by Kevin Reilly
Officials and Scribes . Beneath the rulers was history’s first middle class: a wide range of officials, priests, administrators, artists, and artisans who served the king, his court, and the nobility. To be a scribe, a writer, opened the world of officialdom, a middle-class paradise compared to the prospect of working with one’s hands. In ancient Egypt more than 4,000 years ago, students were advised,
Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labor of any kind and be a magistrate of high repute. The scribe is released from manual tasks; it is he who commands . . .
I have seen the metal-worker at his task at the mouth of his furnace, with fingers like a crocodile’s. He stank worse than fish-spawn. . . . The stonemason finds his work in every kind of hard stone. When he has finished his labors his arms are worn out, and he sleeps all doubled up until sunrise. His knees and spine are broken. . . . The barber shaves from morning till night, he never sits down except to meals. He hurries from house to house looking for business. He wears out his arms to fill his stomach, like bees eating their own honey. . . . The farmer wears the same clothes for all times. His voice is as raucous as a crow’s. His fingers are always busy; his arms are dried up by the wind. He takes his rest—when he gets any—in the mud. . . .
Apply your heart to learning. In truth there is nothing that can compare with it. If you have profited by a single day at school it is a gain for eternity.4
Slaves and Servants . At the bottom of the city class system were slaves. In the beginning, slavery was not as pervasive as it later became, but slavery existed in virtually all ancient city societies. In Egypt, as in many other ancient societies, most slaves were war captives who were employed as domestic servants. Some were owned by wealthy families and others by the state, such as the women who were loaned to working families at tomb-building sites, for example, to grind the workmen’s grain into flour.
Slaves were not the only underclass. Slightly above them in the social hierarchy was a wide range of servants. A pyramid-building site would require servants who were water carriers, woodcutters, fishermen, gardeners, and washermen.
Farmers and Workers . Most of the heavy lifting on public projects like Egyptian pyramids was done not by slaves or servants but by peasant farmers who owed a certain number of labor days in the off season. But they were hardly alone. All the classes of Egyptian society were marshaled to build the great pyramids along the lower Nile by the pharaohs of 4,700 to 4,500 years ago (2700-2500 BCE). Such projects required architects, scribes, stonemasons, carpenters, sculptors, and artists. Each new royal tomb involved the construction of an entire city of suppliers, bakers, physicians, ration providers, guards, and officials just for the period of construction.
New Systems of Control
Why did villagers who lived in general equality accept the inequality of cities? The loss of equality was probably a gradual process. In the previous chapter, we noticed how villages turned into tribal societies and then chiefdoms as they became more complex. City societies were merely the next step in complexity and concentration of power. City societies created new institutions that led people to accept inequality as natural.
Fathers and Kings . One of these was an increased emphasis on the father’s command of the family. Having already seized control of the agricultural surplus through plow and irrigation agriculture, men concentrated property in their own hands and sought to pass it on to their sons. In the cramped quarters of cities, men were eager to ensure that sons were their own, so they restricted their wives to the interior of the houses or demanded that they cover themselves outdoors. In the cities of the Middle East, women wore veils and covered their hair thousands of years before the Arabs brought Islam in the seventh century CE. Thus, the man’s control of wife, children, and family modeled the king’s control of city society. The words for father and king were interchangeable, and both meant power. Even religion changed to support men’s claim. In the age of cities, sky fathers and sun gods replaced Earth Mothers and fertility goddesses, even those who had presided over planting, harvesting, and giving birth. One Egyptian myth even imagined the god Atum creating the world from his own body through masturbation.
Religion and Queens . Goddesses did not disappear in the early cities, but they did become subordinate to gods. Not all women lost power and influence in patriarchal states. With kings came queens, women whose privileged lives were another sign of one man’s power. One of the earliest and most successful archaeological discoveries of ancient Mesopotamia was Leonard Woolley’s discovery of the royal tombs of Ur in the 1920s. In one of these tombs, Woolley found the tomb of Queen Puabi (ca. 2600 BCE), buried with a crown of golden leaves, silver bracelets, and hundreds of strings of precious stone beads—deep blue lapis lazuli from central Asia and bright red carnelian from western India. In addition, the queen was buried with golden sculptured gifts for the gods and a harp-sized lyre, decorated in gold and precious stones.
In death, Queen Puabi exerted wide dominion. To accompany her on her voyage to the netherworld, Queen Puabi was joined by more than 70 guards and attendants, including 12 young women dressed like the queen in beaded cloaks and golden diadems. One can only wonder what these young women understood about their service to Puabi. Did they realize that they were to be buried alive with their queen’s corpse? If so, did their feelings about royal service or religious duty comfort them?
Human sacrifice became a city ruler’s prerogative, not only in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In China, too, the graves of Shang dynasty emperors reveal hundreds of attendants sent to accompany the king on his journey to heaven. In this regard and many others, India stands out as an exception. Excavations of Harappa, Mohenjodaro, and other cities along the Indus show no sign of human sacrifice in elite burials.
