelled on European nation states. German, particularly Prussian, scholars played a leading role here.

Their tendency to perceive ancient Egypt’s past as a series of cyclical alternations between unity and disintegration clearly echoes the political concerns of Bismarck’s Germany, where an authoritarian government was trying to assemble a uniﬁed nation state from an endless variety of tiny statelets. After the First World War, as Europe’s own regime of old monarchies was coming apart, prominent Egyptologists such as Adolf Erman granted the ‘Intermediate’ periods their own place in history, drawing comparisons between the end of the Old Kingdom and the Bolshevik Revolution of their own time.³⁶

With hindsight, it’s easy to see just how much these chronological schemes reﬂect their authors’ political concerns. Or even, perhaps, a tendency – when casting their minds back in time – to imagine themselves either as part of the ruling elite, or as having roles somewhat analogous to ones they had in their own societies: the Egyptian or Maya equivalents of museum curators, professors and middle-range functionaries. But why, then, have these schemes become effectively canonical?

Consider the Middle Kingdom (2055–1650 BC), represented in standard histories as a time when Egypt moved from the supposed chaos of the First Intermediate period into a renewed phase of strong and stable government, bringing with it an artistic and literary renaissance.³⁷ Even if we set aside the question of just how chaotic the ‘intermediate period’ really was (we’ll get to that soon), the Middle Kingdom could equally well be represented as a period of violent disputes over royal succession, crippling taxation, state- sponsored suppression of ethnic minorities, and the growth of forced labour to support royal mining expeditions and construction projects – not to mention the brutal plundering of Egypt’s southern neighbours for slaves and gold. However much future Egyptologists would come to appreciate them, the elegance of Middle Kingdom literature like The Story of Sinuhe and the proliferation of Osiris cults likely offered little solace to the thousands of military conscripts, forced labourers and persecuted minorities of the time, many of whose grandparents were living quite peaceful lives in the preceding ‘dark ages’.

What is true of time, incidentally, is also true of space. For the last 5,000 years of human history – i.e. roughly the span of time we will be moving around in, over the course of this chapter – our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians’ eyes, are variously described as ‘tribal confederacies’, ‘amphictyonies’ or (if you’re an anthropologist) ‘segmentary societies’ – that is, people who systematically avoided ﬁxed, overarching systems of authority. We know a bit about how such societies worked in parts of Africa, North America, Central or Southeast Asia and other regions where such loose and ﬂexible political associations existed into recent times, but we know frustratingly little of how they operated in periods when these were by far the world’s most common forms of government.

A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering, instead, the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination.

One way to test the value of a new approach is to see if it helps us explain what had previously seemed anomalous cases: that is, ancient polities which undeniably mobilized and organized enormous numbers of people, but which don’t seem to ﬁt any of the usual deﬁnitions of a state.

Certainly, there are plenty of these. Let’s start with the Olmec, generally seen as the ﬁrst great Mesoamerican civilization.

ON POLITICS AS SPORT: THE OLMEC CASE

How precisely to describe the Olmec has proved a difﬁcult problem for archaeologists to grapple with. Early-twentieth-century scholars referred to them as an artistic or cultural ‘horizon’, largely because it wasn’t clear how else to describe a style – easily identiﬁable by certain common types of pottery, anthropomorphic ﬁgurines and stone sculpture – that seemed to pop up between 1500 and 1000 BC across an enormous area, straddling the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and including Guatemala, Honduras and much of southern Mexico, but whose meaning was otherwise uncertain. Whatever the Olmec were, they seemed to represent the ‘mother culture’, as it came to be known, of all later Mesoamerican civilizations, having invented the region’s characteristic calendar systems, glyphic writing and even ball games.³⁸

At the same time, there was no reason to assume the Olmec were a uniﬁed ethnic or even political group. There was much speculation about wandering missionaries, trading empires, elite fashion styles and much else besides. Eventually, archaeologists came to understand that there was, in fact, an Olmec heartland in the marshlands of Veracruz, where the swamp cities of San Lorenzo and La Venta arose along the fringes of Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The internal structure of these Olmec cities is still poorly understood. Most seem to have been centred on ceremonial precincts – of uncertain layout, but including large earthen pyramid mounds – surrounded by extensive suburbs. These monumental epicentres stand in relative isolation, amid an otherwise fragmented and relatively unstructured landscape of small maize-farming settlements and seasonal forager camps.³⁹

What can we really say, then, about the structure of Olmec society? We know it was in no sense egalitarian; there were clearly marked elites. The pyramids and other monuments suggest that, at least at certain times of year, these elites had extraordinary resources of skill and labour at their disposal. In every other respect, though, ties between centre and hinterland appear to have been surprisingly superﬁcial. The collapse of the ﬁrst great Olmec city at San Lorenzo, for instance, seems to have had very little impact on the wider regional economy.⁴⁰

Any further assessment of Olmec political structure has to reckon with what many consider its signature achievement: a series of absolutely colossal sculpted heads. These remarkable objects are free-standing, carved from tons of basalt, and of a quality comparable with the ﬁnest ancient Egyptian stonework. Each must have taken untold hours of grinding to produce. These sculptures appear to be representations of Olmec leaders, but, intriguingly, they are depicted wearing the leather helmets of ball players. All the known examples are sufﬁciently similar that each seems to reﬂect some kind of standard ideal of male beauty; but, at the same time, each is also different enough to be seen as a unique portrait of a particular, individual champion.⁴¹

No doubt there were also actual ball-courts – though these have proved surprisingly elusive in the archaeological record – and while we obviously don’t know what kind of game was played, if they were anything like later Maya and Aztec ball games it likely took place in a long and narrow court, with two teams from high-ranking families competing for fame and honour by striking a heavy rubber ball with the hips and buttocks. It seems both reasonable and logical to conclude that there was a fairly direct relationship between competitive games and the rise of an Olmec aristocracy.⁴² Without written evidence it’s hard to say much more, but looking a bit closer at later Mesoamerican ball games might at least give us a sense of how this worked in practice.

Stone ball-courts were common features of Classic Maya cities, alongside royal residences and pyramid-temples. Some were purely ceremonial; others were actually used for sport. The chief Maya gods were themselves ball players. In the K’iche Maya epic Popol Vuh a ball game provides the setting in which mortal heroes and underworld gods collide, leading to the birth of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who go on to beat the gods at their own deadly game and ascend to take their own place among the stars.

The fact that the greatest known Maya epic centres on a ball game gives us a sense of how central the sport was to Maya notions of charisma and authority. So too, in a more visceral way, does an inscribed staircase built at Yaxchilán to mark the accession (in AD 752) of what was probably its most famous king, known as Bird Jaguar the Great. On the central block he appears as a ball player. Flanked by two dwarf attendants, the king prepares to strike a huge rubber ball containing the body of a human captive –bound, broken and bundled – as it tumbles down a ﬂight of stairs. Capturing high-ranking enemies to be held for ransom or, failing payment, to be killed at ball games was a major objective of Maya warfare. This particular unfortunate ﬁgure may be a certain Jewelled Skull, a noble from a rival city, whose humiliation was so important to Bird Jaguar that he also made it the central feature of a carved lintel on a nearby temple.⁴³

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. Both are recorded on Maya monuments as key events in the lives of rulers. Most likely, these elite games were also mass spectacles, cultivating a particular sort of urban public – the sort that relishes gladiatorial contests, and thereby comes to understand politics in terms of opposition. Centuries later, Spanish conquistadors described Aztec versions of the ball game played at Tenochtitlan, where players confronted each other amid racks of human skulls. 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.⁴⁵

It is easy to see why the Olmec, with their intense fusion of political competition and organized spectacle, are nowadays seen as cultural progenitors of later Mesoamerican kingdoms and empires; but 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.

In other words, if these were ‘states’ in any sense at all, then 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.⁴⁶

CHAVÍN DE HUÁNTAR – AN ‘EMPIRE’ BUILT ON IMAGES?

In South America we ﬁnd a somewhat analogous situation. Before the Inca, a whole series of other societies are identiﬁed tentatively by scholars as ‘states’ or ‘empires’. All these societies occur within the area later controlled by the Inca: the Peruvian Andes and adjacent coastal drainages.

None used writing, at least in any form we can recognize. Still, from AD 600 onwards many did employ knotted strings for record-keeping, and probably other forms of notation too.

Monumental centres of some kind were already appearing in the Rio Supe region in the third millennium BC.⁴⁷ Later, between 1000 and 200 BC, a single centre – at Chavín de Huántar, in the northern highlands of Peru – extended its inﬂuence over a much larger area.⁴⁸ This ‘Chavín horizon’ gave way to three distinct regional cultures. 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.⁴⁹

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

The ﬁrst Europeans to study these civilizations, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assumed that any city or set of cities with monumental art and architecture, exerting its ‘inﬂuence’ over a surrounding region, must be the capitals of states or empires (they also assumed – just as wrongly, it turns out – that all the rulers were male). As with the Olmec, a surprisingly large proportion of that inﬂuence seems to have come in the form of images – distributed, in the Andean case, on small ceramic vessels, objects of personal adornment and textiles – rather than in the spread of administrative, military or commercial institutions and their associated technologies.

Consider Chavín de Huántar itself, located high in the Mosna valley of the Peruvian Andes. Archaeologists once believed it to have been the core of a pre-Inca empire in the ﬁrst millennium BC: a state controlling a hinterland that stretched to the Amazonian rainforest to the east and the Paciﬁc Coast to the west, and included all the intervening highlands and coastal drainages in between. Such power seemed commensurate with the scale and sophistication of Chavín’s cut-stone architecture, its unrivalled abundance of monumental sculpture, and the appearance of Chavín motifs on pottery, jewellery and textiles across the wider region. But was Chavín really some kind of ‘Rome of the Andes’?

In fact, little evidence has emerged since to suggest this. In order to get a sense of what might really have been going on at Chavín we must look more closely at the sort of images we’re talking about, and what they tell us about the wider importance of vision and knowledge in Chavín notions of power.

