The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (79 page)

Marc van de Mieroop, who has analyzed the available texts, points out that the Amorites were far more than a horde of nomadic barbarians. Many Amorites were urban; they lived in a number of Sumerian and Akkadian cities while retaining their ethnic identity. Some had even worked their way up as bureaucratic officials in Ur’s Third Dynasty state. In van de Mieroop’s words, however, some cuneiform texts portray the Amorites as a “loathed” ethnic group. This may be another case of pejorative stereotyping, the kind we witnessed in kingdoms such as Egypt and the Zulu.

In the fifth year of his reign, Ibbi-Sin realized that Ur was running out of grain. He needed shipments from the northern fields of his kingdom, a task for which he would have to dispatch a royal official.

The man chosen for the journey was Ishbi-Erra, an Amorite born in Mari, a city far up the Euphrates from Ur. We do not know how Ishbi-Erra came to be a royal official. Had he been a person of some rank in Mari? Or was he a talented commoner who had worked his way up the bureaucratic ladder like Uni had in ancient Egypt? Either scenario is possible since, according to van de Mieroop, individuals with Amorite names were present in all classes of Third Dynasty society.

Ishbi-Erra collected the grain. He then claimed, however, that marauding nomads made it impossible to deliver the shipment to Ur. As a result, he stored the grain at the city of Isin and then suggested that he be put in charge of defending both Isin and the neighboring city of Nippur. According to van de Mieroop, Ibbi-Sin sensed treason coming but felt compelled to grant Ishbi-Erra’s request.

Ibbi-Sin’s worries were well-founded. Ishbi-Erra soon established his own dynasty at Isin, a feat suggesting that his background may indeed have been aristocratic. His control of Nippur, the religious capital of Mesopotamia, gave him the clout to establish links to Uruk and Larsa. Ishbi-Erra’s army conquered Kish and penetrated the Diyala River region as far as Eshnunna. While he was unable to conquer Ur, he received what amounted to “protection money” from that city.

Impoverished by his loss of land and tribute, Ibbi-Sin was forced to raid the temple treasuries of Ur to buy provisions from other cities at inflated prices. He cut all barley rations to his palace staff, but famines became more frequent and thus many laborers fled his kingdom. In the final decade of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, his kingdom was under attack from both Amorites and Elamites.

Archaeologist J. Nicholas Postgate has described the growing famine that gripped Ur in its final days, as its enemies cut off its supplies of barley, fish, and oil, and inflation soared from fivefold to sixtyfold. It was a cruel way for prices to begin reflecting supply and demand instead of bureaucratic guidelines, and it sped the collapse of the venerable old city.

As dust blew in the empty streets of Ur, an anonymous poet wrote a lament that has survived more than 4,000 years. Elamites from Susiana, taking advantage of the chaos brought on by Amorite raids and internal revolts, had just sacked Ur and carried off King Ibbi-Sin. Many of Ur’s temples lay in ruins, and it was to the goddess Ningal that the poet began his lament.

Oh Ningal, how has your heart led you on? How can you stay alive?

Your house has become a house of tears. How has your heart led you on?

Your city has been made into ruins. How can you exist?

Ur, the shrine, has been given over to the wind. How now can you exist?

Obviously we must credit the Sumerians with one additional legacy. They gave birth to the blues.

The collapse of Ur was followed by a fifth-generation state, led by the cities of Isin and Larsa. The sixth-generation state for the region would be the one created by Hammurabi of Babylon (1792–1750
B.C.
). The latter was an empire virtually as large as Sargon’s, and by that time, Sumerian was well on its way to becoming a dead language.

Some authors choose to portray Mesopotamia as a land of petty kingdoms or “city-states,” only briefly consolidated into expansionist states or empires. Other authors, including Postgate, portray that part of the world as going through repetitive cycles of strong centralization, separated by political breakdown and regional autonomy.

