A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium

Part one

The rise of class

societies

Chronology

4 million years ago

First apes to walk on two legs – Australopithecus.

1.5 million to 0.5 million years ago

Clearly human species, Homo erectus, tools of stone, wood and bone. Early ‘old Stone Age’.

400,000 to 30,000 years ago

Neanderthal humans in Europe and Middle East – signs of culture and probable use of language.

150,000 years ago

First ‘modern humans’ (Homo sapiens sapiens), probably originated in Africa. Live by foraging (in small nomadic groups without classes, states or sexual oppression). Middle ‘old Stone Age’.

80,000 to 14,000 years ago

Modern humans arrive Middle East (80,000 years ago); cross to Australia (40,000 years ago); arrive Europe (30,000 years ago); establish Americas (14,000 years ago). Late ‘old Stone Age’.

13,000 years ago

Climate allows some humans to settle in villages a couple of hundred strong while continuing to live by foraging. ‘Middle Stone Age’ (‘Mesolithic’).

10,000 years ago

First agricultural revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Neolithic (‘new Stone Age’). More advanced tools, use of pottery. Spread of village living. First systematic war between groups. Still no division into classes or states.

7,000 years ago

Plough begins to be used in Eurasia and Africa. Agriculture reaches NW Europe. ‘Chieftainships’ among some groups, but no classes or states.

6,000 to 5,000 years ago

‘Urban revolution’ in river valleys of Middle East and Nile Valley. Some use of copper.

5,000 years ago (3000 BC)

States emerge in Mesopotamia and ‘Old Kingdom’ Egypt. First alphabets, bronze discovered, clear division into social classes, religious hierarchies and temples. First pyramids in about 2800 BC. ‘Bronze Age’. Tendency for women to be seen as inferior to men.

4,500 to 4,000 years ago (2500 to 2000 BC)

Growth of city states in Indus Valley. Sargon establishes first empire to unite Middle East. Building of stone rings in western Europe. Probably Nubian civilisation south of Egypt.

4,000 years ago (around 2000 BC)

‘Dark Age’ – collapse of Mesopotamian Empire and of Egyptian ‘Old Kingdom’. Iron smelted in Asia Minor.

4,000 to 3,600 years ago (2000 to 1600 BC)

Rise of ‘Minoan’ civilisation in Crete. Revival of Egypt with ‘Middle Kingdom’ and of Mesopotamian Empire under Hammurabi. Urban revolution takes off in northern China. Mycenaean civilisation in Greece.

3,600 years ago (1600 BC)

Crisis in Egypt with collapse of ‘Middle Kingdom’ into ‘second intermediate period’. ‘Dark Age’ with collapse of Cretan, Indus and then Mycenaean civilisations. Disappearance of literacy in these areas. ‘Bronze Age’ in northern China with Shang Empire.

3,000 years ago (1000 BC)

Uxum civilisation in Ethiopia. Growth of Phoenician city states around Mediterranean. ‘Urban revolution’ in ‘Meso-America’ with Olmec culture and in Andean region with Chavin.

2,800 to 2,500 years ago (800 to 500 BC)

New civilisations arise in India, Greece and Italy. Meroe in Nubia.

2,500 to 2,000 years ago (400 to 1 BC)

Olmec civilisation of Meso-America invents its own form of writing.

2,000 years ago (first century AD)

Rise of Teotihuacan in Valley of Mexico – probably biggest city in world – despite having no use of hard metals. Deserted after about 400 years. Followed by rise of civilisations of Monte Alban and of Mayas in southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Prologue

Before Class

The world as we enter the twenty-first century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. Such a message is put across by innumerable writers and philosophers, politicians and sociologists, journalists and psychologists. They portray hierarchy, deference, greed and brutality as ‘natural’ features of human behaviour. Indeed, there are some who would see these as a feature throughout the animal kingdom, a ‘sociobiological’ imperative imposed by the alleged ‘laws’ of genetics.¹ There are innumerable popular, supposedly ‘scientific’, paperbacks which propagate such a view – with talk of humans as ‘the naked ape’ (Desmond Morris),² the ‘killer imperative’ (Robert Ardrey),³ and, in a more sophisticated form, as programmed by the ‘selfish gene’ (Richard Dawkins).⁴

Yet such Flintstones caricatures of human behaviour are simply not borne out by what we now know about the lives our ancestors lived in the innumerable generations before recorded history. A cumulation of scientific evidence shows that their societies were not characterised by competition, inequality and oppression. These things are, rather, the product of history, and of rather recent history. The evidence comes from archaeological findings about patterns of human behaviour world-wide until only about 5,000 years ago, and from anthropological studies of societies in different parts of the world which remained organised along similar lines until the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth centuries. The anthropologist Richard Lee has summarised the findings:

Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.⁵

In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. Lee echoes the phrase used by Frederick Engels in the 1880s to describe this state of affairs, ‘primitive communism’. The point is of enormous importance. Our species (modern humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens) is over 100,000 years old. For 95 per cent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present-day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.

The origins of our species go much further back into the mists of time than 100,000 years. Our distant ancestors evolved out of a species of ape which lived some four or five million years ago in parts of Africa. For some unknown reason members of this species gave up living in trees, as do our closest animal relatives, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo (often called the ‘pygmy chimpanzee’), and took to walking upright. They were able to survive in their new terrain by cooperating more than any other species of mammal, working together to make rudimentary tools (as chimps sometimes do) to dig up roots, reach high berries, gather grubs and insects, kill small animals and frighten off predators. The premium was on cooperation with each other, not competition against one another. Those who could not learn to adopt such forms of cooperative labour, and the new patterns of mental behaviour that went with them, died out. Those who could survived and reproduced.