The art of Chavín is not made up of pictures, still less pictorial narratives – at least, not in any intuitively recognizable sense. Neither does it appear to be a pictographic writing system. This is one reason why we can be fairly certain we are not dealing with an actual empire. 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. If an Achaemenid Persian emperor carved his likeness into the side of a mountain, he did it in such a way that anyone, even an ambassador from lands as yet unknown to him (or an antiquarian of some remote future age), would be able to recognize that it is indeed the image of a very great king.

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.⁵¹

Some of these images are described by scholars as ‘monsters’, but they have nothing in common with the simple composite ﬁgures of ancient Greek vases or Mesopotamian sculpture – centaurs, grifﬁns and the like – or their Moche equivalents. We are in another kind of visual universe altogether. It is the realm of the shape-shifter, where no body is ever quite stable or complete, and diligent mental training is required to tease out structure from what at ﬁrst seems to be visual mayhem. One reason why we can say any of this with a degree of conﬁdence is because 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.

Up until recent times, a great many indigenous societies were still using systems of broadly similar kinds to transmit esoteric knowledge of ritual formulae, genealogies or records of shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.⁵² In Eurasia, similar techniques were developed in the ancient ‘arts of memory’, where those trying to memorize stories, speeches, lists or similar material would each have a familiar ‘memory palace’. This consisted of a mental pathway or room in which a series of striking images could be arranged, each a cue to a particular episode, incident or name. One can only imagine what might happen if someone were to draw or carve one such set of visual cues, and a later archaeologist or art historian were to discover it, with no idea of the context, let alone what the story being memorized was actually about.

In the case of Chavín, we actually can be on fairly safe ground in assuming that these images were records of shamanic journeys; not just because of the peculiar nature of the images themselves, but also because of a wealth of circumstantial evidence relating to altered states of consciousness. At Chavín itself, snuff spoons, small ornate mortars and bone pipes have been found; and among its carved images are sculpted male ﬁgures with fangs and snake headdresses holding aloft the stalk of the San Pedro cactus. This plant is the basis of Huachuma, a mescaline-based infusion still made in the region today which induces psychoactive visions.

Other carved ﬁgures, all of them apparently male, are surrounded by images of vilca leaves (Anadenanthera sp.), which contain a powerful hallucinogen. Released when the leaves are ground up and snorted, it induces a gush of mucus from the nose, as faithfully depicted on sculpted heads that line the walls of Chavín’s major temples.⁵³

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.⁵⁴ Intriguingly, this is exactly what indigenous informants were still telling Spanish soldiers and chroniclers who arrived at the site in the seventeenth century. 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’. Despite initial scepticism, archaeologists have gradually come round to accepting that they were right.⁵⁵

It’s not just the evidence for ritual and altered states of mind, but also the extraordinary architecture of the place. 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.⁵⁶

If Chavín – a remote precursor to the Inca – was an ‘empire’, it was one built on images linked to esoteric knowledge. Olmec was, on the other hand, an ‘empire’ built on spectacle, competition and the personal attributes of political leaders. Clearly, our use of the term ‘empire’ here is about as loose as it could possibly be. Neither was remotely similar to, say, the Roman or Han, or indeed the Inca and Aztec Empires. Nor do they fulﬁl any of the important criteria for ‘statehood’ – at least not on most standard sociological deﬁnitions (monopoly of violence, levels of administrative hierarchy, and so forth). The usual recourse is to describe such regimes instead as ‘complex chiefdoms’, but this too seems hopelessly inadequate – a shorthand way of saying, ‘looks somewhat like a state, but it isn’t one’.

This tells us precisely nothing.

What makes more sense, we suggest, is to look at these otherwise puzzling cases through the lens of our three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics – outlined at the start of the chapter. In doing so, we can see how each stresses a particular form of domination to an exceptional degree and develops it on an unusually large scale. Let’s give it a go.

First, in the case of Chavín, power over a large and dispersed population was clearly about retaining control over certain kinds of knowledge: something perhaps not that far removed from the idea of ‘state secrets’ found in later bureaucratic regimes, although the content was obviously very different, and there was little in the way of military force to back it up.

In the Olmec tradition, power involved certain formalized ways of competing for personal recognition, in an atmosphere of play laced with risk: a prime example of a large-scale, competitive political ﬁeld, but again in the absence of territorial sovereignty or an administrative apparatus. No doubt there was a certain degree of personal charisma and jockeying at Chavín; no doubt among the Olmec, too, some obtained inﬂuence by their command of arcane knowledge; but neither case gives us reason to think anyone was asserting a strong principle of sovereignty.

We’ll refer to these as ‘ﬁrst-order regimes’ because they seem to be organized around one of the three elementary forms of domination (knowledge-control, for Chavín; charismatic politics for Olmec), to the relative neglect of the other two. The obvious next question, then, is whether examples of the third possible variant can also be found: i.e. cases of societies which develop a principle of sovereignty (that is, grant an individual or small group a monopoly on the right to use violence with impunity), and take it to extreme lengths, without either an apparatus for controlling knowledge or any sort of competitive political ﬁeld. In fact, there are quite a lot of examples. Admittedly, the existence of such a society would probably be more difﬁcult to establish from archaeological evidence alone, but to illustrate this third variant we can turn, fortunately, to more recent Amerindian societies where written documentation is available.

As always, we must be careful with such sources, since they are written by European observers who not only brought their own biases but tended to describe societies already enmeshed in the chaotic destruction that Europeans themselves almost invariably brought in their wake. Still, French accounts of the Natchez of southern Louisiana in the eighteenth century seem to describe exactly the sort of arrangement we are interested in. By general consent, the Natchez (who called themselves Théoloël, or ‘People of the Sun’) represent the only undisputed case of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. Their ruler enjoyed an absolute power of command that would have satisﬁed a Sapa Inca or Egyptian pharaoh; but they had a minimal bureaucracy, and nothing like a competitive political ﬁeld. As far as we know it has never occurred to anyone to refer to this arrangement as a ‘state’.

ON SOVEREIGNTY WITHOUT ‘THE STATE’

Let us turn to the work of a French Jesuit, Father Maturin Le Petit, who gave an account of the Natchez in the early eighteenth century. Le Petit found the Natchez to be nothing like the people Jesuits had encountered in what is now Canada. He was especially struck by their religious practices. These revolved around a settlement all the French sources refer to as the Great Village, which centred on two great earthen platforms separated by a plaza. 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.

The temple, in which an eternal ﬁre burned, was dedicated to the founder of the royal dynasty. The current ruler, together with his brother (called ‘the Tattooed Serpent’) and eldest sister (‘the White Woman’), were for their own parts treated with something that seemed very much like worship.

Anyone who came into their presence was expected to bow and wail, and to retreat backwards. No one, not even the king’s wives, was allowed to share a meal with him; only the most privileged could even see him eat. What this meant in practice was that members of the royal family lived out their lives largely within the conﬁnes of the Great Village itself, rarely venturing beyond.⁵⁷ The king himself emerged mainly during major rituals or times of war.

Le Petit and other French observers – who at the time lived under the suzerainty of Louis XIV, who of course also fancied himself a ‘Sun King’ – were quite fascinated by the parallels: as a result, they described the goings- on in the Great Village in some detail. The Natchez Great Sun might not have had the grandeur of Louis XIV, but what he lacked in that regard he appeared to make up for in terms of sheer personal power. 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.

One paradoxical outcome of these arrangements was that, for most of the year, the Great Village was largely depopulated. As noted by another observer, Father Pierre de Charlevoix, ‘The great Village of the Natchez is at present reduced to a very few Cabins. The Reason which I heard for this is that the Savages, from whom the Great Chief has the Right to take all they have, get as far away from him as they can; and therefore, many Villages of this Nation have been formed at some Distance from this.’⁵⁸

Away from the Great Village, ordinary Natchez appear to have led very different lives, often showing blissful disregard for the wishes of their ostensible rulers. They conducted their own independent commercial and military ventures, and sometimes ﬂatly refused royal commands conveyed by the Great Sun’s emissaries or relatives. Archaeological surveys of the Natchez Bluffs region bear this out, showing that the eighteenth-century ‘kingdom’ in fact comprised semi-autonomous districts, including many settlements that were both larger and wealthier in trade goods than the Great Village itself.⁵⁹

How exactly are we to understand this situation? It might seem paradoxical – but historically such arrangements are not particularly unusual. The Great Sun was a sovereign in the classical sense of the term, which is to say he embodied a principle that was seen as higher than law.

Therefore no law applied to him. This is a very common bit of cosmological reasoning that we ﬁnd, in some form or another, almost anywhere from Bologna to Mbanza Congo. Just as gods (or God) are not seen as bound by morality – since only a principle existing beyond good and evil could have created good and evil to begin with – so ‘divine kings’ cannot be judged in human terms; behaving in arbitrarily violent ways to anyone around them is itself proof of their transcendent status. Yet at the same time, they are expected to be creators and enforcers of systems of justice. Such with the Natchez too. 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.

The problem with this sort of power (at least, from the sovereign’s vantage point) is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king’s sovereignty extends about as 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. Even the ‘absolutist’ monarchs of the Renaissance, like Henry VIII or Louis XIV, had a great deal of trouble delegating their authority – that is, convincing their subjects to treat royal representatives as deserving anything like the same deference and obedience due to the king himself. Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they’re told – and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren’t. As late as the 1780s, as Max Weber liked to point out, Frederick the Great of Prussia found that his repeated efforts to free the country’s serfs came to nothing because bureaucrats would simply ignore the decrees or, if challenged by his legates, insisted the words of the decree should be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what was obviously intended.⁶⁰

In this sense, French observers were not entirely off the mark: the Natchez court really could be considered a sort of hyper-concentrated version of Versailles. On the one hand, the Great Sun’s power in his immediate presence was even more absolute (Louis could not actually snap his ﬁngers and order someone executed on the spot); while on the other, his ability to extend that power was even more restricted (Louis did, after all, have an administration at his disposal, though a fairly limited one compared to modern nation states). Natchez sovereignty was, effectively, bottled up.