Law and the State . Neither kings nor queens, neither fathers nor gods, could ensure inequality without the other major innovations of city society: the law and the state. Unlike tribal chiefs, the first kings did not justify their power in arbitrary or personal terms. That is one of the lessons the people of ancient Mesopotamia read into The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic begins with King Gilgamesh terrorizing the people of Uruk, leaving no son or daughter safe from his lust. The plea of the nobles asking the goddess Aruru to counter Gilgamesh symbolized the beginnings of a state—the formation of a government more permanent and less arbitrary than the whim of a tribal chieftain. States were administered by officials and ruled by law.
Law promised predictability, a limit to vengeance, and a certain standard of fairness. But that did not mean village equality. In a class society, the ministers and scribes of kings wrote laws that protected the wealthy and powerful while still claiming the loyalty of lower-class commoners.
Hammurabi’s Code . One of the earliest law codes, the Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi of Babylon, about 1750 BCE, balanced these two goals adroitly. The class bias of the code is obvious in the law on assault. The penalty for knocking out an eye of a noble was to have your own eye knocked out, no matter who you were. This, of course, was the origin of “an eye for an eye” as a legal principle, but it protected only the eyes of the upper class. If the eye of a common person was knocked out, the penalty was a small fine. The same Hammurabi’s code, however, laid claim to protecting the common people with another set of laws on theft. A noble person who commits a theft must repay 30 times the cost of the stolen property; a common thief need pay only 10 times the cost. The principle here may be that the upper classes had a greater stake in the rule of law and a greater responsibility to society. But before we make too much of this charitable finger on the scales of justice, we should add the last part of the law: “if the thief cannot pay, he shall be put to death.” Clearly, the state cared for some lower classes more than others.
In general, states achieved legitimacy with only the grudging support of the class of ordinary farmers by winning the more energetic approval of the nobility and middle class. The kind of middle class varied, however, depending on the nature of
the state.
New Urban Classes in City-States
and Territorial States
The urban revolution actually created two kinds of states 5,000 years ago, and in many ways these two varieties have persisted down to the present day. One type, known as the city-state, consisted of the city, sometimes suburbs or a subordinate city, and the farm and pasture that were necessary to support the urban population. Uruk was one of these, as were the other first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. City-states also sprung up along the Indus River in India and in Mexico though a bit later. The earliest city in central Mexico, Monte Alban, originated about 1000 BCE, but by about 300 BCE it reached the same population, 25,000 people, as Uruk had about 3000 BCE.
The other type of state, called the territorial state, was much larger in area and less urban. Cities mattered less, or there were fewer of them. Egypt was a territorial state. Its spine was the Nile River, dotted with villages and urban settlements, but it stretched into the desert on either side as far as the eye could see. The capital city of Egypt was the location of the pharaoh’s court: Memphis near modern Cairo during the Old Kingdom in the third millennium BCE and Thebes, upriver near modern Luxor, during the New Kingdom after 1550 BCE. But the vast remains of the pharaoh Akhenaton’s city of the middle 1300s BCE on a previously undeveloped location midway between the two earlier capitals shows how easy it was for a determined king to pick up everything and move when it suited his purpose. The Gilgamesh poet’s pride in Uruk would have sounded strange to Egyptians, who felt no particular pride in any city. What mattered to each pharaoh was the design and construction of his final resting place, usually on the west bank, or sunset side, of the Nile. What mattered to the pharaoh’s court was the location of the pharaoh. And what mattered to the more than 80 percent of Egyptians who were peasant farmers were their meager fields and ancestral villages.
Merchants . Markets were also more important in city-states than in territorial states. In large territorial states like Egypt, kings commanded and taxed all they needed. In the city-states of Mexico, farmers and merchants brought their products to market.
The Aztec city of the Mexica was a successor to many city-states that flourished in the valley of Mexico in the centuries before the Spanish conquest of 1519 CE. One of the Spanish conquistadors, Bernal Diaz, wrote of its great market:
We were astounded at the great number of people and the quantities of merchandise. . . .
Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, precious stones, feathers, cloaks, embroidered goods, and male and female slaves who were sold there. . . . Next there were those who sold coarser cloth, and cotton goods, and fabrics made of twisted thread, and there were chocolate merchants with their chocolate . . .
There were sellers of kidney beans and sage and other vegetables and herbs . . . and in another place they were selling fowls, birds, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, dogs, and other creatures. Then there were the fruiterers and the woman who sold cooked food, flour, and honey cake, and tripe. Then came pottery of all kinds, large and small. . . . Elsewhere they sold timber too, boards, cradles, beams, blocks, and benches, all in a quarter of its own. But why waste so many words on the goods in their great market? If I describe everything in detail I shall never be done. Paper, which in Mexico they call amal, and some reeds that smell of liquid amber, and are full of tobacco, and yellow ointments, and much cochineal [insects for red dye]. . . . I am forgetting the sellers of salt and the makers of flint knives . . . and the fisher-woman, and the men who sell small cakes made from a sort of weed that they get out of the great lake, which curdles and forms a kind of bread which tastes rather like cheese. They sell axes too, made of bronze and copper and tin; and gourds; and brightly painted wooden jars.5
Mayan society was also made up of various independent city-states, linked by markets in which the long-distance trade of obsidian was particularly important. Nevertheless, the importance of markets in city-states did not translate into the importance of merchants, who were only one group among many.