Over millions of years this resulted in the evolution of a mammal whose genetic inheritance was very different to that of other mammals. It lacked the highly specialised physical features which enable other mammals to defend themselves (large teeth or claws), to keep warm (thick fur) or to flee (long legs). Instead, early humans were genetically programmed for extreme flexibility in response to the world around them – being able to use their hands to hold and shape objects, being able to use their voices to communicate with each other, being able to investigate, study and generalise about the world around them, and being able, through long years of child rearing, to pass on their skills and learning. All this required the growth of large brains and the ability and desire to socialise. It also led to the development of a means of communicating with each other (language) qualitatively different to that of any other animals, and with it the ability to conceptualise about things which were not immediately present – that is, to become conscious of the world around them and of themselves as beings within it.⁶ The emergence of modern humans, probably in Africa some 150,000 years ago, was the culmination of this process.⁷

Over the next 90,000 years groups of our ancestors slowly spread out from Africa to establish themselves in other parts of the globe, displacing other human species like the Neanderthals in the process.⁸ By at least 60,000 years ago they had reached the Middle East. By 40,000 years ago they had made their way to western Europe and also somehow managed to cross the band of sea separating the islands of southeast Asia from Australia. By 12,000 years ago, at the latest, they had crossed the frozen Bering Straits to reach the Americas, and were scattered across every continent except Antarctica. The small groups which established themselves in each location were often almost completely isolated from each other for many thousands of years (melting ice made the Bering Straits impassable and raised the sea level to make the passage from southeast Asia to Australia difficult). Their languages grew to be very different and each accumulated its own set of knowledge and developed distinctive forms of social organisation and culture. Certain minor hereditary characteristics became more marked among some than others (eye colour, hairiness, skin pigmentation and so on). But the genetic inheritance of the different groups remained extremely similar. Variations within each group were always greater than variations between them. All of them were equally capable of learning each other’s language, and all had the same spread of intellectual aptitudes. The human species was separated into widely dispersed groupings. But it remained a single species. How each grouping developed depended not on anything specific about its genetic makeup, but on how it adapted its manipulative skills and forms of cooperation to the needs of making a livelihood in its particular environment. It was the form taken by this adaptation which underlay the different societies which emerged, each with its own distinct customs, attitudes, myths and rituals.

The different societies shared certain common, fundamental features until about 10,000 years ago. This was because they all obtained their food, shelter and clothing in roughly the same way, through ‘foraging’ – that is, through getting hold of natural produce (fruit and nuts, roots, wild animals, fish and shellfish) and processing them for use. These societies were all what are normally called ‘hunting and gathering’ – or, better, ‘foraging’ – societies.⁹

Many survived in wide regions of the world until only a few hundred years ago, and the remnants of a few still exist at the time of writing. It has been by studying these that anthropologists such as Richard Lee have been able draw conclusions about what life was like for the whole of our species for at least 90 per cent of its history.

The reality was very different to the traditional Western image of such people as uncultured ‘savages’,¹⁰ living hard and miserable lives in ‘a state of nature’, with a bitter and bloody struggle to wrest a livelihood matched by a ‘war of all against all’, which made life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.¹¹

People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such ‘band societies’ was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more ‘civilised’ agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them ‘the original affluent society’.¹²

There were no rulers, bosses or class divisions in these societies. As Turnbull wrote of the Mbuti pygmies of Congo, ‘There were no chiefs, no formal councils. In each aspect of … life there might be one or two men or women who were more prominent than others, but usually for good practical reasons … The maintenance of law was a cooperative affair’.¹³ People cooperated with each other to procure the means of livelihood without either bowing before a great leader or engaging in endless strife with each other. Ernestine Friedl reported from her studies, ‘Men and women alike are free to decide how they will spend each day: whether to go hunting or gathering, and with whom’.¹⁴ Eleanor Leacock told of her findings: ‘There was no … private land ownership and no specialisation of labour beyond that of sex … People made decisions about the activities for which they were responsible. Consensus was reached within whatever group would be carrying out a collective activity’.¹⁵ Behaviour was characterised by generosity rather than selfishness, and individuals helped each other, offering food they had obtained to other band members before taking it themselves. Lee comments, ‘Food is never consumed alone by a family: it is always shared out among members of a living group or band … This principle of generalised reciprocity has been reported of hunter-gatherers in every continent and in every kind of environment’.¹⁶ He further reports that the group he studied, the !Kung¹⁷ people of the Kalahari (the so-called ‘Bushmen’), ‘are a fiercely egalitarian people, and they have evolved a series of important cultural practices to maintain this equality, first by cutting down to size the arrogant and boastful, and second by helping those down on their luck to get back in the game’.¹⁸ An early Jesuit missionary noted of another hunter-gathering people, the Montagnais of Canada, ‘The two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans do not reign in their great forests – I mean ambition and avarice … not one of them has given himself to the devil to acquire wealth’.¹⁹

There was very little in the way of warfare, as Friedl notes:

Contests for territory between the men of neighbouring foraging groups are not unknown … But on the whole, the amount of energy men devote to training for fighting or time spent on war expeditions among hunter-gatherers is not great … Conflicts within bands are normally settled by the departure of one of the parties to the dispute.²⁰

Such evidence completely refutes claims by people such as Ardrey that the whole prehistory of humanity, from the time of Australopithecus – the first ape-like animal to walk on two legs – through to the emergence of literacy, was based on the ‘killing imperative’, that ‘hunter-gatherer bands fought over water holes which tended all too often to vanish under the baking African sun’, that we are all ‘Cain’s children’, that ‘human history has turned on the development of superior weapons … for genetic necessity’, and that, therefore, only a thin veneer of ‘civilisation’ conceals an instinctive ‘delight in massacre, slavery, castration and cannibalism’.²¹

This is of immense importance for any arguments about ‘human nature’. For, if such a nature exists, it was moulded by natural selection during the long epoch of hunting and gathering. Richard Lee is quite right to insist:

It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deep-rooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted … sense of community.²²

From a very different perspective, Friedrich von Hayek, the favourite economist of Margaret Thatcher, complained that humans have ‘long-submerged innate instincts’ and ‘primordial emotions’ based on ‘sentiments that were good for the small band’, leading them to want ‘to do good to known people’.²³

‘Human nature’ is, in fact, very flexible. In present-day society it enables some people, at least, to indulge in the greed and competitiveness that Hayek enthused over. It has also permitted, in class societies, the most horrific barbarities – torture, mass rape, burning alive, wanton slaughter. Behaviour was very different among foraging peoples because the requirements of obtaining a livelihood necessitated egalitarianism and altruism.