We find the latter portrayal more convincing. Rather than making Mesopotamia unique, it makes it comparable both to Egypt (with its cycles of centralized Kingdoms and decentralized Intermediate periods) and to ancient Mexico and Peru (whose cycles we describe later in this book). At the heart of all these cycles is a principle with which we are already familiar: For every leader seeking greater territory and power, there are others seeking to bring him down.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

In Rousseau’s scenario for mankind’s past, the archaic state represented the final stage. It was in societies like that of Sumer that the poor had signed the Social Contract, agreeing to inequality forever.

Rousseau did not know as much about ancient Mesopotamia as today’s archaeologists and epigraphers, but Sumerian society comes as close to matching his hypothetical final stage as any we know of. Sumer was, in fact, a society of signed contracts. The Sumerian ideal was order, and the method for achieving order was obedience to hundreds of me, or rules, interpreted for the poor by the aristocracy and the priests.

All but the lowliest Sumerians signed multiple contracts in the course of their lives, and all understood the penalties for default. Many signers, who put up their personal liberty as collateral for a loan, were in the long run signing a contract for inequality. Rousseau could not possibly have known that in 1753, but his instincts were correct.

Bureaucratic micromanagement of Sumerian society resulted in huge archives of cuneiform tablets, equivalent to today’s “red tape” or “paperwork.” The intervention of an authoritarian government into commoners’ private lives reduced the variety of marriages to one. The Sumerians created harsh punishments for behavior that other societies would merely have gossiped about.

Many societies had hereditary aristocracies. Prior to Sumer, however, few created such economic inequality within the commoner stratum. The growing privatization of land, combined with the charging of high interest on loans, undercut the safety net provided by the traditional descent groups of earlier societies. The Sumerian government seems to have been aware of what was happening and thus periodically slowed the process by canceling debts. Unfortunately, it could not reverse it.

We have seen that Hawai’i’s paramount chiefs eliminated the landed gentry by placing all garden land under chiefly control. In contrast, the Sumerians swelled the ranks of the landed gentry and turned thousands of commoners into sharecroppers.

Debt slavery was widespread in rank societies. Private ownership of land was not. It was a defining feature of Mesopotamian society, one that might even have begun during the Late Uruk period. The first step was to remove land from circulation and assign it to the city’s most important temple. Late Uruk temples were impressive; Early Dynastic temples were grander still.

Sumerian kings often claimed to be loved by a patron deity. Appointing their heirs to take care of the gods’ estates was thus only logical. After spending years as sanga of such an estate, the royal heir knew just how valuable a property it was. On his ascent to the throne, he held on to the god’s estate and then provided his wife with the estate of the god’s wife.

It was on such temple estates that Sumerian record-keeping, standard weights and measures, the renting of land at interest, and the accumulation of capital for use by temple merchants were perfected. The lessons were not lost on the aristocracy, which soon established its own private estates.

We have seen that the Chumash of California learned how to create a fourfold increase in the value of shell beads. Sumerian accountants learned how to calculate the wealth-producing effects of long-term interest rates. And the skilled merchants who carried out trade for the Sumerian temples inspired others to become private entrepreneurs.

Economic historian Michael Hudson considers the Sumerian temple the forerunner of the corporation. The wealth of the palace estates encouraged other aristocrats to see how much land they could pry away from commoner descent groups. Lacking the clout of the royal family, the aristocrats relied on extending loans at interest rates of up to 33⅓ percent. As we have seen, many commoners used their personal freedom as collateral and wound up becoming serfs. Reform-minded rulers tried to prevent this from happening, but as Hudson points out, private wealth eventually grew strong enough to undermine royal power. One outcome was real estate as we know it.

Although Mesopotamian economic behavior looks capitalistic, it was not yet laissez-faire capitalism. As late as the period of the Isin-Larsa Dynasties and the First Dynasty of Babylon, the government was still attempting to micromanage prices. While the economy had some elements of a market, bureaucrats set guidelines for the exchange of goods. Silver was used as a standard of value, but it was not yet an actual medium of exchange.

The state was especially interested in long-distance trade, such as the movement of copper from Turkey to Mesopotamia. The price of copper, however, was not allowed to fluctuate with supply and demand. Instead, guilds of merchants traveled to the highlands of Turkey and, by negotiating with the local princes, established a long-term price for copper. The merchants then purchased specific amounts of copper on consignment and received a commission on their return to Mesopotamia. Their profits depended on the high volume of trade, and their business was low-risk because the price of copper had been fixed.

