For more than 6000 years, from the dawn of the Neolithic Era when the first horticultural villages appeared in what is now Syria and the West Bank of Palestine, until the start of the Bronze Age (3500 BCE) when the first great civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, humanity enjoyed a relatively settled, peaceful, and egalitarian existence. Like the latency period of our individual development (age 6–11), it was a time of calm before the storm of our collective adolescence engulfed us in the ensuing Age of Civilizations and Empires
During the later stages of the Neolithic Era, a number of developments took place that led inevitably to the emergence of the great Bronze Age civilizations:
• the growth of simple villages into large and complex city-states
• the invention of kingship
• the rise of militarism and large-scale warfare in an increasingly male-dominated world.
The growth of city-states
During much of the Neolithic period, our ancestors lived in pastoral-horticultural villages of anywhere from 150 to 2000 people. As their technology improved, and they discovered ways of farming more intensively (e.g. the polished stone axe for clearing forests, irrigation ditches, crop rotation, and the ox-drawn plough), they began to produce more food than was needed to meet the immediate needs of the community. A food surplus that could be stored, or possibly traded for other necessities, provided a measure of security hitherto unknown and attracted more and more people from the nomadic life of the hunter-gatherer to the settled life of the Neolithic village. As early as 7500 BCE, some villages were already approaching city size. By 5000 BCE, we see in some of them the first evidence of intensive year-round agriculture. And by 4500 BCE, some had grown in size to as many as 10,000 people.
People who lived in these early towns and cities now had time to concentrate on things other than growing food. Some became skilled in producing tools, others in weaving clothes, and others in building mud-brick houses. As early as 6000 BCE there is evidence of specialist classes – artisans, priests, traders, and administrators. And with such specialisation came social stratification and economic disparity – certainly in comparison with the egalitarian structure of earlier hunter-gatherer bands. The domestication of animals itself contributed to such disparity. Possession of livestock encouraged competition between families and led to inherited inequalities of wealth. But, for all that, such inequalities were still not pronounced. In the Anatolian settlement of Catal Hoyuk (6300-5500 BCE), for example, although some homes appear slightly larger or more elaborately decorated than others, there is on the whole a striking lack of difference in the size of homes and burial sites.
By the start of the Bronze Age, many of these burgeoning Neolithic towns had so grown in size and complexity as to become the first city-states. These were self-governing territories focused on a major urban centre with sovereignty over a surrounding region ranging from a few square miles to a vast hinterland that might itself contain other cities or towns. The earliest included the Mesopotamian cities of Babylon and Ur, the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and the Egyptian cities of Hierakonpolis and Abydos. As the centre of economic, religious, cultural, and administrative life, the core city provided a variety of livelihoods while the surrounding area supplied food and other resources. Now there are marked disparities in wealth, power, and social class. The privileged classes included the professional religious persons, the ruling authorities, the wealthy traders, and the landowners. Those who worked the land were the peasants.
City-states reached their peak in Greece. By the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the Greeks were organised into hundreds of city-states, including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. In Italy, what began as a 9th century BCE village became the city-state of Rome and thence the centre of a vast empire. The Middle Ages saw a revival of Italian city-states such as Florence, Genoa, Siena, and Venice. What became known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice controlled a vast land-and-sea empire throughout the eastern Mediterranean until it was finally conquered by Napoleon in 1797 CE. And some German city-states such as Bremen and Hamburg managed to survive into the 19th century. For the most part, however, unable to defend themselves against aggressive territorial empires, independent city-states went into serious decline after 1500 CE. Today, with the exception of Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City, they are all consigned to history.
The invention of kingship
Large population centres, characterised by increasing social stratification and economic disparity, need some form of governmental control. Certainly this was true of the first city-states. By the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, some had reached such size and complexity as to require an organised system of government. And so they invented kingship.
Precisely when or how the first kings came to power remains shrouded in pre-historic mist. Some early Sumerian texts (made possible only after cuneiform writing had been invented c. 3500 BCE) point to an earlier time, before kings existed, when the people wandered in a state of leaderless confusion – to which the gods responded by delivering to them the concept of kingship. “Kingship,” it was said, “descended from heaven.” The office, in other words, was of divine origin.
At about the same time, the priestly watchers of the Mesopotamian night skies discovered that the seven celestial lights – the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – move at mathematically determined rates through fixed constellations. Following the principle of “as above, so below,” they concluded that this celestial order should be reflected in the social order and that human affairs should be governed by a king and members of his court who played out a ritual pantomime of identification with the heavenly bodies. So the first Priest-Kings arose – rulers through whom each city-state was governed in accordance with the will of its patron deity.