Hunters and gatherers were necessarily intensely dependent on one another. The gatherers usually supplied the most reliable source of food, and the hunters that which was most valued. So those who specialised in hunting depended for their daily survival on the generosity of those who gathered, while those who specialised in gathering – and those who were temporarily unsuccessful in the hunt – relied for valued additions to their diet on those who managed to kill animals. The hunt itself did not usually consist of an individual male hero going off to make a kill, but comprised a group of men (sometimes with the auxiliary assistance of women and children) working together to chase and trap a prey. At every point, the premium was on cooperation and collective values. Without them, no band of foragers could have survived for more than a few days.

Linked to this was the absence of male supremacy over women. There was almost always a division of labour between the sexes, with the men doing most of the hunting and the women most of the gathering. This was because a woman who was pregnant or breastfeeding a child could only take part in the hunt by exposing it to dangers, and thus threatening the reproduction of the band. But this division did not amount to male dominance as we know it. Both women and men would take part in making key decisions, such as when to move camp or whether to leave one band and join another. The conjugal unit itself was loosely structured. Spouses could separate without suddenly jeopardising their own livelihood or that of their children. Missing was the male supremacism which is too often assumed to be part of ‘human nature’.²⁴

Finally, there could not have been the obsession with private property that we take for granted today. The normal size of foraging bands was always restricted by the need to find enough food each day in the area of the camp. Within that area, the individual members were continually moving from one source of plant food to another, or in pursuit of animals, while the band as a whole had to move on every so often as the food supplies in a locality were used up. Such continual movement precluded any accumulation of wealth by any band member, since everything had to be carried easily. At most an individual may have had a spear or bow and arrow, a carrying bag or a few trinkets. There would be no concept of the accumulation of personal wealth. The material conditions in which human beings lived conspired to produce very different societies and very different dominant ideas to those taken for granted today.

The history of humanity over the last few thousand years is, above all, the history of how such very different societies and sets of ideas developed. That history is woven out of the actions of innumerable men and women, each attempting to make decent lives for themselves, their companions and their loved ones, sometimes accepting the world as it is, sometimes desperate to change it, often failing, sometimes succeeding. Yet through these interminable, interlinking stories two things stand out. On the one hand, there is the cumulative increase in humanity’s ability to extract a livelihood from nature, the overcoming of the primitive material conditions which were part of ‘primitive communism’. On the other, there is the rise of successive forms of organisation of society that oppress and exploit the majority of people to the benefit of a small, privileged minority.

If we trace these parallel sets of changes we will be able to see, eventually, how the world we face at the beginning of the twenty-first century arose. It is a world in which wealth can be produced on a scale undreamt of even by our grandparents, yet also a world in which the structures of class rule, oppression and violence can seem as firmly entrenched as ever. A billion people live in desperate poverty, billions more are plagued by insecurity, wars and civil wars are endemic, and the very bases of human life are at risk from uncontrolled technological change. The dominating question for everybody ought to be whether it is possible to use the wealth to satisfy basic human needs by getting rid of the oppressive structures, to subordinate it to a society based upon the values that characterised the lives of our ancestors for the hundreds of generations of primitive communism.

But first, we have to look at how class rule and the state came into being.

Chapter 1

The Neolithic ‘revolution’

The first big changes in people’s lives and ideas began to occur only about 10,000 years ago. People took up a new way of making a livelihood in certain parts of the world, notably the ‘Fertile Crescent’ region of the Middle East.²⁵ They learned to cultivate crops instead of relying upon nature to provide them with vegetable foodstuffs, and to domesticate animals instead of simply hunting them. It was an innovation which was to transform their whole way of living.

The transformation did not necessarily lead these people to have an easier life than their forebears. But climatic changes gave some of them a very limited choice.²⁶ They had grown accustomed, over two or three millennia, to life in areas where conditions had been such as to provide bountiful supplies of wild plant food and animals to hunt – in one area in south east Turkey, for instance, a ‘family group’ could, ‘without working very hard’, gather enough grain from wild cereals in three weeks to keep them alive for a year. They did not need to be continually on the move like other peoples.²⁷ They had been able to live in the same places year after year, transforming their former rough camps into permanent village settlements numbering hundreds rather than dozens of people, storing foodstuffs in stone or baked clay pots, and accumulating a range of sophisticated stone tools. For a period of time greater than from the foundation of ancient Rome to the present day, they had been able to combine the low workloads typical of foraging societies with the advantages of fixed village life.

But then changes in the global climate prevented people obtaining an adequate livelihood in this way. As conditions in the Fertile Crescent region became drier and cooler, there was a decline in the availability of naturally occurring wild grains and a fall in the size of the antelope and deer herds. The hunter-gatherer villages faced a crisis. They could no longer live as they had been living. If they were not to starve they either had to break up into small groups and return to a long-forgotten nomadic way of life, or find some way to make up for the deficiencies of nature by their own labour.