Priests . In the city-states of both Mesopotamia and Middle America, religious temples presided over central squares, and priests were more influential than merchants. In both areas, priests administered irrigation and the rhythms of agriculture. Priests were the interpreters of the calendar, the celebrants of religious rites. Even kings who claimed divinity relied on their priests. All Bronze Age states were theocracies: they did not distinguish between religious and secular matters. Religions were local, and the deities were very much involved in life within the city walls. Recall Ahruru. Local deities were able to control larger natural forces: the winds, rain, sky, sun, and underworld. The Epic of Gilgamesh contains an early version of the biblical flood story, but the great flood in the epic occurs because the people are too noisy and the gods cannot sleep.
The well-being of the people, nature, and the gods were intimately bound together. Kings were descended from the gods or became gods. Gods often acted like people, displayed human emotions, or had relations with people. They had to be placated, appeased, or offered sacrifices. At times, the gods seemed to need the people as much as the people needed the gods. One ancient Mesopotamian poem has a slave advise his master to “teach the god to run after you like a dog” by withholding sacrifices.6
Numerous city societies offered human sacrifices to ensure the health and vitality of the god and natural forces. In Mexico, the Aztecs and the Mayans offered flesh to the sky and blood to the earth to ensure the continuance of the rains and fertility. Priests and rulers led their people in rituals of bloodletting from various parts of their bodies as offerings to the gods. The Aztec sun god, Huitzilopoctli, required regular human sacrifices just to ensure that the sun rose each day. Consequently, the Aztecs conquered the cities of central Mexico, making some of them allies while turning others into permanent enemies and suppliers of captive soldiers for sacrifice.
The sacrifice of palace attendants in the tombs of kings was a frequent practice in other city societies, especially territorial states where the power of the king was more like a god. The tombs of kings in Egypt, Inca Peru, and China contain such remains. In addition, defeated soldiers were sacrificed in ritual ceremonies in China and in other states.
Soldiers . After merchants and priests, the most important urban class was soldiers. Unlike in modern armies, they were normally conscripts rather than professionals, drawn from the farmers and urban working class and commanded by members of the nobility. In periods of war or expansion, however, soldiers were granted special privileges. The Aztec state, for instance, promoted soldiers to the nobility and gave them land after they had captured four enemy combatants. And as the ancient states expanded, they developed professional armies. They also used mercenary armies, often recruited from pastoral societies on the borders of their expanding empires.
New Country People . What sorts of people inhabited the countryside? Farmers, of course, but we would be mistaken if we thought of farmers as a single class, all alike. The class divisions of the city extended to the countryside. In fact, wealthy farmers often lived in the city, as in the following Egyptian account attributed to an official who contemplates a visit to his country estate, where the farming was done for him:
You go down to your ship manned from bow to stern. You reach your beautiful villa, the one you have built for yourself. Your mouth is full of wine and beer, of bread, meat and cakes. Oxen are slaughtered and wine is opened, and melodious singing is before you. Your chief anointer anoints you. Your manager of cultivated lands brings garlands. Your chief fowler brings ducks, your fisherman brings fish. Your ship has returned from Syria laden with every manner of good things. Your byre is full of calves, your weavers flourish.7
The countryside was full of people who were not farmers, as the city was full of people who owned or rented farmland. Nevertheless, the majority of people in the countryside worked the land. Many were free peasants, but there was also a vast number of semifree farmers, bound to work the lands
of the state or of religious temples. In Egypt, they were called “royal workers,” and in Mesopotamia they were officially “bringers of income.” In Egypt, where the status was hereditary, men worked in the fields, while the women of the household spun cloth and sewed in special workshops. All classes of workers, dependent and free, participated in mammoth public work projects and the building of monuments.
Here is another clue to why social inequality was widely accepted. Beneath the king or pharaoh, people of all classes worked on public projects, and they were not generally distinguishable by appearance. Slaves were foreigners, drawn from conquered armies of various racial or ethnic backgrounds. In addition, foreign mercenary soldiers mirrored the diversity of slaves but were free.
Change and “Civilization”
To ask how things change is a difficult but important question for historians. But to ask if the change was good or bad is a question most historians would rather avoid. “Good for whom?” they might ask. “We should be careful not to impose our values on the past.” Yet as citizens, we make judgments about how the world is changing all the time. In fact, we would be ill equipped to shape our future without an understanding of how things were changing and without an ability to evaluate those changes.
The Bias of “Civilization.” No change in human history is more loaded with value judgments than the development of cities and state societies. Traditionally, they are called “civilizations,” a word related to “cities,” “civic,” and “civility,” which implies urban sophistication, high culture, and great achievement. In addition, “civilized” has long had a special meaning of emotional control, maturity, and politeness.