From the start, religion and politics were in cahoots. Religion legitimised the power structure while priests enjoyed the fruits of their royal patronage. Soon the surpluses accumulated by the great city-states were being funnelled to the king and his court. More and more the labour of the many filled the treasure chests of the few. Why would men and women willingly submit to such a regime? Because they wanted a visible god or representative of the deity – a kind of father figure – always present to receive their offerings, provide necessary leadership, and ensure their protection and prosperity. And for this they were willing to pay the price of their own subjugation.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of these early priest-kings as ruling their cities with anything resembling the tyranny of later Roman emperors or European monarchs. On the contrary, with little individual autonomy, they were locked into playing their prescribed role. Moreover, though the job had undeniable perks, the term of office was time-limited and ended after a certain span of years with the king, together with dignitaries of his court, being slain in the ancient custom of ritual regicide. An extension of the longstanding Neolithic tradition of human and animal sacrifice intended to ensure continuing fertility and prosperity for the community, regicide was part of the job description to which the king willingly submitted. However his reign began – typically chosen in some manner by the local deity to take on the mantle of kingship and become the consort of the Great Mother – it ended with his being ritually sacrificed.
The occasion seems linked to the orbit of the planets – most often to the 8-year cycle of Venus or the 12-year cycle of Jupiter. Stargazing priests would set the date, and members of the king’s council or family would carry it out. Nor were they dispatched alone. Burial sites excavated in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur contain bodies from sixteen different royal courts, including not only those of the priest-kings themselves but of assorted members of their entourages.
Though later kings, more concerned with their own well-being than that of the polis, conspired to have substitutes sacrificed in their stead, the sacrifice of divine or divinely-chosen figures has continued to be an important theme throughout history. Sacred regicide, evident in the early stages of every literate culture, was still being practiced in India in the 16th century CE. In Zimbabwe, as recently as 1810, priests were still ordering the strangulation of the king every four years. And the voluntary sacrifice of a divine saviour to effect our salvation continues to be the central motif in the dominant religion of the Western world.
The rise of warfare
Throughout the Neolithic Era, the Mother Goddess was the ruling principle of the universe. Her presence and power was dispersed throughout the natural world. With the rise of city-states and a system of government modeled on our solar system, however, the cosmological order came more and more to be seen in its hierarchical dimension. Rather than power being dispersed throughout nature, it came more and more to reside above nature – in a celestial realm from whence a deity communicated his will and exercised his power through a human ruler. And significantly, that power became more his than hers. The realm of nature spirits was becoming a pantheon of gods and goddesses, with increasingly aggressive male deities coming to the fore.
Other factors doubtless contributed to this shift towards male dominance. Much of the work on which the city-state depended and which therefore had economic value (e.g. clearing forests, ploughing fields, and digging irrigation ditches) required male muscle-power in a way that earlier tasks such as planting seeds with a pointed stick did not. It may also be that the very nature of a city-state requires a more aggressive and expansive energy. The increasing concentration of power and wealth at the top means progressively less for those at the bottom. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, unless the state expands its resource base. Economic growth is essential to avoid social unrest and potential revolt. Eventually the city-state’s consumption will outstrip its own resources and drive it to consume the resources of its neighbours.
As early as the 8th millennium BCE, the village of Jericho, now a proto-city, found it necessary to fortify itself with a surrounding wall. Uruk in Mesopotamia is one of the world’s oldest known walled cities. By the 5th millennium BCE, many hitherto peaceful settlements, not only in the Middle East but in the Indus Valley as well, were fortified with a palisade and outer ditch as neighbouring communities quarrelled more and more over control of prime agricultural land. Nor was the threat only from neighbouring city-states. Bands of desert-dwelling nomads, with an eye on the rich fertile land, invaded many of these towns and villages and brought with them their warring male sky-gods. Clearly the level of testosterone was on the rise.
And it was only the beginning. By the dawn of the Bronze Age civilizations in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, virtually all of the city-states that comprised them were fortified with walls and defended by armies. Until then, armed conflict had been largely limited to local quarrels as one city-state bumped into another, or as may have been necessary to fend off invading nomads. But in 2350 BCE, King Sargon of Akkad changed all that. He invaded Sumer in massive style – the first outright war of conquest and total subjugation – and the world since then has never looked back. Ironically it was at this same time that city-states, in at least this part of the world, ended their practice of ritual regicide. End one form of ritual murder and institute a far more lethal one! Homo sapiens had discovered another mark of its specie’s uniqueness: a seeming delight in massacring huge numbers of its own kind. Now we could shed blood on a massive scale.
So began the Age of Civilizations and Empires. The rise of city-states, the emergence of kings, and the institution of large-scale warfare in an expansionist, male-dominated world marked a massive upheaval in human society. And it initiated an empire-building era that has lasted until the present.
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