This path led to agriculture. People had accumulated immense amounts of knowledge about plant life over hundreds of generations of living off wild vegetation. Now some groups began to use this knowledge to guarantee food supplies by planting the seeds of wild plants. Observation taught them that the seeds of certain plants were much more fruitful than others and, by selecting such seeds, they began to breed new, domesticated varieties which were much more useful to them than wild plants could ever be. The regular harvests they obtained enabled them to tether and feed the more tame varieties of wild sheep, goats, cattle and donkeys, and to breed animals that were tamer still.

The first form of agriculture (often called ‘horticulture’) involved clearing the land by cutting away at woodland and brush with axes and burning off the rest, then planting and harvesting seeds using a hoe or a digging stick. After a couple of years the land would usually be exhausted. So it would be allowed to return to the wild and a new area would be cleared for cultivation.

Obtaining a livelihood in this way involved radical changes in patterns of working and living together. People became more firmly rooted to their village settlements than ever before. They had to tend the crops between planting and harvesting and so could not wander off for months at a time. They also had to work out ways of cooperating with each other to clear the land, to ensure the regular tending of crops (weeding, watering and so on), the storing of harvests, the sharing of stocks, and the rearing of children. Whole new patterns of social life developed and, with them, new ways of viewing the world, expressed in various myths, ceremonies and rituals.

The transformation is usually referred to as the ‘Neolithic revolution’,²⁸ after the increasingly sophisticated ‘Neolithic’ (meaning ‘New Stone Age’) tools associated with it. This involved a complete reorganisation of the way people worked and lived, even if the process took place over a prolonged period of time.

The archaeological evidence from the Fertile Crescent shows people living in small villages as separate households, although it does not tell us what the basis of these households was (whether, for instance, they were made up of separate couples and their children; of a mother, her daughter and their spouses; or of a father, his sons and their wives).²⁹ There was still nothing resembling class and state authority until many thousands of years after the first turn to agriculture. In the ‘late Urbaid period’ (4000 BC), ‘significant differentiation’ in ‘wealth was almost entirely absent’, and even in the ‘protoliterate period’ (towards 3000 BC), there was no indication that ‘the processes of social stratification had as yet proceeded very far’.³⁰ There was no evidence of male supremacy, either. Some archaeologists have seen the existence of clay or stone statuettes of fecund female figures as suggesting a high status for women, so that men found it ‘natural’ to pray to women.³¹ However, one significant development was that weapons for warfare as well as for hunting became more prevalent.

The pattern seems to have been very similar to that in horticulture-based societies which survived into more recent times – in a few cases right through to the twentieth century – in various parts of the world. These societies varied considerably, but did share certain general features.³²

Households tended to be associated with cultivating particular bits of land. But private property in land as we know it did not exist, nor did the drive of individuals or households to pile up stocks of personal possessions at the expense of others. Instead, individual households were integrated into wider social groupings, ‘lineages’ of people, who shared (or at least purported to share) the same ancestry. These provided individuals and households with clearly defined rights and obligations towards others to whom they were related directly, or linked to through marriage or through ‘age group’ associations. Each was expected to share food with the others, so that no household would suffer because of the failure of a crop or because it had more young children to bring up than others. Prestige came not from individual consumption, but from the ability to help make up for the deficiencies of others.

Many core values remained much closer to those of hunter-gatherer societies than to those we take for granted in class societies. Thus, an early eighteenth-century observer of the Iroquois horticulturists noted, ‘If a cabin of hungry Iroquois meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same dangers of perishing as those whom they help’.³³ A classic study of the Nuer noted, ‘In general it can be said that no one in a Nuer village starves unless all are starving’.³⁴

Once again, the explanation for such ‘altruism’ lay in the requirements of obtaining a livelihood. It made sure, for example, that households with lots of labour but few mouths to feed provided assistance to those which had lots of mouths but little labour – especially those with many young children.³⁵ Children represented the future labour supply of the village as a whole. Such ‘redistributional’ mechanisms towards the biggest families were necessary if the group was to be protected from dying out.

Under hunting and gathering, the need to carry children on the daily round of gathering and on the periodic moves of the whole camp had led to very low birth rates. Women could not afford to have more than one child who required carrying at a time, so births were spaced every three or four years (if necessary through sexual abstention, abortion or infanticide). With a fixed village life based on agriculture, the child did not have to be carried once it was a few months old, and the greater the number of children, the greater the area of land that could be cleared and cultivated in future. The premium was on larger families. The change in the method of production also had a profound impact on reproduction. Populations began to expand. Although the rate of growth was small by present standards (0.1 per cent a year),³⁶ it quadrupled over two millennia, beginning the climb which took it from perhaps ten million at the time of the Neolithic revolution to 200 million at the beginning of capitalism.

There were other big changes in horticulture-based societies compared with those of hunter-gatherers. A big dispute in a band of hunter-gatherers could be solved simply by the band splitting or by individuals leaving. This option was hardly open to a group of agriculturists once they had cleared and planted their land. The village was larger and depended on a more complex, organised interaction between people than did the hunter-gatherer band. At the same time it faced a problem which hunter-gatherers did not – it had stocks of stored food and artefacts which provided a motive for attacks by armed raiders from outside. War, virtually unknown among hunter-gatherers, was endemic among many horticultural peoples. This gave a further impetus to formal decision-making mechanisms designed to exercise social control – to councils made up of senior figures in each lineage, for example.

