Forever Sumer

The most recent book to ease my nighttime passage to drowsiness provided some new insights about the megalithic complex at Gobekli Tepe in Asia Minor (see my September 26 blog Mabon) even though it didn’t specifically mention the site. Gobekli Tepe is remarkable for having been built by hunter-gatherers 12,000 years ago. Animal bones found at the site are from wild prey animals, not farm animals, and there is no hint of cultivated crops or permanent settlements. It is presumably a temple complex of some kind. The time that passed between its construction and the construction of the first cities was thousands of years greater than the time that has passed between the first cities and today. So, our prehistoric ancestors had the skills to build massive masonry structures even before the last ice age ended, but they didn’t bother to use them to build cities until (in the scheme of things) quite recently. If you count from the first appearance of modern humans some 200,000 years ago, it was very very recently.

Why not? The answer, while tautological, seems simply to be they didn’t want to. According to Yale professor James C. Scott in his book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States they had good reason. It long has been known that hunter-gatherers were healthier, fitter, and had a far better and more varied diet than the farmers who supplanted them. Even today, remaining hunter-gatherers work far less than farmers despite living in truly marginal landscapes such as the Kalahari. In the rich lands of well-watered Paleolithic middle latitudes, game and edible vegetation were abundant. Skeletons from after the switch to farming show a severe decline in average human size and health including dental health: grains are bad for the teeth. The question to ask is why with all its advantages did most people give up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Once again, the answer is they didn’t want to. Scott tells us the reason is intimately connected with the rise of states and the use of force.

Scott reminds us that the technologies of farming and pastoralism (the Neolithic Revolution) did not immediately or inevitably lead to states. There were clans, bands, and tribes to be sure, but their chiefs and councils had little authority: it was too easy for individuals and their families just to walk away if self-styled leaders got too overbearing. The new food-gathering methods simply supplemented a stateless hunter-gatherer economy. A good example are the Lenni Lenape who several hundred years ago inhabited the inland northern NJ area where I presently live. In the spring they hunted and gathered but also planted maize crops; in the summer they left for the Jersey Shore where they took in some rays and seafood; they returned in the fall to harvest the maize. Yet, their settlements were no more than semi-permanent, it was no disaster if the crops failed, and it always was possible for disgruntled individuals to walk away.

All the elements necessary for a city-state to survive pre-existed urbanism by thousands of years: farmed crops, domestic animals, and artisans such as masons and toolmakers. Yet, states didn’t arise spontaneously even in those regions where sedentism was the rule – sedentism is not at conflict with foraging economies in biologically rich environments. Scott points out that all of the regions where early states arose – Upper Egypt, the Maya, the Yellow River, and southern Mesopotamia – shared some things in common: rising populations that were constrained by geography (such as deserts on each side) in such a way that made it difficult for residents just to walk away when some brigand called himself “king” and enforced his rule with a gang of thugs. The new rulers were able to force the bulk of local populations to labor to produce calorie surpluses that could be expropriated for urban dwellers. Outright slavery formed a large part of the labor force but even more important was taxation. Demanding taxes in the form of food forced farmers, under severe penalties in the case of non-payment, to work their land harder than they would if left to themselves. The very first city-states were Sumerian, and a Sumerian proverb (found on a clay tablet c.2400 BCE) says, “You can have a landlord, you can have a king, but the man to fear is the tax-collector.”

This is why grain became a staple crop. Unlike some other crops, fields of barley or wheat are impossible to hide and easy to quantify. Furthermore, one bushel of grain is pretty much like another making it ideal currency for taxation. Grain farming prevailed because governments demanded tax payments in grain. Taxation in turn required accountants and records, which promoted writing and the other trappings of civilization. Yet, except for the urban elites, civilization was so unattractive an existence that most of the world resisted it for a very long time. In 2000 BCE, notes Scott, states were “a mere smudge on the map of the ancient world and not much more than a rounding error in a total global population estimated at roughly 25 million…” Even at the height of the Roman Empire and its Chinese counterpart the vast majority of the world’s land surface was occupied by stateless peoples.

There is no denying the demographic and military advantages that accrued over time to civilized states, which eventually let them spread over the habitable land area of the earth so that now there is no escaping them – but this did take time. Personally, I’m mostly OK with civilization in its current form and would like to see more of it. I like my permanent home and the farmed foods in my refrigerator, though come tax-time I still agree with that grumbling Sumerian. But it is worth remembering the brutal origins of civilization in the first urban states, and what a price was paid for it by our ancestors. The Sumerians have a lot for which to answer.

Sirenia – In Sumerian Haze