There was even a suggestion that this power, and particularly its benevolent aspect, was in some way dependent on being bottled up. 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.⁶¹ In a similar way, the king was sacred, and could be a conduit for such blessings, precisely insofar as he could be contained.

The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. 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.⁶² Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings.

People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn’t actually in the room), but insofar as such a ﬁgure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law – in other words, as sacred or set apart – another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same ﬁgure becomes surrounded with restrictions. Violent men generally insist on tokens of respect, but tokens of respect taken to the cosmological level – ‘not to touch the earth’, ‘not to see the sun’ – tend to become severe limits on one’s freedom to act, violently or indeed in most other ways.⁶³

For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces – or even, as in some of the cases of ‘divine kingship’ ﬁrst made famous by Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, facing ritual death themselves.

So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with – violence, knowledge and charisma – could, in ﬁrst-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don’t. None could in any sense be described as ‘egalitarian’ societies – they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite – but at the same time, it’s not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters. There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we ﬁnd any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign’s immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit.

Another instructive case of sovereignty without the state is found in the recent history of South Sudan, among the Shilluk, a Nilotic people living alongside the Nuer. To recap, the early-twentieth-century Nuer were a pastoral society, of the sort often referred to in the anthropological literature as ‘egalitarian’ (though not, in fact, entirely so), because of their extreme distaste for any situation that might even suggest the giving and taking of orders. The Shilluk speak a western Nilotic language closely related to Nuer, and most believe that at some point in the past they were one people. While the Nuer occupied lands best ﬁt for cattle-grazing, the Shilluk found themselves living along a fertile stretch of the White Nile, which allowed them to grow the local grain known as durra, and support dense populations. However, the Shilluk – unlike the Nuer – had a king. Known as the reth, this Shilluk monarch could also be seen as embodying sovereignty in the raw, in much the same way as the Natchez Great Sun.

Both the Great Sun and the Shilluk reth could act with total impunity, but only towards those in their immediate presence. Each normally resided in an isolated capital, where he conducted regular rituals to guarantee fertility and well-being. According to one Italian missionary, writing in the early twentieth century:

The Reth lives isolated, as a rule, with some of his wives in the small but famous hill-village of Pacooda, known as Fashoda … His person is sacred and can be approached only with difﬁculty by ordinary people, and only with elaborate etiquette by the higher class. His appearance among the people, as for a journey, is rare and awe-inspiring, so that most people used to go into hiding or keep out of his path; girls especially do so.⁶⁴

The latter presumably for fear of being snatched up and carried off to the royal harem. 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. If the king attempted to mediate a local dispute and one party refused to comply, he would occasionally throw in his lot with the other side, raid the offending village and carry off what cattle and other things of value his men could get their hands on. The royal treasury thus consisted almost entirely of wealth that had been stolen, plundered in raids on foreigners or on the king’s own subjects.

All this might seem a pretty poor model for a free society – but in fact, in everyday affairs ordinary Shilluk appear to have maintained the same ﬁercely independent attitude as Nuer, and to have been just as averse to taking orders. Even the members of the ‘higher class’ (basically, descendants of earlier kings) could expect only a few gestures of deference, certainly not obedience. An old Shilluk legend sums it up nicely:

There was once a cruel king, who killed many of his subjects, he even killed women. His subjects were terriﬁed of him. One day, to demonstrate that his subjects were so afraid they would do anything he asked, he assembled the Shilluk chiefs and ordered them to wall him up inside a house with a young girl. Then he ordered them to let him out again. They didn’t. So he died.⁶⁵

If such oral traditions are anything to go on, Shilluk appear to have made a conscious choice that the sporadic appearance of an arbitrary and sometimes violent sovereign was preferable to any gentler but more systematic method of rule. Whenever a reth attempted to set up an administrative apparatus, even if only to collect tribute from defeated peoples, his actions were met with overwhelming waves of popular protest that either forced him to abandon the project or ousted him entirely.⁶⁶

Unlike the Shilluk reth, Chavín and Olmec elites were able to mobilize enormous amounts of labour, but it’s not at all clear if they did so through chains of command. As we’ve seen in ancient Mesopotamia, corvée or periodic labour service could also be a festive, public-spirited, even levelling occasion. (And as we shall see in the case of ancient Egypt, the most authoritarian regimes still often ensured it continued to have something of the same spirit.) Lastly, then, we should consider the impact of such ﬁrst-order regimes on our third basic form of freedom: the freedom to shift and renegotiate social relations, either seasonally or permanently.

This is, of course, the hardest to assess. Certainly, most of these new forms of power had a decidedly seasonal element. During certain times of year, as with the makers of Stonehenge, the entire social apparatus of authority would dissolve away and effectively cease to exist. What seems most difﬁcult to comprehend is how these strikingly new institutional arrangements, and the physical infrastructure that sustained them, came into being in the ﬁrst place.

Who came up with the design for the labyrinthine temple of Chavín de Huántar, or the royal compounds of La Venta? Insofar as they were collectively conceived – as they may well have been⁶⁷ – such grand fabrications may themselves be considered extraordinary exercises in human freedom. None of these ﬁrst-order regimes could be considered examples of state formation – few now would even claim they were. So let’s turn instead to one of the only cases that pretty much everyone agrees can be considered a state, and which has served, in many ways, as a paradigm for all subsequent states: ancient Egypt.

HOW CARING LABOUR, RITUAL KILLING AND ‘TINY BUBBLES’ ALL CAME TOGETHER IN THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

If we had no written accounts to go by, but only the archaeological remains of the Natchez, would we have any way of knowing that a ﬁgure like the Great Sun even existed in Natchez society? Conceivably not. We would know that there were some fairly large mounds in the Great Village, built up in various stages, and no doubt post-holes would provide evidence for some large wooden structures built on them. Inside those structures, a number of hearths, refuse pits and scattered artefacts would undoubtedly point to some of the activities that went on there.⁶⁸ Perhaps the only compelling evidence of kingship, though, would come in the form of burials of richly decorated bodies surrounded by sacriﬁced retainers – if, that is, archaeologists happened to locate them.⁶⁹

For some readers, the idea of a dead monarch sent off to the afterlife amid the corpses of his retainers might evoke images of early pharaohs.

Some of Egypt’s earliest known kings, those of the First Dynasty around 3000 BC (who, in fact, were not yet referred to as ‘pharaoh’), were indeed buried in this way.⁷⁰ But Egypt is not alone in this respect. Burials of kings surrounded by dozens, hundreds, on some occasions even thousands of human victims killed specially for the occasion can be found in almost every part of the world where monarchies did eventually establish themselves, from the early dynastic city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia to the Kerma polity in Nubia to Shang China. There are also credible literary descriptions from Korea, Tibet, Japan and the Russian steppes. Something similar seems to have occurred as well in the Moche and Wari societies of South America, and the Mississippian city of Cahokia.⁷¹

We might do well to think a bit more about these mass killings, because most archaeologists now treat them as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way. They follow a surprisingly consistent pattern. Almost invariably, they mark the ﬁrst few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom, often being imitated by rivals in other elite households; then the practice gradually fades away (though sometimes surviving in very attenuated versions, as in sati or widow-suicide among largely kshatriya – warrior-caste – families in much of South Asia). 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, in that moment, close members of the royal family, high-ranking military ofﬁcers and government ofﬁcials are counted among the victims. Of course, if looking at a burial without written records, it’s often hard to tell when we’re dealing with the bodies of royal wives, viziers or court musicians, as opposed to those of war captives, slaves or commoners seized randomly on the road (as we know was sometimes done in Buganda or Benin) – or even entire military units (as was sometimes the case in China). Perhaps, indeed, the individuals named as kings and queens in the famous Royal Tombs of Ur were not really that at all, but just hapless victims, substitute ﬁgures or maybe high-ranking priests and priestesses dressed up as royalty.⁷²

Even if some cases were just a particularly bloody form of costume drama, others clearly weren’t, so the question remains: why did early kingdoms ever do this sort of thing at all? And why did they stop doing it once their power became more established?

At the Shang capital of Anyang, on the central Chinese Plain, rulers tended to make their way into the afterlife accompanied by a few important retainers, who went voluntarily – if not always happily – to their deaths and were interred with due honours. These were only a small proportion of the bodies that went with them. It was also a royal prerogative to have one’s tomb surrounded by the bodies of sacriﬁcial victims.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴

It’s interesting to bear this in mind when we turn to Egypt, because on the surface what we observe in the earliest dynasties seems the exact opposite.

The ﬁrst Egyptian kings, and at least one queen, are indeed buried surrounded by sacriﬁcial victims, but those victims seem to have been drawn almost exclusively from their own inner circles. Our evidence for this derives from a series of 5,000-year-old burial chambers, looted in antiquity but still visible near the site of the ancient city of Abydos in the low desert of southern Egypt. These were the tombs of Egypt’s First

Dynasty.⁷⁵ Around each royal tomb lie long rows of subsidiary burials, numbering in the hundreds, forming a kind of perimeter. Such ‘retainer burials’ – including royal attendants and courtiers, killed in the prime of life – were placed in smaller brick compartments of their own, each marked with a gravestone inscribed with the individual’s ofﬁcial titles.⁷⁶ There do not appear to be any dead captives or enemies among the buried. On the death of a king, then, his successor appears to have presided instead over the death of his predecessor’s courtly entourage, or at least a sizeable portion of it.

So why all this ritual killing at the birth of the Egyptian state? What was the actual purpose of subsidiary burials? Was it to protect the dead king from the living, or the living from the dead king? Why did those sacriﬁced include so many who had evidently spent their lives caring for the king: most likely including wives, guards, ofﬁcials, cooks, grooms, entertainers, palace dwarfs and other servants, grouped by rank around the royal tomb, ccording to their roles or occupation? There is a terrible paradox here. 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. Many have speculated about what it all means. Likely as not, 5,000 years ago, many of those laying out the bodies wondered too.