People have made the move from hunting and gathering to farming in several parts of the world, independently of each other, in the ten millennia since – in Meso-America (present-day Mexico and Guatemala), in the Andean region of South America, in at least three distinct parts of Africa, in Indochina, in the Highland valleys of central Papua New Guinea, and in China.³⁷ In each case, changes occurred similar to those in Mesopotamia, although the different plants and animals available for domestication had an important impact on exactly how and to what degree. The evidence refutes any claim that some ‘race’ or ‘culture’ had a special ‘genius’ which led the rest of humanity forward. Rather, faced with changes in climate and ecology, different human groups in different parts of the world found they had to turn to new techniques to sustain anything like their old way of life – and found their ways of life began to change anyway, in a manner they could hardly have expected. In each case, the loose band gave way to life in villages, organised through strongly structured kin groups, rigid norms of social behaviour and elaborate religious rituals and myths.³⁸

A typical example of the independent development of agriculture was in Highland Papua New Guinea. Here people began domesticating and cultivating a variety of crops in about 7000 BC – sugar cane, certain varieties of bananas, a nut tree, the giant swamp taro, edible grass stems, roots and green vegetables. With cultivation they turned, as elsewhere, from nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gathering to village life. Their social organisation was centred on egalitarian kinship groups, and there was no private ownership of land. People continued to live like this, in valleys remote and virtually impenetrable from the coast, undisturbed by outside intrusion until they were ‘discovered’ by Westerners in the early 1930s.

Many early societies did not turn to agriculture. Some put up resistance to what they saw as needless drudgery when they could make a comfortable living through hunting and gathering. Others lived in environments – such as California, Australia and southern Africa – which provided neither plants nor animals that were easy to domesticate.³⁹ The groups which inhabited these regions for millennia had little choice but to subsist by hunting and gathering until contact with outsiders provided domesticated species from elsewhere.⁴⁰

Once agriculture was established in any part of the world, however, it proceeded to spread. Sometimes the success of a people in adopting agriculture encouraged others to imitate them. So the arrival of crop species from the Fertile Crescent seems to have played a role in the rise of agriculture in the Nile Valley, the Indus Valley and western Europe. Sometimes the spread of agriculture was the inevitable result of the spread of peoples who already practised it as their populations grew and some split off to build new villages on previously uncultivated lands. It was in this way that Bantu speakers from west Africa spread into the centre and eventually the south of the continent, and Polynesians from south east Asia spread across the oceans to Madagascar off the African coast, to Easter Island (only 1,500 miles from the South American coast) and to New Zealand.

The existence of an agriculturist society often changed the lives of the hunter-gatherer peoples who came into contact with it. They found they could radically improve their livelihoods by exchanging products with nearby agriculturists – fish, game or animal skins for grain, woven clothing or fermented drinks. This encouraged some to turn to one aspect of agriculture, the breeding and herding of animals, without also cultivating crops. Such ‘pastoralist peoples’ were soon to be found in Eurasia, Africa and the southern Andes of South America, wandering the land between agricultural settlements – sometimes raiding them, sometimes trading with them – and developing characteristic patterns of social life of their own.

On occasion the spread of crop raising and herding led to one final important change in social life – the first differentiation into social ranks. What anthropologists call ‘chieftainships’ or ‘big men’ arose, with some individuals or lineages enjoying much greater prestige than others, and this could culminate in the establishment of hereditary chiefs and chiefly lineages. But even these were not anything like the class distinctions we take for granted, with one section of society consuming the surplus which others toil to produce.

Egalitarianism and sharing remained all-pervasive. Those people with high status had to serve the rest of the community, not live off it. As Richard Lee notes, there were the same ‘communal property concepts’ as in hunter-gatherer societies: ‘Much of what tribute the chiefs receive is redistributed to subjects, and the chiefs’ powers are subject to checks and balances by the forces of popular opinion and institutions’.⁴¹ So among the Nambikwara of South America, ‘Generosity is … an essential attribute of power’, and ‘the chief’ must be prepared to use the ‘surplus quantities of food, tools, weapons and ornaments’ under his control to respond ‘to the appeals of an individual, a family or the band as a whole’ for anything they need.⁴² This could even result in the leader having a harder time materially than those under him. Thus, among the New Guinea Busama, the clubhouse leader ‘has to work harder than anyone else to keep up his stocks of food … It is acknowledged he must toil early and late – his hands are never free from earth, and his forehead continually drips with sweat.’⁴³

The ‘New Stone Age’ turn to agriculture transformed people’s lives, spreading village living and warfare. To this extent it was indeed a certain sort of ‘revolution’. But society still lacked most of the elements we take for granted today: class division, the establishment of permanent state apparatuses based on full-time bureaucrats and bodies of armed men, the subordination of women – none of these things had arisen. They would not do so until there was a second series of changes in the ways people gained a livelihood – until what Gordon Childe called the ‘urban revolution’ was superimposed on the ‘Neolithic revolution’.

Chapter 2

The first civilisations

Civilisation, as we understand it today, goes back just over 5,000 years. The first indications of it are the great edifices found in very different parts of the world – the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, the ziggurats (staged tower temples) of Iraq, the palace of Knossos in Crete, the fortress at Mycenae in mainland Greece, and the grid-planned 4,000-year-old cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-dero on the Indus. For this reason the archaeologist Gordon Childe baptised the change ‘the urban revolution’.⁴⁴ The remains are stunning enough in themselves. Even more amazing is the fact that they were built by peoples who a few generations previously had known nothing but a purely rural life based on fairly rudimentary agriculture. Now they were in possession of elaborate construction skills, capable of quarrying, transporting, erecting and carving huge chunks of rock, and then decorating them with elaborate artistic works – even, in certain cases (the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Chinese and the Meso-American), of developing scripts with which to describe how they behaved and felt. In Eurasia and Africa they also learnt at this stage to obtain copper and tin from rock oxides, and some time afterwards to fuse them into a harder metal, bronze, for making ornaments and weapons – hence the often used terms for the period, the ‘Copper’ and ‘Bronze’ Ages.

