Scott is a professor of anthropology and political science at Yale, whose latest book reaches substantially back further in time. He seeks to describe the origins of State-making in Mesopotamia. Scott fully admits that his expertise is not in prehistory, archaeology, or ancient history, yet he brings a startling new hypothesis to the table. Perhaps it would take an outsider to bring a radical new reappraisal to the origins of human history. “We thought (most of us anyway) that the domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism and fixed-field agriculture. It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared.” The invention of agriculture did not beget fixed residency and fixed residency existed for thousands of years before the first State formed! Scott focuses on Mesopotamia, beginning with the Ubaid Period, roughly 6500 BC, through the Babylonian Period, ending roughly 1600 BC, although he makes lengthy digressions and comparisons with ancient Greece, Rome, and China.
Scott begins by reminding us just how new the State project is in the course of history. “The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and state in Mesopotamia occurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on the planet…. Evidence for the use of fire is dated at least 400,000 years ago…. Permanent settlement, agriculture and pastoralism appearing 12,000 years ago…. The first states in the Mesopotamian alluvium pop up no earlier than about 6,000 years ago…. Until the past four hundred years, one-third of the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and independent horticulturalists, while states, being essentially agrarian, were confined largely to that small portion of the globe suitable for cultivation.”
Scott dates the beginnings of the Anthropocene to the introduction of fire. Fire was actually invented by Homo Erectus, even before Homo Sapiens came onto Earth’s scene. “Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning.” Hominids began to shape their environment and in doing so changed the evolutionary path of the plants and animals that they interacted with. Even hominids themselves became shaped by the harnessing of fire. “The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes starch and denatures protein…. [It] allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition [from food]…. Plants with thorns, thick skins, and bark could be opened, peeled, and detoxified by cooking; hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable; the flesh and guts of small birds and rodents could be sterilized.” It is no exaggeration to assert that fire changed the landscape of the entire earth by changing the diet available to hominids. Fire also allowed the human anatomy to transform. Compared to other primates, humans have smaller teeth, a gut half the size, and a brain three times as large as would be expected for our size.
Getting back to habitat, Scott maintains that “sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little to no cereal cultivation.” This flies in the face of accepted history. Furthermore, even after that, “domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears.” The gap between the first domestications and the arrival of the State is now put at around 4,000 years, as reckoned from new archaeological records and soil samples. Instead, the first sedentary settlements sprang up in wetlands between the Euphrates and Tigris, initially having no need for grain or irrigation. “The density and diversity of resources that are lower in the food chain, in particular, make sedentism more feasible. Compared, say, with hunter-gatherers who may follow large game (seals, bison, caribou), those who take most of their diet from lower trophic levels such as plants, shellfish, fruits, nuts, and small fish that are, other things equal, denser and less mobile than the larger mammals and fish, can be far less migratory.” These initial sedentary communities also sprang up at a time when the ocean water reached much further inland than currently. Mesopotamia was not today’s arid climate, requiring irrigation to channel scarce water resources, but was a marine environment between coasts and estuaries that created multiple diverse habitats in which to scavenge and hunt. Seasonally, as the brackish line between fresh and ocean water would shift, the peoples learned to adapt to the changing environment. The natural water environment moved through the seasons instead of the people moving to new environments. From Mesopotamia, to the lower Nile, Jericho, the Indus, Lake Titicaca, and Hangzhou Bay, the first settled peoples always chose wetland locations with diverse ecologies to put up stakes. The important thing to note is that these people also shifted in methods of acquiring sustenance. Gradually the people of the Mesopotamian alluvium learned to incorporate aspects of agriculturalism and pastoralism, as well as being hunter-gatherers. They shifted their methods and would switch back and forth as the seasons, climate, and fauna dictated. There was no need to practice labor intensive farming and livestock rearing, besides as insurance, as long as the food supply was bountiful. The earliest agriculture was probably “flood-retreat” in that it relied on nature to transfer, by erosion, upstream nutrients to a flood plain that was then seeded annually.
Eventually, as agriculture gained traction, man and nature interacted to change the evolution of both. “The tilled, sown, weeded field is an altogether different terrain selection [from the wild]. The farmer wants nonshattering (indehiscent) grain spikes that can be gathered intact, as well as determinate growth and maturity. Many of the characteristics of a domestic grain are simply the long-run effects of sowing and harvesting. Thus plants that produce both more seeds and seeds that are larger, with thin coats (allowing them to quickly germinate and outrace weedy competitors when sown), that ripen uniformly, are easily threshed, germinate reliably, and have fewer glumes and appendages are likely to contribute disproportionately to the harvest, and thus their offspring will be favored in next year’s planting.” Humans also shaped the evolutionary direction of the animals that interacted with their domus. “The hallmark behavioral difference between domesticated animals and their wild contemporaries is a lower threshold of reaction to external stimuli and an overall reduced wariness of other species- including homo sapiens.” These traits were not just intentionally bred by humans, but came as a natural result of living in a domus environment. This can be shown because even uninvited “commensals such as statuary pigeons, rats, mice, and sparrows exhibit much the same reduced wariness and reactivity.” Sexual dimorphism was also reduced, fertility increased, neotany (the early attainment of adulthood) increased, a shortening of the face and jaw occurred, and the limbic systems in the brains of domesticated animals were reduced in size, resulting in an overall dampening of emotions. With agriculture, the very cycle of humanity changed. Humans shifted from a natural calendar to one that was based on field clearing, sowing, weeding, watering, and harvesting. Humans had shifted the very cycles of time. “This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of fauna for a handful of livestock.” Scott considers this Neolithic Revolution to be a great deskilling of mankind on par with the specialization of the factory worker, related by Adam Smith’s pin factory during the Industrial Revolution.