Written records from the time don’t give us much sense of the ofﬁcial motives, but one thing that’s quite striking in the evidence we do have – largely, a list of names and titles – is the very mixed composition of these royal cemeteries. They seem to include both blood relatives of the early kings and queens, notably some female members of the royal family, and a good number of other individuals who were taken in as members of the royal household owing to their unusual skills or striking personal qualities, and who thus came to be seen as members of the king’s extended family.

The violence and shedding of blood that attended these mass funerary rituals must have gone some way to effacing those differences, melding them into a single unit, turning servants into relatives and relatives into servants. In later times the king’s close kin represented themselves in exactly this way, by placing in their tombs some humble replicas of themselves engaged in acts of menial labour, such as grinding grain or cooking meals.⁷⁷

When sovereignty ﬁrst expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin.⁷⁸ Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.

These extreme forms of ritual killing around royal burials ended fairly abruptly in the course of Egypt’s Second Dynasty. However, the patrimonial polity continued to expand – not so much in the sense of expanding Egypt’s external borders, which were established early on through outward violence directed at neighbours in Nubia and elsewhere,⁷⁹ but more in terms of reshaping the lives of its internal subjects. Within a few generations we ﬁnd the valley and delta of the Nile divided into royal estates, each dedicated to provisioning the mortuary cults of different former rulers; and, not long after that, the foundation of entire ‘workers’ towns’ devoted to the construction of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, drawing corvée labour from up and down the country.⁸⁰

At this point, with the construction of the great pyramids at Giza, surely no one could deny that we are in the presence of some sort of state; but the pyramids, of course, were also tombs. In the case of Egypt, it seems, ‘state formation’ began with some kind of Natchez or Shilluk-like principle of individual sovereignty, bursting out of its ritual cages precisely through the vehicle of the sovereign’s demise in such a way that royal death ultimately became the basis for reorganizing much of human life along the length of the Nile. To understand how this could happen, we need to look at what Egypt was like well before the First Dynasty tombs at Abydos.

Before we consider what happened in the centuries directly preceding Egypt’s First Dynasty – the so-called Predynastic and Proto-dynastic periods, from around 4000 to 3100 BC – it is worth casting our minds back to an even earlier phase of prehistory in the same region.

Let’s recall that the African Neolithic, including that of the Nile valley – Egyptian and Sudanese – took a different form to that of the Middle East. In the ﬁfth millennium BC, there was less of an emphasis on cereal agriculture and more on cattle, along with the wide variety of wild and cultivated food sources typical of the period. Perhaps the best modern comparison we have – though it’s very far from exact – is with Nilotic peoples like the Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk or Anuak, who grow crops but think of themselves as pastoralists, shifting back and forth each season between camps improvised for the occasion. If we might hazard a very broad generalization, where in the Middle Eastern Neolithic (the Fertile Crescent) the cultural focus – in the sense of decorative arts, care and attention – was on houses, in Africa it was on bodies: from very early on we have burials with beautifully worked objects of personal grooming and highly elaborate sets of body ornamentation.⁸¹

It’s no coincidence that many centuries later, when the Egyptian First Dynasty took form, among the very ﬁrst objects with royal inscriptions we ﬁnd the ‘ivory comb of King Djet’ and the famous ‘palette of King Narmer’ (stone palettes being used, both by men and women, for grinding and mixing make-up). These are basically spectacular versions of the sort of objects Neolithic Nile dwellers used to beautify themselves millennia earlier and, not coincidentally, to offer as gifts to the ancestral dead; and in Neolithic and Predynastic times, such objects were widely available to women, men and children. In fact from those very early times, in Nilotic society the human body itself became a sort of monument. 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.⁸²

How, then, do we get from such a remarkably ﬂuid state of affairs to the spectacular appearance of the First Dynasty almost 2,000 years later?

Territorial kingdoms don’t come out of nowhere.⁸³ Until quite recently, we had little more than fragmentary hints of what must have been happening during what are technically referred to as the Predynastic and Proto- dynastic periods – that is, roughly the fourth millennium, before King Narmer appears around 3100 BC. In such cases, it is tempting to revert to analogies with more recent situations. 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. This is especially true if, like so many peoples whose ancestors organized their lives around livestock, they tend toward patriarchal forms of organization.⁸⁴ One could imagine the prehistoric Nile valley as dominated by a collection of Shilluk-like reths, each with their own settlement which was, essentially, an extended patriarchal family; bickering and feuding with one another, but otherwise, as yet, making fairly little difference to the lives of those over whom they ostensibly ruled.

Still, there is no substitute for actual archaeological evidence – and in recent years it has been building up apace. New discoveries show that, by no later than 3500 BC – and so still some ﬁve centuries before the First Dynasty – we do indeed ﬁnd burials of petty monarchs at various locations throughout the valley of the Nile, and also down into Nubia. We don’t know any of their names, since writing had barely developed yet. Most of these kingdoms appear to have been extremely small. The largest we know of centred on Naqada and Abydos, near the great bend of the Nile in Upper Egypt; on Hierakonpolis further to the south; and on the site of Qustul in Lower Nubia – but even those do not seem to have controlled extensive territories.⁸⁵

What preceded the First Dynasty, then, was not so much a lack of sovereign power as a superﬂuity of it: a surfeit of tiny kingdoms and miniature courts, always with a core of blood relatives and a motley collection of henchmen, wives, servants and assorted hangers-on. Some of these courts appear to have been quite magniﬁcent in their own way, leaving behind large tombs and the bodies of sacriﬁced retainers. The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf (they seem to have become a ﬁxture of courtly society very early on), but a signiﬁcant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo: a menagerie of exotic animals including two baboons and an African elephant.⁸⁶ These kings give every sign of making grandiose, absolute, cosmological claims; but little sign of maintaining administrative or military control over their respective territories.

How do we get from here to the massive agrarian bureaucracy of later, dynastic times in Egypt? Part of the answer lies in a parallel process of change that archaeology also allows us to untangle, around the middle of the fourth millennium BC – we might imagine it as a kind of extended argument or debate about the responsibilities of the living to the dead. Do dead kings, like live ones, still need us to take care of them? Is this care different from the care accorded ordinary ancestors? Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what exactly do they eat? For whatever reasons, 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

The two processes – agronomic and ceremonial – were mutually reinforcing, and the social effects epochal. In effect, they led to the creation of what might be considered the world’s ﬁrst peasantry. As in so many parts of the world initially favoured by Neolithic populations, the periodic ﬂooding of the Nile had at ﬁrst made permanent division of lands difﬁcult; quite likely, it was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufﬁcient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen – another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC. Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and ependencies 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.

If any of this seems fanciful, we need only compare what happened with the extension of Inca sovereignty in Peru. Here, too, we ﬁnd a contrast between the traditional, varied and ﬂexible regime of everyday foodstuffs – in this case centring on cuisine made from freeze-dried potatoes (chuño) – and the introduction of a completely different sort of food, in this case, maize beer (chicha), which was considered ﬁt for the gods and also gradually became, as it were, the food of empire.⁸⁹ By the time of the Spanish conquest, maize was a ritual necessity for rich and poor alike. Gods and royal mummies dined on it; armies marched on it; and those too poor to grow it – or who lived too high up on the altiplano – had to ﬁnd other ways of obtaining it, often ending up in debt to the royal estate as a result.⁹⁰

In the case of Peru, we have the Spanish chroniclers to help us understand how an intoxicant could gradually become the lifeblood of an empire; in Egypt, 5,000 years ago, we can really only guess at the details. It is a remarkable tribute to the discipline of archaeology that we know as much as we do, and we are starting to put the pieces together. For instance, it is around 3500 BC that we begin to ﬁnd remains of facilities used for both baking and brewing – ﬁrst alongside cemeteries, and within a few centuries attached to palaces and grand tombs.⁹¹ A later depiction, from the tomb of an ofﬁcial called Ty, shows how they could have operated, with pot-baked bread and beer produced by a single process. The gradual extension of royal authority, and also administrative reach, throughout Egypt began around the time of the First Dynasty or a little before, with the creation of estates ostensibly dedicated to organizing the provision, not so much of living kings but of dead ones, and eventually dead royal ofﬁcials too. By the time of the Great Pyramids (c.2500 BC), bread and beer were being manufactured on an industrial scale to supply armies of workers during their seasonal service on royal construction projects, when they too got to be ‘relatives’ or at least care-givers of the king, and as such were at least temporarily well provisioned and well cared for.

The workers’ town at Giza produced some thousands of ceramic moulds. These were used to make the huge communal loaves known as bedja bread, eaten in large groups with copious amounts of meat supplied by royal livestock pens and washed down with spiced beer.⁹² The latter was of special importance for the solidarity of seasonal work crews in Old Kingdom Egypt. The facts emerge with disarming simplicity, from grafﬁti on the reverse sides of building blocks used in the construction of royal pyramids. ‘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

There may be interesting parallels to explore here with what happened in the Industrial Revolution, when techniques of discipline, transforming crews of people into clock-like machines, were ﬁrst pioneered on sailing ships and only later transferred to the factory ﬂoor. 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.⁹⁵

We have just described, in broad outline, what’s widely treated as the world’s ﬁrst known example of ‘state formation’. It would be easy to go on from here to generalize. Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.

There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to ﬂourish.⁹⁶ Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly deﬁned. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the ﬁrst royal inscriptions are found on combs and make- up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.⁹⁷ All this activity was seen as generating a downward ﬂow of divine blessings and protection, which occasionally took material form in the great feasts of the workers’ towns.

The problems come when we try to take this paradigm and apply it almost anywhere else. True, as we’ve noted, there are some interesting parallels between Egypt and Peru (all the more remarkable, considering their strikingly different topographies – the ﬂat and easily navigable Nile as against the ‘vertical archipelagos’ of the Andes). These parallels appear in uncanny details, like the mummiﬁcation of dead rulers and the way in which such mummiﬁed rulers continue to maintain their own rural estates; the way living kings are treated as gods who have to make periodic tours of their domains. Both societies too shared a certain antipathy to urban life.