The rarity of laissez-faire market systems in early civilizations has fueled a long-standing debate between two kinds of economists: formalists and substantivists. Formalists believe that the laws of supply and demand usually determine what societies do. Substantivists, as exemplified by economic historian Karl Polanyi, believe that, on the contrary, the economy is embedded in society and constitutes a special form of social relations. Indeed, many substantivists would argue that economics began with the reciprocal gifts exchanged by hunters and gatherers and grew from there.

We once had the pleasure of dining with a formal economist who spent most of the evening telling us how silly archaeologists were for believing that prehistoric behavior was determined by anything but supply and demand. As he finished his dessert, he took out a fine cigar and asked if we minded his lighting up. We knew better than to deny him that pleasure. He then complained that it was no longer possible to get his favorite brand of Havana cigar. It never occurred to him that the cultural values and social policies of the United States had prevented Cuba’s supply from getting together with his demand.

Perhaps the best way to leave the debate is this: Substantivists can cite dozens of anecdotal cases in which cosmology, religion, or cultural values restrict the operation of supply and demand. The formalists, however, have produced all the sexy equations that might win you a Nobel Prize.

TWENTY-THREE

How New Empires Learn from Old

An empire is a kind of macro-state and has its own social and political logic. In many parts of the world we can point to multiple generations of kingdoms and empires. This allows us to observe third- and fourth-generation states borrowing strategies from their predecessors.

Two New World societies can serve as examples. The Aztec belonged to the fifth generation of states in central Mexico. The Inca constituted the fourth-generation empire in the Andes. Both used the logic of their predecessors as templates.

CENTRAL MEXICO’S FIRST STATE

The Basin of Mexico lies 7,200 feet above sea level and occupies 3,700 square miles. When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, they found a series of interconnected lakes covering 400 square miles. The most productive farmland lay in the southern part of the lake system, where the annual rainfall exceeded 40 inches and the lake margin was swampy. The central part of the lake system was brackish. The northern basin received less than 24 inches of rain and required irrigation.

This dry northern region, however, had a unique environmental feature. At a place now called San Juan Teotihuacan, 80 permanent springs brought more than a billion cubic feet of water to the surface annually. Today this water is collected by a canal system irrigating more than 10,000 acres. Two thousand years ago, the water supported Teotihuacan, one of Mexico’s earliest and largest cities. Archaeologists are not yet sure whether the state headed by Teotihuacan was a monarchy or an oligarchy.

Fifteen hundred years ago, Teotihuacan had an estimated population of 125,000. One of the ways that it grew so large was by drawing most of the rural population of the Basin of Mexico into the city. This deliberate relocation of the rural population was so extensive that no serious candidates for Level 2 administrative centers were left within the basin. Teotihuacan’s impact can be seen at distant settlements, from the Mexican states of Hidalgo in the north and Veracruz in the east to the Republic of Guatemala in the south. Let us look at some of the Teotihuacan behaviors that were emulated by later states.

  1. The capital was divided into quadrants and had major roads leading into and out of the city.

  2. Craft specialists of various kinds lived in their own residential wards. Teotihuacan had more than 2,000 large, multifamily apartment compounds, surrounded by high walls and separated from other compounds by narrow alleys. At least 500 of these compounds were involved in craft activity. Some produced artifacts of obsidian, some made pottery of a specific type, some produced mold-made figurines, others produced masks for rituals or funeral bundles, and so on.

  3. Some compounds may have been occupied by hundreds of people, suggesting that a social segment with clanlike properties may have been involved. These large, possibly corporate social segments may have served as an archetype for the
calpulli
of the later Aztec.

  4. There were enclaves of people from foreign ethnic groups. For example, Zapotec immigrants from Oaxaca lived in one part of the city and traders from the Gulf Coast in another. Some of these enclaves may have supplied Teotihuacan’s craftsmen with raw materials from distant regions.