Scott asserts that the domestication of food was a lot of work. It was fragile and vulnerable. It created a monotonous food source prone to fungus, disease, weeds, rodents, and insects. It was also labor intensive. It also created new diseases that affected humans. “Virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand…. Of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases, originating in nonhuman hosts.” Fortunately (or not), “despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-a-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction- enough to compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.” The spacing between births was also greatly compressed. Mobile populations only birthed every four years or so, due to prolonged weaning, abortions, and infanticide. A combination of exercise and a protein rich diet also induced later puberty, earlier menopause, and less regular ovulation, resulting in less births compared to sedentary contemporaries. Thus, while the lives of hunter-gatherers were more nutritious, less prone to disease, and, overall, healthier individually, they were still being outcompeted as a group by the greater birthrates of agriculturalists.
The first State was probably Uruk around 3200 BC. Its population was somewhere around twenty-five to fifty thousand, in an area of about 250 hectares. Some define the State as having a monopoly of violence over a given geographical space. Others include a specialist scribal class, soldiers, and standardized weights and measures as marks of stateliness. Most agree that social stratification arose with the State, as separation between an elite and a peasantry formed. Agricultural surplus, provided by the peasants, was needed to feed the specialized class of clerks, artisans, soldiers, priests, and aristocrats. Transport was always arduous, so most grain had to be produced within the smallest radius possible from the State core. Water transport, far easier than land, almost guaranteed that all States would be next to a water source. Cereal grains were the basis of all States. That was because “only cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops- legumes, tubers, and starch plants- have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages.” Cereals were ideal to distribute to laborers and slaves, for requiring as tribute, for soldiers, and to store in case of famine or siege. Hunters and gatherers, on the other hand, were dispersed and mobile, with no permanent base, and their tubers were impossible to find and even so had to be dug up one by one. Owen Lattimore suggests that the Great Wall of China was not so much to keep the Mongol hordes out, as to keep the Chinese tax-paying base in. Wars in this period were for people, not land. People meant wealth for the State. Wars, slave raiding, and destruction of other urban cores provided forced resettlement of a peasant base that elites could extract a surplus of grain from. “As late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.” Female slaves were as important for reproduction as for labor. Captive women and children also may have played a necessary role in alleviating the unhealthy effects of population concentration and homogenization around the State core. There was social mobility in this system, however. As former slaves were incorporated into the civilization, new slaves were found to occupy the bottom rungs of society in a never ending cycle of raiding and plunder. The use of slaves to occupy the worst jobs in society also helped to mitigate insurrectionary pressure and civil war from within. Writing was also critical to this enterprise. “Behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders.” In fact, in early Mesopotamia, writing existed for over five hundred years, just in the form of government lists and for bookkeeping, before it spread to other purposes, such as literature and religious texts.
The State was always a fragile affair, teetering on the brink of collapse. “Climate change, resource depletion, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance” could all lead to the abandonment of a State core. “Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent.” This would mean collapse for the reigning elites, but was it always catastrophic for society at large? After all, these events “do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition” and often, by these measures, humanity, in fact, improved. Why was the State so vulnerable? There were two main reasons. It depended on a single annual harvest of one or two cereal staples. A crop failure was often an irrecoverable event. The population was always in danger of an epidemic of infectious disease, often brought on by contact through trade or warfare with a new community. There were also many reasons that led to a more gradual decline. Deforestation, the loss of nutrients in the soil, and overgrazing of lands slowly eroded State productivity. Because of the limits of transportation, trees had to be felled as near to the rivers as possible. This led to further erosion, silt build up, and unpredictable flooding downstream. Malaria, nicknamed the “disease of civilization”, also first appeared in early Mesopotamian States. “As the silt accumulates, it creates its own levee or barrier, blocking its passage to the sea and causing it to back up and spread out laterally, creating malarial wetlands that are both anthropogenic and perhaps uninhabitable." Irrigation projects also gradually caused the salt tables to increase, eventually leading to the salinization of the top soil. Finally, warfare diverted manpower from grain production to defense. Walls and weapons had to be constructed, using up manpower. Furthermore, city sites now had to be chosen on the basis of ease in repelling invaders, not just where the best soil, timber, and food sources were located. Warfare had existed before the State, but the State amplified the gains and risks involved. “The advent of the early states raised the stakes largely because they represented a stock of fixed capital- canals, defensive works, records, storehouses, and, often, a valuable location with respect to soil, water, and trade routes. These assets were nodes of power.”
Scott ends by rethinking periods labeled as “dark ages” by historians. “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription. As such, it may stanch the worst losses that arise from concentrated sedentism under state rule.” Scott goes on to consider the barbarian as one who simply lives outside the confines of the State. He is the “other”, not taxed or counted by the “civilized” core. The State was also a boon to these barbarians, however, as it provided a stationary target to raid and trade with. Barbarians were often given tribute or protection money to stay away from State centers and were often able to control the main trading routes connecting State to State. “A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war.”
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