Their capitals were really ceremonial centres, stages for royal display, with relatively few permanent residents, and their ruling elites preferred to imagine their subjects as living in a realm of bucolic estates and hunting grounds.⁹⁸ But all this only serves to underline the degree to which other cases referred to in the literature as ‘early states’ were entirely different.

IN WHICH WE REFLECT ON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHAT ARE USUALLY CALLED ‘EARLY STATES’, FROM

CHINA TO MESOAMERICA

The kingdom of Egypt and the Inca Empire demonstrate what can happen when the principle of sovereignty arms itself with a bureaucracy and manages to extend itself uniformly across a territory. As a result, they are very often invoked as primordial examples of state formation, even though they are dramatically separated in time and space. Almost none of the other canonical ‘early states’ appear to have taken this approach.

Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, for instance, was made up of dozens of city-states of varying sizes, 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. Only occasionally would one ruler gain enough of an upper hand to create something that might be described as the beginnings of a uniﬁed kingdom or empire. It’s not clear whether any of these early Mesopotamian rulers actually claimed ‘sovereignty’ – at least in the absolute sense of standing outside the moral order and thus being able to act with impunity, or to create entirely new social forms of their own volition. The cities they ostensibly ruled over had been around for centuries: commercial hubs with strong traditions of self- governance, each with its own city gods who presided over local systems of temple administration. 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.⁹⁹ The result was a dynamic tension between two principles which, as we’ve seen, originally arose in opposition to one another: the administrative order of the river valleys and the heroic, individualistic politics of the surrounding highlands. Sovereignty, in the last resort, belonged to the gods alone.¹⁰⁰

The Maya lowlands were different again. 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. Ajaws were, effectively, like tiny squabbling gods. If anything was projected into the cosmos, in the Classic Maya case, it was precisely the principle of bureaucracy. Most Mayanists would agree that Classic-period rulers lacked a sophisticated administrative apparatus, but they imagined the cosmos as itself a kind of administrative hierarchy, governed by predictable laws:¹⁰¹an intricate set of celestial or subterranean wheels within wheels, such that it was possible to establish the exact birth and death dates of major deities thousands of years in the past (the deity Muwaan Mat, for instance, was born on 7 December 3121 BC, seven years before the creation of the current universe), even if it would never occur to them to register the numbers, wealth, let alone birthdates of their own subjects.¹⁰²So do these ‘early states’ have any common features at all? Obviously, some basic generalizations can be made. All deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system; all ultimately depended on and to some degree mimicked the patriarchal organization of households. In every case, the apparatus of government stood on top of some kind of division of society into classes. But as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, these elements could just as well exist without or prior to the creation of central government – and even when such government was established, they could take very different forms. 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. We know much less about such matters in the Maya lowlands, but what we do know suggests that power was based less on the control of land or commerce than on the ability to control ﬂows of people and loyalty directly, through intermarriage and the intensely personal bonds that obtained between lords and lesser nobles. Hence the focus, in Classic Maya politics, on capturing high-status rivals in warfare as a form of ‘human capital’ (something which hardly features in Mesopotamian sources).¹⁰³ Looking at China only seems to complicate things even further. In the time of the late Shang, from 1200 to 1000 BC, Chinese society did share certain features with the other canonical ‘early states’ but, considered as an integrated whole, it’s entirely unique. Like Inca Cuzco, the Shang capital at Anyang was designed as a ‘pivot of the four quarters’ – a cosmological anchor for the entire kingdom, laid out as a grand stage for royal ritual. Like both Cuzco and the Egyptian capital of Memphis (and later Thebes), the city was suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead, serving as home to the royal cemeteries and their attached mortuary temples, as well as a living administration. Its industrial quarters produced enormous quantities of bronze vessels and jades, the tools used in communing with ancestors.¹⁰⁴ But in most important ways, we ﬁnd little similarity between the Shang and either Old Kingdom Egypt or Inca Peru. 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.¹⁰⁵ Even there one is left with a sense that they didn’t really claim sovereignty in the same sense as Egyptian, Peruvian or even Mayan rulers. The clearest evidence is the exceptional importance of divination in the early Chinese state, which stands in striking contrast to pretty much all the other examples we’ve been looking at.¹⁰⁶

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; and there was no absolute assurance that such approval would be forthcoming in any given case. Shang diviners appealed to gods through the medium of burnt offerings. The process was as follows: when hosting gods or ancestors at a ritual meal, kings or their diviners put turtle shells and ox scapulae on the ﬁre, then ‘read’ the cracks that broke out on their surfaces as a kind of oracular writing. The proceedings were quite bureaucratic. Once an answer had been obtained, the diviner or an appointed scribe would then authorize the reading by etching an inscription on to bone or shell, and the resulting oracle would be stored for later consultation.¹⁰⁷ These oracle texts are the ﬁrst written inscriptions in China we actually know about, and while it is very possible that writing was used for everyday purposes on perishable media that don’t survive, there remains as yet no clear evidence for the other forms of administrative activity or archives that became so typical of later Chinese dynasties, nor much in the way of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus at all.¹⁰⁸

Like the Maya, Shang rulers routinely waged war to acquire stocks of living human victims for sacriﬁces. Rival courts to the Shang had their own ancestors, sacriﬁces and diviners, and while they appear to have recognized the Shang as paramount – especially in ritual contexts – there seemed to be no contradiction between this and actually going to war with them, if they felt there was sufﬁcient cause. Such rivalries help explain the lavishness of Shang funerals and mutilation of captive bodies; their rulers were still in a sense playing the agonistic games typical of a ‘heroic society’, competing to outshine and humiliate their rivals. Such a situation is inherently unstable and eventually one rival dynasty, the Western Zhou, did manage deﬁnitively to defeat the Shang, and claimed for itself the Mandate of Heaven.¹⁰⁹

At this point it should be clear that what we are really talking about, in all these cases, is not the ‘birth of the state’ in the sense of the emergence, in embryonic form, of a new and unprecedented institution that would grow and evolve into modern forms of government. We are speaking instead of broad regional systems; it just happens, in the case of Egypt and the Andes, that an entire regional system became united (at least some of the time) under a single government. This was actually a fairly unusual arrangement. More common were arrangements such as those in Shang China, where uniﬁcation was largely theoretical; or Mesopotamia, where regional hegemony rarely lasted for longer than a generation or two; or the Maya, where there was a protracted struggle between two main power blocs, neither of which could ever quite overcome the other.¹¹⁰

In terms of the speciﬁc theory we’ve been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these ‘early states’ could be more accurately described as ‘second-order’ regimes of domination. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavín or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt’s early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.

We should emphasize that it’s not as if any of these principles, in their elementary forms, were entirely absent in any one case: in fact, what seems to have happened is that two of them crystallized into institutional forms – fusing in such a way as to reinforce one another as the basis of government – while the third form of domination was largely pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos (as with divine sovereignty in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, or the cosmic bureaucracy of the Classic Maya). Keeping all this in mind, let’s return brieﬂy to Egypt to clarify some remaining points.

IN WHICH WE RECONSIDER THE EGYPTIAN CASE IN LIGHT OF OUR THREE ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF DOMINATION, AND ALSO REVISIT THE PROBLEM OF ‘DARK AGES’

The architects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom clearly saw the world they were creating as something like a cultured pearl, reared in precious isolation. Their vision is vividly documented in relief carvings of stone, lining the walls of royal temples, which served the mortuary cults of kings such as Djoser, Menkaure, Sneferu and Sahure. Here Egypt, the ‘Two Lands’, is always represented as both a celestial theatre-state, in which king and gods share equal billing, and an earthly domain: a world of rural estates and hunting grounds, mapped out in a cartography of compliance, each parcel of land personiﬁed as a lady-in-waiting who brings her bounty to the feet of the king. The governing principle of this vision of Egypt is the monarch’s absolute sovereignty over everything, symbolized in his gigantic funerary monuments, his deﬁant assertion that there was nothing he could not conquer, even death.

Egyptian kingship was, however, Janus-faced. Its inner visage was that of supreme patriarch, standing guard over a vastly extended family – a Great House (the literal meaning of ‘pharaoh’). Its outer face is shown in depictions of the king as a war leader or hunt leader asserting control over the country’s wild frontiers; all were fair game when the king turned his violence upon them.¹¹¹ This 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.

As we’ve already had occasion to observe, any form of sovereignty at once so absolute and so personal as a pharaoh’s will necessarily pose severe problems of delegation. Here, too, all state ofﬁcials had to be in some sense appendages of the king’s own person. Major landowners, military commanders, priests, administrators and other senior government ofﬁcials also held titles like ‘Keeper of the King’s Secrets’, ‘Beloved Acquaintance of the King’, ‘Director of Music to the Pharaoh’, ‘Overseer of the Palace Manicurists’ or even ‘of the King’s Breakfast’. We are not suggesting that power games were absent here; no doubt there’s never been a royal court without jockeying for position, tricks and double-dealing and political intrigue. The point is that these were not public contests, and no sanctioned space existed for open competition. Everything remained conﬁned to life at court. This is abundantly clear in the ‘tomb biographies’ of Old Kingdom ofﬁcials, which describe their life achievements almost exclusively in terms of their relationship to and their care for the king, rather than any personal qualities or attainments.¹¹²

What we have in this case, then, seems to be a hypertrophy of the principles of sovereignty and administration and an almost complete absence of competitive politics. Dramatic public contests of any sort, political or otherwise, were well-nigh non-existent. There is nothing in the ofﬁcial sources of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (nor much in later periods of ancient Egyptian history) that is remotely reminiscent of, say, Roman chariot-racing or Olmec or Zapotec ball games. In the royal jubilee or sed festival, when Egyptian kings ran a circuit to celebrate the uniﬁcation of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, it took the form of a solo performance, the outcome of which was never in doubt. Insofar as competitive politics appears in later Egyptian literature (which it occasionally does), it takes place precisely between the gods, as in works like the Contendings of Horus and Seth. Dead kings, perhaps, compete with one another; but by the time sovereignty comes down to the domain of mortals, matters have already been settled.

