Marvin Harris (Our Kind): The First States

The first time a chiefdom became a state was in the Middle East, specifically in Sumer in southern Iran and Iraq, between 3500 and 3200 B.C. Why the Middle East? Probably because this region was better endowed than other early centers of state formation with wild grasses and animal species suitable for domestication. The progenitors of wheat, barley, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs all thrived in the upland sections of the Levant and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, facilitating an early abandonment of foraging modes of subsistence in favor of sedentary village life.

What motivated people at the end of the Ice Age to give up their hunter-gatherer existence remains a matter of dispute among archaeologists. But it seems likely that with the warming of the earth after 12,000 B.C., a combination of environmental changes and hunting overkill brought about the extinction of many species of big game, which reduced the attractiveness of the old means of subsistence. In several regions of the Old and New Worlds, people compensated for the extinction of large game species by foraging for a broader variety of plants and animals, including the wild progenitors of today's familiar grains and barnyard animals.

In the Middle East, which had never been as richly endowed with large game as other regions during the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers turned to exploiting wild stands of wheat and barley over thirteen millennia ago. As their dependence on these plants increased, they were obliged to become less nomadic because the seeds all ripened at the same time and had to be stored for the rest of the year. Since the wild seed harvest could not be moved about from camp to camp, people like the Natufians, who flourished in the Levant about 10,000 B.C., stayed put, built storage houses, and established permanent villages. It was a relatively short step from settling down near wild stands of wheat and barley to propagating the plants whose seeds were bigger and did not fall off at the slightest touch. And as the wild stands gave way to cultivated fields, they attracted animals like sheep and goats into closer association with humans, who soon found it was more practical to put these animals in pens, feed them, and breed the ones with the most desirable characteristics rather than simply hunt them all to extinction. And that is how the period that archaeologists call the Neolithic began.

The first settlements quickly evolved beyond headman or bigman village stages to simple chiefdoms. Jericho, situated in an oasis in what is modern-day Jordan, for example, already covered ten acres and had 2,000 inhabitants as long ago as 8000 B.C., and by 6000 B.C., Catal Huyuk in southern Turkey covered thirty-two acres and had 6,000 people. Its ruins contain a dazzling array of art objects, woven cloth, murals, and wall sculpture. Wall paintings–the earliest known inside houses–depict a large bull, hunting scenes, dancing men, and vultures attacking human bodies done in red, pink, mauve, black, and yellow. The people of (fatal Huyuk grew barley and three varieties of wheat. They kept sheep, cattle, goats, and dogs and lived in attached houses opening on courtyards. There were no doors; the only way in was through holes in the flat roofs.

Like chiefdoms everywhere, early Neolithic villages seem preoccupied with the threat of attack by marauders from afar. Jericho was surrounded by moats and walls (long before Biblical times) and had a circular watch tower on top of one of the walls. Other early Neolithic settlements such as Tell-es-Sawwan and Maghzaliyah in Iraq were also surrounded by walls. I should note that at least one archaeologist claims that the first walls built at Jericho were for protection against mudslides rather than against armed attacks. But the tower with its narrow lookout slits clearly was designed to serve defensive functions. Nor can one doubt that the walls around Tell-es-Sawwan and Maghzaliyah were the equivalent of the wooden palisades characteristic of chiefdoms in lands where trees were abundant. These were no peaceful, harmonious, and harmless farmers concerned only with cultivating their fields and tending their flocks. At Cayonu in southern Turkey, not far from Catal Huyuk, James Mellaart excavated a large stone slab that had once been covered with human blood. Nearby he found several hundred human skulls without the rest of their skeletons. And why else, if not for protection against marauding strangers, would the people of Catal Huyuk have built their houses without openings at ground level?

Like chiefdoms everywhere, Neolithic societies engaged in long-distance trade. Their favorite items for exchange with ocher faraway settlements were obsidian, a volcanic glass used for making knives and other cutting tools, and pottery. Catal Huyuk seems to have been a center for the domestication, breeding, and export of cattle in exchange for a variety of imported artifacts and raw materials, including fifty-five different kinds of minerals.

The degree of specialization within and between Neolithic settlements also bespeaks of much trade and other forms of exchange. At Beidha in Jordan, one house concentrated on making beads, while others concentrated on flint making, and still others on butchering animals. At Cayonu, a group of houses specialized in making beads. At Umm Dabajioua in northern Iraq, the whole settlement seems to have been devoted to tanning animal skins, while the inhabitants of Yarim Tepe and Tell-es-Sawwan specialized in the mass production of pottery.

There is also evidence for redistribution and distinctions of rank. For example, at Bougras in Syria, a storage structure adjoins the largest house in the village, and at Catal Huyuk and Tell-es-Sawwan, burial chambers differ in size and in the amount of grave goods interred with different individuals.

In the earliest centers of agriculture and stockraising, people depended on rainfall to water their crops. As the population increased, they experimented with irrigation and began to fission off and colonize the drier parts of the region. Sumer, situated in the rainless but swampy and flood-prone deltaic zones of the TigrisEuphrates, was settled in this manner. Confined at first to the margins of a natural watercourse, the Sumerians soon became totally dependent on irrigation to water their fields of wheat and barley, unknowingly trapping themselves into the final condition for the transition to statedom. As their would-be kings pressed for more taxes and more public labor, Sumer's commoners found that they had lost the option to move out. How could they take the artificial waterways and their irrigated fields, gardens, and orchards, representing the investment of generations of labor, with them? To live away from the rivers, they would have to adopt a pastoral nomadic way of life for which they lacked the prerequisite skills and technology.

Archaeologists are not able to say exactly where and when in Sumer the transition took place. But by 4350 B.C., mud-brick structures with ramps and terraces called ziggurats, combining the function of fortress and temple, began to loom over the larger settlements. Like the mounds, tombs, megaliths, and pyramids found throughout the world, ziggurats attest to the presence of advanced chiefdoms capable of organizing large amounts of donated labor and were the forerunner of the great tower of Babylon, which was over 300 feet high, and of the Biblical tower at Babel. By 3500 B.C., there were streets, houses, temples, palaces, and fortifications covering several hundred acres at Uruk in Iraq. Perhaps the transition occurred there. If not, it took place at Lagash, Eridu, Ur, or Nippur, all flourishing as independent kingdoms by 3200 B.C.

Driven by the same internal pressures that sent chiefdoms to war, the Sumerian kingdom had one important advantage. Chiefdoms were likely to try to exterminate their enemies and to kill and eat their prisoners of war. Only states possessed the managerial know-how and the military might for extracting labor and resources from conquered people. By aggregating defeated populations into a peasant class, states rode an amplifying wave of territorial expansion. The more populous and productive they became, the greater their power to defeat and exploit additional peoples and territories. At various times after 3000 B.C., one or the other of the Sumerian kingdoms held sway over Sumeria. But other states soon formed farther upstream on the Euphrates. Under Sargon 1, in 2350 B.C., one of them conquered all of Mesopotamia including Sumeria and lands extending from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea. For the next 4,300 years it was one empire after another: Babylonian, Assyrian, Hyskos, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arabian, Ottoman, British. Our kind had created and mounted a wild beast that ate continents. Will we ever be able to tame this, our own creation, the way we tamed nature's sheep and goats?