None of this could have happened without a prior change in the way in which people made their livelihood, a change that was initially centred on agriculture. The earliest forms of agriculture, using fairly elementary techniques and involving naturally found varieties of plants and animals, could lead over generations to slow increases in agricultural productivity, enabling some peoples to gain a satisfactory livelihood while continuing to enjoy considerable leisure.⁴⁵ But conditions were by no means always as idyllic as is suggested by some romanticised ‘noble savage’ accounts of indigenous peoples. There were many cases in which the growth in food output did little more than keep abreast of the rise in population. People were exposed to sudden famines by natural events beyond their control, ‘droughts or floods, tempests or frosts, blights or hailstorms’.⁴⁶ The history of the pre-Hispanic peoples of Meso-America, for example, is one of years in which they found it easy to feed themselves interspersed with unexpected and devastating famines.⁴⁷

There were only two options if such groups were to maintain their settled way of life. One was to resort to raiding other agriculturists for food, so that warfare became a growing feature of such societies. Stone battle axes and flint daggers became increasingly common, for instance, in the later stages of the Neolithic revolution in Europe. The other option was to develop more intensive and productive forms of agriculture. There was a premium on technological innovation. Farming groups which undertook it could survive the threat of famine. Those which did not eventually died out or fell apart.

Innovation could mean simply improving existing crop varieties or learning to fatten domesticated animals more effectively. But it could also mean much more far-reaching changes. One was the discovery, in Eurasia and Africa, that large domesticated mammals (initially oxen, much later horses) pulling a shaped piece of wood – a plough – through the soil could be much more effective in breaking up the ground for sowing than any hand-held hoe. Another was the building of dams and ditches to protect crops from flooding and to channel water to areas of land that would otherwise become parched and infertile. Then there was the collection of animal dung as fertiliser to avoid exhausting the soil and having to clear new land every few years. Other techniques discovered in one part of the world or another were the draining of marshland, the digging of wells, the terracing of hillsides and the laborious cultivation and then transplanting of rice seedlings (in southern China).

These new techniques, like all human labour, had a double aspect. On the one hand they provided people with additional means of livelihood. Groups which previously had only been able to produce enough for subsistence could begin to produce a surplus. On the other hand, there were changes in people’s social relations.

The new techniques depended upon different forms of cooperation between people. The use of the plough, for instance, encouraged an increased division of labour between the sexes, since it was a form of heavy labour not easily done by women bearing or nursing children. The building and maintenance of regular irrigation channels required the cooperation of dozens or even hundreds of households. It also encouraged a division between those who supervised work and those who undertook it. The storing of food encouraged the emergence of groups responsible for maintaining and supervising the food stocks. The existence of a surplus for the first time permitted some people to be freed from agricultural activities to concentrate on craftwork, preparing for warfare or exchanging local products for those of other peoples.

Gordon Childe described the transformation which occurred in Mesopotamia between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago as people settled in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. They found land which was extremely fertile, but which could only be cultivated by ‘drainage and irrigation works’, which depended upon ‘cooperative effort’.⁴⁸ More recently Maisels has suggested people discovered that by making small breaches in the banks between river channels they could irrigate wide areas of land and increase output considerably. But they could not afford to consume all the extra harvest immediately, so some was put aside to protect against harvest failure.⁴⁹

Grain was stored in sizeable buildings which, standing out from the surrounding land, came to symbolise the continuity and preservation of social life. Those who supervised the granaries became the most prestigious group in society, overseeing the life of the rest of the population as they gathered in, stored and distributed the surplus. The storehouses and their controllers came to seem like powers over and above society, the key to its success, which demanded obedience and praise from the mass of people. They took on an almost supernatural aspect. The storehouses were the first temples, their superintendents the first priests.⁵⁰ Other social groups congregated around the temples, concerned with building work, specialised handicrafts, cooking for and clothing the temple specialists, transporting food to the temples and organising the long-distance exchange of products. Over the centuries the agricultural villages grew into towns and the towns into the first cities, such as Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Kish and Ur (from which the biblical patriarch Abraham supposedly came).

A somewhat similar process occurred some two and a half millennia later in Meso-America. Irrigation does not seem to have played such a central role, at least initially, since maize was a bountiful enough crop to provide a surplus without it in good years.⁵¹ But vulnerability to crop failures encouraged the storage of surpluses and some form of coordination between localities with different climates. There was a great advantage for the population as a whole if a specialised group of people coordinated production, kept account of the seasons and looked after the storehouses. Here, too, storehouses turned, over time, into temples and supervisors into priests, giving rise to the successive cultures of the Olmecs, Teotihuacan, the Zapotecs and the Mayas, as is shown by their huge sculptures, magnificent pyramids, temples, ceremonial brick ball courts and elaborately planned cities (Teotihuacan’s population rose to perhaps 100,000 in the early centuries AD).

In both the Middle East and Meso-America something else of historic importance occurred. The groups of priestly administrators who collected and distributed the stockpiles belonging to the temples began to make marks on stone or clay to keep a record of incomings and outgoings. Over time pictorial images of particular things were standardised, sometimes coming to express the sound of the word for the object they portrayed, until a way was provided of giving permanent visual expression of people’s sentences and thoughts. In this way writing was invented. The temple guardians also had time and leisure to make detailed observations of the sky at night, correlating the movements of the moon, the planets and the stars with those of the sun. Their ability to predict future movements and events such as eclipses gave them a near magical status. But they also learnt to produce calendars based on the moon and the sun which enabled people to work out the best time of the year for planting crops. Such efforts led to mathematics and astronomy taking root in the temples, even if in the magical form of astrology. As Gordon Childe put it, ‘The accumulation of a substantial social surplus in the temple treasuries – or rather granaries – was actually the occasion of the cultural advance that we have taken as the criterion of civilisation’.⁵²

Once writing had been developed by the earliest civilisations in Mesopotamia and Meso-America, it was adopted by many of the peoples who came into contact with them, using their own variants to write in their own languages. It spread at great speed across the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, and on into central, eastern and south Asia, north east Africa and Mediterranean Europe. It was used by all Meso-American civilisations from the Olmecs on. There were, however, civilisations which managed to develop to a high degree without writing – most significantly those in South America, which used markings as an aid to memory without ever moving on to transcribe the spoken word.