Just to be utterly clear about what we are saying here, 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. It’s just that in a pure monarchy there is only one person, or at best a handful of individuals, who really matter. Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government – and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one – then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same.

It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players, since everything depends on the monarch’s ability to continue the dynastic line. The dead can be worshipped under any regime – even the United States, which frames itself as a beacon of democracy, creates temples to its Founding Fathers and carves portraits of dead presidents into the sides of mountains – but infants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires.

If the ancient Egyptian regime is often held out as the ﬁrst true state and a paradigm for all future ones, it is largely because it was capable of synthesizing absolute sovereignty – the monarch’s ability to stand apart from human society and engage in arbitrary violence with impunity – with an administrative apparatus which, at certain moments at least, could reduce almost everyone to cogs in a single great machine. Only heroic, competitive politics was lacking, pushed off into the worlds of gods and the dead. But there was, of course, a great exception to this which comes precisely in those periods when central authority broke down, the supposed ‘dark ages’, beginning with the First Intermediate period (c. 2181–2055 BC).

Already towards the end of the Old Kingdom, ‘nomarchs’ or local governors had made themselves into de facto dynasties.¹¹³ 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.

Neither was this always just idle boasting; some were indeed revered as saints for centuries to come. No doubt charismatic local leaders had always existed in Egypt; but with the breakdown of the patrimonial state, such ﬁgures could begin to make open claims of authority based on their personal achievements and attributes (bravery, generosity, oratorical and strategic skills) and – crucially – redeﬁne social authority itself as based on qualities of public service and piety to the gods of their local town, and the popular support those qualities inspired.

In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned – with charismatic ﬁgures just as vainglorious and competitive, perhaps, as those we know from ancient epics, but far less bloodthirsty. The change is clearly visible in autobiographical inscriptions, like those in the rock-cut tomb of the nomarch Ankhtiﬁ at El-Mo’alla, south of Thebes.

Here’s how he narrates his role in war: ‘I was one who found the solution when it was lacking, thanks to my vigorous plans; one with commanding words and untroubled mind on the day when the nomes [administered territories] allied together (to wage war). I am the hero without equal; one who spoke freely while people were silent on the day when fear was spread and Upper Egypt did not dare to speak.’ Even more striking, here’s how he celebrates his social achievements:

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.¹¹⁴

It’s only at this point, in the First Intermediate period, that we see a hereditary aristocracy coming into its own in Egypt, as local magnates like Ankhtiﬁ began transferring their powers to their offspring and extended families. Aristocracy and personal politics had no such recognized place in the Old Kingdom, precisely because they came into conﬂict with the principle of sovereignty. In summary, the transition from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate period was not so much a shift from ‘order’ to ‘chaos’ – as Egyptological orthodoxy once had it – as a swing from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘charismatic politics’ as different ways of framing the exercise of power.

With that came a shift in emphasis, from the people’s care of god-like rulers to the care of the people as a legitimate path to authority. 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.

IN WHICH WE GO IN SEARCH OF THE REAL ORIGINS OF

BUREAUCRACY, AND FIND THEM ON WHAT APPEARS TO BE A SURPRISINGLY SMALL SCALE

At this point it should be easy enough to understand why ancient Egypt is so regularly held out as the paradigmatic example of state formation. It’s not just that it is chronologically the earliest of what we’ve called second- order regimes of domination; aside from the much later Inca Empire, it’s also just about the only case where the two principles that came together were sovereignty and administration. In other words, it’s the only case from a suitably distant phase of history that perfectly ﬁts the model of what should have happened. All such assumptions really go back to a certain kind of social theory – or, maybe better put, a theory of organization – that we described at the start of Chapter Eight. Small, intimate groups (the argument goes) might be able to adopt informal, egalitarian means of problem-solving, but as soon as large numbers of people are assembled together in a city or a kingdom everything changes.

It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.’¹¹⁵ In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process.

Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.

We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example). In fact, 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.

This, however, raises the interesting question of where and when such technologies did ﬁrst arise, and for what reason. Here there’s some surprising new evidence too. Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the ﬁrst systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. The earliest clear evidence of this appears in a series of tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East, dating over 1,000 years after the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was founded (at around 7400 BC), but still more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city.

The best example of such a site is Tell Sabi Abyad, investigated by a team of Dutch archaeologists working in Syria’s Balikh valley in the province of Raqqa. Around 8,000 years ago (c.6200 BC), in what was prehistoric Mesopotamia, a one-hectare village was destroyed there by ﬁre, baking its mud walls and many of their clay contents, thus preserving them. While obviously a very bad bit of luck for the inhabitants, it was a stroke of brilliant luck for future researchers, since it has left us a unique insight into the organization of a Late Neolithic community, comprising perhaps around 150 individuals.¹¹⁷ What the excavators discovered is that not only did the inhabitants of this village erect central storage facilities, including granaries and warehouses; they also employed administrative devices of some complexity to keep track of what was in them. These devices included economic archives, which were miniature precursors to the temple archives at Uruk and other later Mesopotamian cities.

These were not written archives: writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years. What did exist were geometric tokens made of clay, of a sort that appear to have been used in many similar Neolithic villages, most likely to keep track of the allocation of particular resources.¹¹⁸ At Tell Sabi Abyad, miniature seals bearing engraved designs were used alongside them to stamp and mark the clay stoppers of household vessels with identifying signs.¹¹⁹ Perhaps most remarkably, the stoppers themselves, once removed from the vessels, were kept and archived in a special building – an ofﬁce or bureau of sorts – near the centre of the village for later reference.¹²⁰ Ever since these discoveries were reported in the 1990s, archaeologists have been debating in whose interests and for what purpose such ‘village bureaucracies’ functioned.

In trying to answer this question, it’s important to note that the central bureau and depot of Tell Sabi Abyad is not associated with any kind of unusually large residence, rich burials or other signs of personal status. If anything, what’s striking about the remains of this community is their uniformity: the surrounding dwellings, for instance, are all roughly equal in size, quality and surviving contents. The contents themselves suggest small family units which maintained a complex division of labour, often including tasks that would have required the co-operation of multiple households.

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.

Careful scheduling and mutual aid would have been vital for the successful completion of an annual round of productive activities, while evidence of obsidian, metals and exotic pigments indicates that villagers also interacted regularly with outsiders, no doubt through intermarriage as well as travel and trade.¹²¹ 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.

Whatever the reason, the effect of introducing such techniques seems to have been profound for villages in prehistoric Mesopotamia and the surrounding hill country. Recall that 2,000 years separate Tell Sabi Abyad from the earliest cities, and during that long span of time village life in the Middle East underwent a series of remarkable changes. 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. It sounds counter-intuitive – but it is what we see in the intervening centuries in the evidence of villages scattered across a large region, from southwestern Iran through much of Iraq and all the way over to the Turkish highlands. 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’.¹²²

What it all looks like, in the archaeological record, is impossible to miss.

We write from ﬁrst-hand experience here, since one of us has conducted archaeological investigations of prehistoric villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, dating before and after the great transformation took place. 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.¹²³

In fact 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. Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s ﬁrst cities, and that administrative tools were ﬁrst designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.¹²⁴ To get a sense of how such small-scale bureaucracies might have worked in practice we can brieﬂy consider again the ayllu, those Andean village associations which, as we mentioned earlier, had their own home-grown administration.

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 arguments that crop up in such situations – about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom.¹²⁶ 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. In other words, although the actual administrative tools used were different, the reason for their existence was quite similar to what we envisage for the village accounting systems in prehistoric Mesopotamia, and rooted in a similarly explicit ideal of equality.¹²⁷

Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangement, even those founded on arbitrary violence (e.g. ‘conquest’), an air of even-handedness and equity. That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny.

Under the Inca, let’s recall, all ayllus were reduced to the status of ‘conquered women’ and khipu strings were employed to keep track of labour debts owed to the central Inca administration. Unlike the local string records, these were ﬁxed and non-negotiable; the knots were never unravelled and retied. Here it is necessary to overcome a few myths about the Inca, who are often portrayed as the mildest of empires – even a kind of benevolent proto-socialist state. In fact, it was the pre-existing ayllu system that continued to provide social security under Inca rule. By contrast, the overarching administrative structure put in place by the Inca court was largely extractive and exploitative in nature (even if local ofﬁcers of the court preferred to misrepresent it as an extension of ayllu principles): for purposes of central monitoring and recording, households were grouped into units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and so on, each responsible for labour obligations over and above those they already owed to their community, in a way that could only play havoc with existing allegiances, geography and communal organization.¹²⁸ Corvée duties were assigned uniformly according to a rigid scale of measurement; work tasks might simply be invented if there was nothing that needed doing; scofﬂaws faced severe punishment.¹²⁹

The results were predictable, and we can see them clearly reﬂected in the ﬁrst-hand accounts supplied by Spanish chroniclers of the time, who took an obvious interest in Inca strategies of conquest and domination and their local workings. 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.¹³⁰ This new class of hereditary peons was growing rapidly at the time of Spanish conquest.

None of which is to say the Inca reputation as adept administrators is unfounded. They apparently were capable of keeping exact track of births and deaths, adjusting household numbers at yearly festivals and so on. Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, 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.

In the Middle East, very similar things appear to have happened in later periods of history. Most famously, perhaps, the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible preserve memories of powerful protests that ensued as demands for tribute drove farmers into penury, forced them to pawn their ﬂocks and vineyards, and ultimately surrender their children into debt peonage. Or wealthy merchants and administrators took advantage of crop failures, ﬂoods, natural disasters or neighbours’ simple bad luck to offer interest-bearing loans that led to the same results. Similar complaints are recorded in China and India as well. 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. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violent inequalities seem to arise, in the ﬁrst instance, from such ﬁctions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or all worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered ultimately the same – at least in that one speciﬁc way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, whether as individuals or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of some paterfamilias.

What’s important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity. But there’s no reason to believe that impersonal systems were originally, or are necessarily, stupid. 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.

Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difﬁcult situation is the most basic element of the ﬁrst. In fact, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.¹³²

One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized. It is one of history’s great ironies that Madame de Grafﬁgny’s notion of the Inca state as a model of a benevolent, bureaucratic order actually derives from a misreading of the sources, if a very common one: mistaking the social beneﬁts of local, self-organized administrative units (ayllu) for an imperial, Inca structure of command, which in reality served almost exclusively to provision the army, priesthood and administrative classes.¹³³

Mesopotamian and later Chinese kings also tended to represent themselves, like the Egyptian nomarchs, as protectors of the weak, feeders of the hungry, solace of widows and orphans.

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.

IN WHICH, ARMED WITH NEW KNOWLEDGE, WE RETHINK SOME BASIC PREMISES OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Social scientists and political philosophers have been debating the ‘origins of the state’ for well over a century. These debates are never resolved and are unlikely ever to be. At this point, at least we can understand why. Much like the search for the ‘origins of inequality’, seeking the origins of the state is little more than chasing a phantasm. As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, it never occurred to Spanish conquistadors to ask whether or not they were dealing with ‘states’ since the concept didn’t really exist at the time. The language they used, of kingdoms, empires and republics, serves just as well, and in many ways rather better.

Historians, of course, still speak of kingdoms, empires and republics. If social scientists have come to prefer the language of ‘states’ and ‘state formation’ it’s largely because this is taken to be more scientiﬁc – despite the lack of consistent deﬁnition. It’s not clear why. Part of the reason might be that the notions of ‘the state’ and of modern science both emerged around the same time and were to a certain degree entangled with one another. Whatever the cause, because the existing literature is so relentlessly focused on a single narrative of increasing complexity, hierarchy and state formation, it becomes very difﬁcult to use the term ‘state’ for any other purpose.

The fact that our planet is, at the present time, almost entirely covered by states obviously makes it easy to write as if such an outcome was inevitable. Yet our present situation regularly leads people to make ‘scientiﬁc’ assumptions about how we got here that have almost nothing to do with the actual data. Certain salient features of current arrangements are just projected backwards, presumed to exist once society has attained a certain degree of complexity – unless deﬁnitive evidence of their absence can be produced.

For example, it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government – military, administrative and judicial – pass into the hands of full-time specialists. This makes sense if you accept the narrative that an agricultural surplus ‘freed up’ a signiﬁcant portion of the population from the onerous responsibility of securing adequate amounts of food: a story that suggests the beginning of a process that would lead to our current global division of labour. Early states might have used this surplus largely to support full-time bureaucrats, priests, soldiers and the like, but – we are always reminded – its existence also allowed for full-time sculptors, poets and astronomers.

It’s a compelling story. It is also quite true when applied to our present- day situation (at least, only a small percentage of us are now involved in the production and distribution of foodstuffs). However, almost none of the regimes we’ve been considering in this chapter were actually staffed by full-time specialists. Most obviously, none seem to have had a standing army. 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.¹³⁴

One could go further. It’s not clear to what degree many of these ‘early states’ were themselves largely seasonal phenomena (recall that, at least as far back as the Ice Age, seasonal gatherings could be stages for the performance of something that looks to us a bit like kingship; rulers held court only during certain periods of the year; and some clans or warrior societies were given state-like police powers only during the winter months).¹³⁵ Like warfare, the business of government tended to concentrate strongly upon certain times of year: there were months full of building projects, pageants, festivals, census-taking, oaths of allegiance, trials and spectacular executions; and other times when a king’s subjects (and sometimes even the king himself) scattered to attend to the more urgent needs of planting, harvesting and pasturage. This doesn’t mean these kingdoms weren’t real: they were capable of mobilizing, or for that matter killing and maiming, thousands of human beings. It just means that their reality was, in effect, sporadic. They appeared and then dissolved away.

Could it be that, in the same way that play farming – our term for those loose and ﬂexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities – turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well? The evidence from Egypt might be interpreted along these lines. But it’s also possible that both these processes, when they did happen, were ultimately driven by something else, such as the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women’s power within the household. Surely these are the kinds of questions we should be asking. Ethnography also teaches us that kings are rarely content with the idea of being a sporadic presence in most of their subjects’ lives. Even rulers of kingdoms that nobody would describe as a state, like the Shilluk reth or rulers of minor principalities in Java or Madagascar, would try to insert themselves into the rhythms of ordinary social life by insisting that no one can swear an oath, or marry, or even greet one another without invoking their name. In this manner, the king would become the necessary means by which his subjects established relations with each other, in much the same way as later heads of state would insist on putting their faces on money.

In 1852 the Wesleyan minister and missionary Richard B. Lyth described how in the Fijian kingdom of Cakaudrove there was a daily rule of absolute silence at sunrise. Then the king’s herald would proclaim that he was about to chew his kava root, whereon all his subjects shouted, ‘Chew it!’ This was followed by a thunderous roar when the ritual was completed. The ruler was the Sun, who gave both life and order to his people. He recreated the universe each day. In fact, most scholars nowadays insist this king wasn’t even a king, but merely the head of a ‘confederacy of chiefdoms’ who ruled over perhaps a few thousand people. Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do). If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.¹³⁶

Monuments like the Egyptian pyramids seem to have served a similar purpose. They were attempts to make a certain kind of power seem eternal – the kind that only really manifested itself in those particular months when pyramid construction was under way. 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. Such is their power that even now we risk falling under their spell. We don’t really know how seriously to take them. After all, the Fijian subjects of the King of Cakaudrove must at least have been willing to play along with the daily sunrise ritual, since he lacked much in the way of means to compel them. Yet rulers such as Sargon the Great of Akkad or the First Emperor of China had many such means at their disposal, and as a result we can say even less about what their subjects really made of their more grandiose claims.¹³⁷

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. As the sociologist Philip Abrams pointed out long ago, failure to make this distinction has led social scientists up countless blind alleys, because the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter, he argued, we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does’.¹³⁸ We can now see that these points apply just as forcefully to ancient political regimes as they do to modern ones – if not more so.

An origin for ‘the state’ has long been sought in such diverse places as ancient Egypt, Inca Peru and Shang China, but what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a conﬂuence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the beneﬁt of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart. As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J. P. Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global ﬁeld of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states.

If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

CODA: ON CIVILIZATION, EMPTY WALLS AND HISTORIES STILL TO BE WRITTEN

On reﬂection, it’s odd that the term ‘civilization’ – one we’ve not discussed much until now – ever came to be used this way in the ﬁrst place. When people talk about ‘early civilizations’ they are mostly referring to those very same societies we’ve been describing in this chapter and their direct successors: 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. Is it any wonder that in some circles the very idea of civilization’ has fallen into disrepute?

Something very basic has gone wrong here.

One problem is that we’ve come to assume that ‘civilization’ refers, in origin, simply to the habit of living in cities. Cities, in turn, were thought to imply states. But as we’ve seen, that is not the case historically, or even etymologically.¹³⁹ The word ‘civilization’ derives from Latin civilis, which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition. In other words, it originally meant the type of qualities exhibited by Andean ayllu associations or Basque villages, rather than Inca courtiers or Shang dynasts.

If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.

As we saw in Chapter Five, Marcel Mauss took some initial, furtive steps in that direction but was largely ignored; and, as he anticipated, such a history might well begin with those geographically expansive ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’ that archaeologists can now trace back into periods far earlier than kingdoms or empires, or even cities. As we’ve seen, physical evidence left behind by common forms of domestic life, ritual and hospitality shows us this deep history of civilization. In some ways it’s much more inspiring than monuments. Arguably, the most important ﬁndings of modern archaeology are precisely these vibrant and far-ﬂung networks of kinship and commerce, where those who rely largely on speculation have expected to ﬁnd only backward and isolated ‘tribes’.

As we’ve been showing throughout this book, in all parts of the world small communities formed civilizations in that true sense of extended moral communities. 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.

A moment’s reﬂection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization. As we saw in earlier chapters, tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just two examples, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents or in the layout of Peru’s Chavín temples sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe or sculptor, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork.¹⁴⁰ What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

We began this chapter by noting how often the expansion of ambitious polities, and the concentration of power in a few hands, was accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination. This seems to be true not just of second-order regimes like Aztec Mexico and Old Kingdom Egypt but also of ﬁrst-order ones like Chavín de Huántar. But what about cases where, even as societies scaled up and also took on more centralized forms of government, women and their concerns remained at the core of things? Do any such exist in history? This brings us to our ﬁnal example: Minoan Crete.

Whatever was happening during the Bronze Age on Crete, the largest and most southerly of the Aegean islands, it clearly doesn’t quite ﬁt the scholarly playbook of ‘state formation’. Yet the remains of what has come to be called Minoan society are too dramatic, too impressive and too close to the heart of Europe (and what was to become the classical world) to be sidelined or ignored. Indeed, in the 1970s the renowned archaeologist Colin Renfrew chose nothing less than The Emergence of Civilisation as the title of his important book on the prehistory of the Aegean, to the eternal confusion and annoyance of archaeologists working anywhere else.¹⁴¹ Despite this high proﬁle, and more than a century of intense ﬁeldwork, Minoan Crete remains a kind of beautiful irritant for archaeological theory, and frankly a source of puzzlement to anyone coming at the topic from outside.