There is only room here to provide a few examples of the transition to intensive agriculture and urban life. It happened in several different parts of the world as people took up new ways of gaining a livelihood. There were also many instances of agricultural societies going at least part of the way in this direction, reaching a level where hundreds or even thousands of people could be mobilised to construct imposing stone edifices – like the stone temples of the third and fourth millennia BC in Malta, the stone circles of western Europe (of which Stonehenge is the best known), the giant statues of Easter Island and the stepped platforms of Tahiti.⁵³ Sometimes the move towards ‘civilisation’ would be influenced to some degree by developments elsewhere.⁵⁴ But this does not alter the fact that the processes leading to the formation of towns and cities, and often to the invention of writing, began independently in several different locations because of the internal dynamic of society once agriculture advanced beyond a certain point. This makes a nonsense of any claim that one group of the world’s people are somehow ‘superior’ to others because they arrived at ‘civilisation’ first.

Chapter 3

The first class divisions

The development of civilisation came at a price. In his account of the rise of urban society Adams writes, ‘Tablets of the sign for slave girl’ are to be found at ‘the very end of the protoliterate period’, about 3000 BC. The sign for ‘male slave’ occurs slightly later. This is followed by the first appearance of different terms distinguishing ‘full, free citizen’ and ‘commoner or subordinate status’.⁵⁵ By this time ‘evidence for class differentiation is all too clear’. In

ancient Eshnunna the larger houses along the main roads … often occupied 200 square metres or more of floor area. The greater number of houses, on the other hand, were considerably smaller … having access to the arterial roads only by twisting, narrow alleys … Many do not exceed 50 square metres in total.⁵⁶

Adams continues:

At the bottom of the social hierarchy were slaves, individuals who could be bought and sold … One tablet alone lists 205 slave girls and children who were probably employed in a centralised weaving establishment … Other women were known to be engaged in milling, brewing, cooking … Male slaves generally are referred to as the ‘blind ones’ and apparently were employed in gardening operations.⁵⁷

The emergence of civilisation is usually thought of as one of the great steps forward in human history – indeed, as the step that separates history from prehistory. But it was accompanied wherever it happened by other, negative changes: by the development for the first time of class divisions, with a privileged minority living off the labour of everyone else, and by the setting up of bodies of armed men, of soldiers and secret police – in other words, a state machine – so as to enforce this minority’s rule on the rest of society. The existence of slavery, the physical ownership of some people by others, is palpable proof of this development, not only in Mesopotamia but in many other early civilisations. It shows how far social differentiation had gone since the days of kin-based societies and village communities. But slavery was of relatively minor significance in providing for the early Mesopotamian ruling class. Much more important was the exploitation of peasants and other labourers forced to provide work to the temples and the upper classes. There were groups such as the shub-lugals – ‘a group with a reduced status and degree of freedom, reported as labouring in gangs on demesne lands of the Bau temple or estate, pulling ships, digging irrigation canals, and serving as a nucleus of the city militia’. They received subsistence rations during four months of the year in return for labour service and were ‘allotted small plots of … land from holdings of the temple or estate’.⁵⁸ Such groups had once been independent peasant households, but had been forced into dependency on more powerful groupings, especially the temple.

Gordon Childe summarises an edict from the city of Lagash of around 2500 BC which describes how

favoured priests practised various forms of extortion (overcharging for burials, for instance) and treated the god’s (ie the community’s) land, cattle and servants as their own private property and personal slaves. The high priest came into the garden of the poor and took wood therefrom … If a great man’s house adjoined that of an ordinary citizen, the former might annex the humble dwelling without paying any proper compensation to its owner.

He concludes, ‘This archaic text gives us unmistakable glimpses of a real conflict of class … The surplus produced by the new economy was, in fact, concentrated in the hands of a relatively small class’.⁵⁹

The scale of exploitation grew until it was massive. T B Jones tells how in the city state of Lagash in about 2100 BC

a dozen or more temple establishments were responsible for cultivating most of the arable land … About half [the crop] was consumed by the cost of production [wages for workers, feed for draught animals and the like] and a quarter went to the king as royal tax. The remaining 25 percent accrued to the priests.⁶⁰

C J Gadd notes that in the famous Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘The hero is represented … looking at the wall of Uruk, which he had just built, and beholding the corpses which floated upon the river; such may indeed have been the end of the poorest citizens’.⁶¹

In Meso-America the pattern was essentially similar. Even with the first civilisation, that of the Olmecs, Katz observes ‘marked degrees of social stratification’, with ‘pretentious burial grounds furnished with rich gifts’ and ‘a representation … of a man kneeling in front of another who is richly clad … a nobleman and his subordinate’.⁶² Among the Mayas ‘multi-roomed buildings or palaces’ proved society was ‘sharply differentiated into elite and commoner strata’.⁶³

Why did people who had not previously exploited and oppressed others suddenly start doing so, and why did the rest of society put up with this new exploitation and oppression? The record of hundreds of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer society and thousands of years of early agricultural society show that ‘human nature’ does not automatically lead to such behaviour.⁶⁴

The only account of human society which comes to terms with the change is that outlined by Karl Marx in the 1840s and 1850s and further elaborated by Frederick Engels. Marx put the stress on the interaction between the development of ‘relations of production’ and ‘forces of production’. Human beings find new ways of producing the necessities of life, ways that seem likely to ease material problems. But these new ways of producing begin to create new relations between members of the group. At a certain point they either have to embrace the new ways of relating to each other or reject the new ways of making a livelihood.