Much of our knowledge comes from the metropolis of Knossos, as well as other major centres at Phaestos, Malia and Zakros, which are usually described as ‘palatial societies’ that existed between 1700 and 1450 BC (the Neopalatial or ‘New Palace’ period).¹⁴² Certainly, they were very impressive places at this time. Knossos, thought to have had a population of about 25,000,¹⁴³ in many ways resembles similar cities in other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, centring as it does on large palace complexes replete with industrial quarters and storage facilities, and a system of writing on clay tablets (‘Linear A’) which, frustratingly, has never been deciphered. The problem is that, unlike palatial societies of roughly the same age – such as those of Zimri-Lim at Mari on the Syrian Euphrates, or in Hittite Anatolia to the north, or Egypt – there is simply no clear evidence of monarchy on Minoan Crete.¹⁴⁴

It’s not for lack of material. We might not be able to read the writing, but Crete and the nearby island of Thera (Santorini) – where a bed of volcanic ash preserves the Minoan town of Akrotiri in splendid detail – actually furnish us with one of the most extensive bodies of pictorial art from the Bronze Age world: not just frescoes, but also ivories and detailed engravings on seals and jewellery.¹⁴⁵ 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.¹⁴⁶ Women are regularly depicted at a larger scale than men, a sign of political superiority in the visual traditions of all neighbouring lands. They hold symbols of command, like the staff-wielding ‘Mother of Mountains’ who appears on seal impressions from a major shrine at Knossos; they perform fertility rites before horned altars, sit on thrones, meet together in assemblies with no male presiding and appear ﬂanked by supernatural creatures and dangerous animals.¹⁴⁷ Most male depictions, on the other hand, are either of scantily clad or naked athletes (no women are depicted naked in Minoan art); or show men bringing tribute and adopting poses of subservience before female dignitaries. All this is without parallel in the highly patriarchal societies of Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Egypt (all regions that Cretans of the time were familiar with, since they visited them as traders and diplomats).

Scholarly interpretations of Minoan palatial art, with its array of powerful females, are somewhat perplexing. Most follow Arthur Evans, the early- twentieth-century excavator of Knossos, in identifying such ﬁgures as goddesses, or priestesses wielding no earthly power – almost as though they have no connection to the real world.¹⁴⁸ They tend to come up in the ‘religion and ritual’ sections of books on Aegean art and archaeology as opposed to ‘politics’, ‘economics’ or ‘social structure’ – politics, in particular, being reconstructed with almost no reference to the art at all.

Others simply avoid the issue altogether, describing Minoan political life as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one). Would this keep happening if these were images of men in positions of authority? Unlikely, since the same scholars usually have no trouble identifying similar scenes that involve males – painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs, for example – or even actual representations of Keftiu (Cretans) bringing tribute to powerful Egyptian men as reﬂections of real power relations.

Another puzzling bit of evidence is the nature of the wares that Minoan merchants imported from abroad. Minoans were a trading people, and the traders appear to have been mostly men. But starting in the Proto-palatial period, what they brought home from overseas had a distinctively female ﬂavour. Egyptian sistra, cosmetic jars, ﬁgures of nursing mothers and scarab amulets do not come from the male-dominated sphere of courtly culture but the rituals of non-royal Egyptian women and the gynocentric rites of Hathor. Hathor was celebrated outside Egypt too, in temples near the Sinai turquoise mines and in maritime ports, where the horned goddess morphed into a protector of travellers. One such port was Byblos on the Lebanese coast, where an assemblage of cosmetics and amulets – almost identical to those from early Cretan tombs – was found buried as offerings in a temple. Most likely, such objects travelled along with women’s cults, perhaps like the much later cults of Isis, tracking the ‘ofﬁcial’ trade of male elites. The concentration of these items within prestigious Cretan tholos tombs in the period just before the formation of palaces (another of those neglected ‘proto-periods’) suggests, at the very least, that women occupied the demand side of such long-distance exchanges.¹⁴⁹

Again, this was most deﬁnitely not the case elsewhere. To throw things into relief, let’s brieﬂy consider the slightly later palaces of mainland Greece.

Cretan palaces were unfortiﬁed, and Minoan art makes almost no reference to war, dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts. All this is in marked contrast to what was happening on the Greek mainland. Walled citadels arose at Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns around 1400 BC, and before long their rulers launched a successful takeover of Crete, occupying Knossos and assuming control of its hinterland. Compared to Knossos or Phaistos, their residences appear little more than hill forts, perched on key passes in the Peloponnese and surrounded by modest hamlets. Mycenae, the biggest, had a population of around 6,000. 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.¹⁵⁰

On to this institutional foundation – the warrior band leader and his hunting retinue – were soon added courtly ﬁnery borrowed mainly from the Cretan palaces, and a script (Linear B) adapted to write the Greek language for administration. Analysis of the Linear B tablets suggests that just a handful of literate ofﬁcers did most of the administrative work themselves, personally inspecting crops and livestock, gathering taxes, distributing raw materials to artisans and supplying provisions for festivals. It was all rather limited and small-scale,¹⁵¹ and a Mycenaean wanax (the ruler or overlord) would have exercised little true sovereignty beyond his citadel, making do with seasonal tax raids on a surrounding populace whose lives otherwise went on beyond the scope of royal surveillance.¹⁵²

These Mycenaean overlords held court in a megaron or great hall, a relatively well-preserved example of which exists at Pylos. Early archaeologists were being a bit fanciful when they imagined this actually to be the palace of the Homeric king Nestor, but there is no doubt one of Homer’s kings would have felt quite at home here. The megaron centred on a huge hearth, open to the sky; the remainder of the space, including the throne, was most likely cast in shadow. The walls bear frescoes showing a bull led to slaughter and a bard playing the lyre. The wanax, although not depicted, is clearly the focus of these processional scenes, which converge on his throne.¹⁵³

We can contrast this with the ‘Throne Room’ of Knossos on Crete, identiﬁed as such by Arthur Evans. In this case the purported throne faces an open space, surrounded by stone benches symmetrically arranged in rows so the assembled groups could sit in comfort for long periods, each visible to all the others. Nearby was a stepped bathing chamber. There are many such ‘lustral basins’ (as Evans called them) in Minoan houses and palaces. Archaeologists puzzled for decades over their function, until at Akrotiri one such was found directly under a painted scene of a female initiation ceremony most likely linked to menstruation.¹⁵⁴ In fact, on purely architectural grounds, and notwithstanding Evans’s rather desperate insistence that it ‘seems better adapted for a man’, the centrepiece of the Throne Room may be quite reasonably understood not as the seat of a male monarch but rather that of a council head, and its occupants more likely a succession of female councillors.

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. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant to this conclusion? One can’t blame everything on the fact that proponents of ‘primitive matriarchy’ made exaggerated claims back in 1902. Yes, scholars tend to say that cities ruled by colleges of priestesses are unprecedented in the ethnographic or historical record. But by the same logic, one could equally point out that there is no parallel for a kingdom run by men, in which all the visual representations of authority ﬁgures are depictions of women. Something different was clearly happening on Crete.

Certainly, the way in which Minoan artists represented life attests to a profoundly different sensibility to that of Crete’s neighbours on mainland Greece. In an essay called ‘The Shapes of Minoan Desire’, Jack Dempsey points out that erotic attention seems to be displaced from the female body on to just about every other facet of life, starting with the lithe, scantily clad ﬁgures of young men as they dart in and out of the bodies of bulls who tease them, or gyrate in sporting activities, or the naked boys represented carrying ﬁsh. It’s all a world away from the stiff animal ﬁgures that populate the walls of Pylos, or indeed those of Zimri-Lim’s court, let alone the scenes of brutal warfare on later Assyrian wall reliefs. In the Minoan frescoes everything merges – except, that is, for the sharply delineated ﬁgures of those leading females, who stand apart or in small groups, happily chatting with one another or admiring some spectacle. Flowers and reeds, birds, bees, dolphins, even hills and mountains are in the throes of a perpetual dance, weaving in and out of each other.

Minoan objects too bleed into one another in an extraordinary play on materials – a true ‘science of the concrete’ – that turns pottery into crusted shell and melds the worlds of stone, metal and clay together into a common realm of forms, each mimicking the others.

All this unfolds to the undulating rhythms of the sea, the eternal backdrop to this garden of life, and all with a remarkable absence of ‘politics’, in our sense, or what Dempsey calls the ‘self-perpetuating, power-hungry ego’.

What these scenes celebrate, as he eloquently puts it, is quite the opposite of politics: it is the ‘ritually induced release from individuality, and an ecstasy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, “standing beyond oneself”) – a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies’. There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players. Crete of the palaces was the realm of Homo ludens. Or perhaps, better said, Femina ludens – not to mention Femina potens.¹⁵⁵

What we’ve learned in this chapter can be brieﬂy summarized. The process usually called ‘state formation’ can in fact mean a bewildering number of very different things. It can mean a game of honour or chance gone terribly wrong, or the incorrigible growth of a particular ritual for feeding the dead; it can mean industrial slaughter, the appropriation by men of female knowledge, or governance by a college of priestesses. But we’ve also learned that when studied and compared more closely, the range of possibilities is far from limitless.

In fact, there seem to be both logical and historical constraints on the variety of ways in which power can expand its scope; these limits are the basis of our ‘three principles’ of sovereignty, administration and competitive politics. What we can also see, though, is that – even within these constraints – there were far more interesting things going on than we might ever have guessed by sticking to any conventional deﬁnition of ‘the state’. What was really happening in the Minoan palaces? They seem to have been in some sense theatrical stages, in some sense women’s initiation societies, and administrative hubs all at the same time. Were they even a regime of domination at all?

It’s also important to recall the very uneven nature of the evidence we’ve been dealing with. What would we be saying about Minoan Crete, or Teotihuacan, or Çatalhöyük for that matter, were it not for the fact that their elaborate wall paintings happen to have been preserved? More than almost any other form of human activity, painting on walls is something people in virtually any cultural setting seem inclined to do. This has been true almost since the beginnings of humanity itself. We can hardly doubt that similar images were produced, on skins and fabrics as well as directly on walls, in any number of so-called ‘early states’ from which only bare stone building blocks or mud-brick enclosures now survive.

Archaeology, using a barrage of new scientiﬁc techniques, will undoubtedly reveal many more such ‘lost civilizations’, as it is already in the process of doing, from the deserts of Saudi Arabia or Peru to the once seemingly empty steppes of Kazakhstan and the tropical forests of Amazonia. As the evidence accumulates, year on year, for large settlements and impressive structures in previously unsuspected locations, we’d be wise to resist projecting some image of the modern nation state on to their bare surfaces, and consider what other kinds of social possibilities they might attest to.

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