Classes began to arise out of certain of these changes in making a livelihood. Methods of production were open to the group that could enable it to produce and store a surplus over and above what was needed to subsist. But the new methods required some people to be freed from the immediate burden of working in the fields to coordinate the activities of the group, and to ensure that some of the surplus was not immediately consumed but set aside for the future in storehouses.

The conditions of production were still precarious. A drought, a virulent storm or a plague of locusts could destroy crops and turn the surplus into a deficit, threatening general starvation and driving people to want to consume the stores set aside for future production. In such circumstances, those freed from manual labour to supervise production could find the only way to achieve this task was to bully everyone else – to keep them working when tired and hungry and to force them to put aside food stocks even when starving. The ‘leaders’ could begin to turn into ‘rulers’, into people who came to see their control over resources as in the interests of society as a whole. They would come to defend that control even when it meant making others suffer; they would come to see social advance as dependent on themselves remaining fit, well and protected from the famines and impoverishment that periodically afflicted the population as a whole. In short, they would move from acting in a certain way in the interests of the wider society to acting as if their own sectional interests were invariably those of society as a whole. Or, to put it another way, for the first time social development encouraged the development of the motive to exploit and oppress others.

Class divisions were the other side of the coin of the introduction of production methods which created a surplus. The first farming communities had established themselves without class divisions in localities with exceptionally fertile soil. But as they expanded, survival came to depend on coping with much more difficult conditions – and that required a reorganisation of social relations.⁶⁵

Groups with high prestige in preceding non-class societies would set about organising the labour needed to expand agricultural production by building irrigation works or clearing vast areas of new land. They would come to see their own control of the surplus – and the use of some of it to protect themselves against natural vicissitudes – as in everyone’s interest. So would the first groups to use large-scale trade to increase the overall variety of goods available for the consumption of society and those groups most proficient at wresting surpluses from other societies through war.

Natural catastrophes, exhaustion of the land and wars could create conditions of acute crisis in a non-class agricultural society, making it difficult for the old order to continue. This would encourage dependence on new productive techniques. But these could only be widely adopted if some wealthy households or lineages broke completely with their old obligations. What had been wealth to be given away to others in return for prestige became wealth to consume while others suffered: ‘In advanced forms of chieftainship … what begins with the would-be headman putting his production to others’ benefit ends, to some degree, with others putting their production to the chief’s benefit’.⁶⁶

At the same time warfare allowed some individuals and lineages to gain great prestige as they concentrated loot and the tribute from other societies in their hands. Hierarchy became more pronounced, even if it remained hierarchy associated with the ability to give things to others.⁶⁷

There was nothing automatic about this process. In many parts of the world societies were able to prosper right through to modern times without resorting to labour-intensive methods such as the use of heavy ploughs or extensive hydraulic works. This explains the survival until relatively recent times of what are misleadingly called ‘primitive’ societies in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific islands and parts of Africa, the Americas and south east Asia. But in other conditions survival came to depend on adopting new techniques. Ruling classes arose out of the organisation of such activities and, with them, towns, states and what we usually call civilisation. From this point onwards the history of society certainly was the history of class struggle. Humanity increased its degree of control over nature, but at the price of most people becoming subject to control and exploitation by privileged minority groups.

Such groups could only keep the surplus in their own hands at times when the whole of society was suffering great hardship if they found ways of imposing their will on the rest of society by establishing coercive structures – states. Control over the surplus provided them with the means to do so, by hiring armed men and investing in expensive techniques such as metal working which could give them a monopoly of the most efficient means of killing.

Armed force is most effective when backed by legal codes and ideologies which sanctify ruling-class power by making it seem like the source of people’s livelihoods. In Mesopotamia, for example, ‘Early kings boast of their economic activities, of cutting canals, of building temples, of importing timber from Syria, and copper and granite from Oman. They are sometimes depicted on monuments in the garb of bricklayers or masons and of architects receiving the plan of the temple from the gods’.⁶⁸

Not only could rulers think of themselves as the embodiment of society’s highest values – so too, in certain circumstances, could those they exploited. By the very fact of absorbing society’s surplus, of having control of its means of reproducing itself, the rulers could come to symbolise society’s power for those below them – to be seen as gods, or at least as the necessary intermediaries between the mass of society and its gods. Hence the god-like attributes of the pharaohs of Egypt or the priestly attributes of the first ruling classes of Mesopotamia and Meso-America.

Religious notions of sorts had existed in pre-class societies. People had ascribed to magical beings control over the apparently mysterious processes which led some plants to flower and not others, to the years of bountiful hunting and years of hunger, to unexpected and sudden deaths. With the appearance of classes and states people also had to come to terms with the existence of social powers beyond their own control. It was at this stage that organised religious institutions arose. Worshipping the gods became a way of society worshipping its own power, of people giving an alienated recognition to their own achievements. This, in turn, enhanced the control of those who claimed to be responsible for these achievements – those who gave orders to the mass of producers, monopolised the surplus in their own hands and used armed force against anyone rejecting their claims.

Once such state structures and ideologies were in existence, they would perpetuate the control of the surplus by a certain group even when it no longer served the purpose of advancing production. A class that emerged as a spur to production would persist even when it was no longer such a spur.

The character of the first class societies

We usually think of class societies as based on private property. But private property is not a feature of all societies divided into classes. Karl Marx referred to an ‘Asiatic’ form of class society in which private property did not exist at all. Instead, he argued, the rulers were able, through their collective control of the state machine,