Preface.  After the Great Simplification new societies will arise, and I hope copy past civilizations that deliberately avoided slavery, war and autocratic kings.  I’ve extracted a few examples of this from The Dawn of Everything below.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Self-governance by councils not kings

In the standard, textbook version of human history, scale is crucial. The tiny bands of foragers in which humans were thought to have spent most of their evolutionary history could be relatively democratic and egalitarian precisely because they were small. If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would almost inevitably develop writing or something like it, together with administrators, storage and redistribution facilities, workshops and overseers. Before long, they would also start dividing themselves into social classes. ‘Civilization’ came as a package.

The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort. In fact, much of what we have come to learn in the last 40 or 50 years has thrown conventional wisdom into disarray. In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.

Cities are tangible things. Certain elements of their physical infrastructure – walls, roads, parks, sewers – might remain fixed for hundreds or even thousands of years; but in human terms they are never stable. People are constantly moving in and out of them, whether permanently, or seasonally for holidays and festivals, to visit relatives, trade, raid, tour around, and so on; or just in the course of their daily rounds. Yet cities have a life that transcends all this. This is not because of the permanence of stone or brick or adobe; neither is it because most people in a city actually meet one another. It is because they will often think and act as people who belong to the city.

All this applies in equal measure to ancient cities. Aristotle, for example, insisted that Babylon was so large that, two or three days after it had been captured by a foreign army, some parts of the city still hadn’t heard the news.

From the perspective of someone living in an ancient city, the city itself was not so entirely different from earlier landscapes of clans or moieties that extended across hundreds of miles.

So what was really new here? Let’s go back to the archaeological evidence. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people make their first appearance in human history around 6000 years ago, on almost every continent, at first in isolation. Then they multiply. One of the things that makes it so difficult to fit what we now know about them into an old-fashioned evolutionary sequence, where cities, states, bureaucracies and social classes all emerge together, is just how different these cities are. It’s not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form.

Contemporary archaeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule. It also shows that their ecology was far more diverse than once believed: cities do not necessarily depend on a rural hinterland in which serfs or peasants engage in back-breaking labor, hauling in cartloads of grain for consumption by urban dwellers. Certainly, that situation became increasingly typical in later ages, but in the first cities small-scale gardening and animal-keeping were often at least as important; so too were the resources of rivers and seas, and for that matter the continued hunting and collecting of wild seasonal foods in forests or in marshes. The particular mix depended largely on where in the world the cities happened to be, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that history’s first city dwellers did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other.

We may never be able to reconstruct in any detail the unwritten constitutions of the world’s first cities, or the upheavals that appear to have periodically changed them. Did the sort of temporary, seasonal aggregation sites we discussed in earlier chapters gradually become permanent, year-round settlements? That would be a gratifyingly simple story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be what happened.

Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves, not in the idiom of kinship or ethnic ties, but simply as ‘the people’ of a given city (or often its ‘sons and daughters’), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar, which always involves at least some occasions for popular festivity.

Where there is evidence to be had, we also find differences. People who lived in cities often came from far away. The great city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was already attracting residents from such distant areas as Yucatán and the Gulf Coast in the third or fourth century AD; migrants settled there in their own neighborhoods, including a possible Maya district. Immigrants from across the great floodplains of the Indus buried their loved ones in the cemeteries of Harappa. Typically, ancient cities divided themselves into quarters, which often developed enduring rivalries, and this seems to have been true of the very first cities. Marked out by walls, gates or ditches, consolidated neighborhoods of this sort were probably not different in any fundamental respect from their modern counterparts.

What makes these cities strange, at least to us, is largely what isn’t there. This is especially true of technology, whether advanced metallurgy, intensive agriculture, social technologies like administrative records, or even the wheel. Any one of these things may, or may not, have been present, depending where in this early urban world we cast our gaze. Here it’s worth recalling that in most of the Americas, before the European invasion, there were neither metal tools nor horses, donkeys, camels or oxen. All movement of people and things was either by foot, canoe or travois. But the scale of pre-Columbian capitals like Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan dwarfs that of the earliest cities in China and Mesopotamia, and makes the ‘city-states’ of Bronze Age Greece (like Tiryns and Mycenae) seem little more than fortified hamlets.

The largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia – with its many technical and logistical advantages – but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. This raises an obvious question: why did so many end up living in the same place to begin with? Teotihuacan, for instance, appears to have become such a large city, peaking at perhaps 100,000 souls, mainly because a series of volcanic eruptions and related natural disasters drove entire populations out of their homelands to settle there.

At the beginning of the Holocene, the world’s great rivers were mostly still wild and unpredictable. Then, around 7,000 years ago, flood regimes started changing, giving way to more settled routines. This is what created wide and highly fertile floodplains along the Yellow River, the Indus, the Tigris and other rivers that we associate with the first urban civilizations.

Parallel to this, the melting of polar glaciers slowed down in the Middle Holocene to a point that allowed sea levels the world over to stabilize, at least to a greater degree than they ever had before. The combined effect of these two processes was dramatic; especially where great rivers met the open waters, depositing their seasonal loads of fertile silt faster than seawaters could push them back. This was the origin of those great fan-like deltas we see today at the head of the Mississippi, the Nile or the Euphrates, for instance.

Comprising well-watered soils, annually sifted by river action, and rich wetland and waterside habitats favored by migratory game and waterfowl, such deltaic environments were major attractors for human populations. Neolithic farmers gravitated to them, along with their crops and livestock. Hardly surprising, considering these were effectively scaled-up versions of the kind of river, spring and lakeside environments in which Neolithic horticulture first began, but with one other major difference: just over the horizon lay the open sea, and before it expansive marshlands supplying aquatic resources to buffer the risks of farming, as well as a perennial source of organic materials (reeds, fibers, silt) to support construction and manufacturing.

All this, combined with the fertility of alluvial soils further inland, promoted the growth of more specialized forms of farming in Eurasia, including the use of animal-drawn ploughs (also adopted in Egypt by 3000 BC), and the breeding of sheep for wool. Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.

Wetlands and floodplains are no friends to archaeological survival. Often, these earliest phases of urban occupation lie beneath later deposits of silt, or the remains of cities grown over them. In many parts of the world, the first available evidence relates to an already mature phase of urban expansion: by the time the picture comes into focus, we already see a marsh metropolis, or network of centers, out-scaling all previous known settlements by a factor of ten to one. Some of these cities in former wetlands have only emerged very recently into historical view – virgin births from the bulrushes. The results are often striking, and their implications still unclear.

These new findings show that archaeologists still have much to find out about the distribution of the world’s first cities. They also indicate how much older those cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation.

Mesopotamia

Unlike the Ukrainian mega-sites, or the Bronze Age cities of the Indus valley to which we’ll turn shortly, Mesopotamia was already part of modern memory before any archaeologist put a spade into one of its ancient mounds. The oldest remains of cities and kingdoms – including the Royal Tombs of Ur – belonged to a culture previously unknown, and not mentioned in scripture: the Sumerians. The first decades of archaeological work in the region, from the late 19^th to 20^th century, confirmed an expected association of ancient Mesopotamia with empire and monarchy. The Sumerians, at least on first sighting, seemed no exception. In fact, they set the tone.  This reinforced a popular picture of Mesopotamia as a civilization of cities, monarchy and aristocracy.

The real story is far more complicated. The earliest Mesopotamian cities – those of the fourth and early third millennia BC – present no clear evidence for monarchy at all. Now, you might object, it’s difficult to prove for certain that something isn’t there. However, we know what evidence for monarchy in such cities would be like, because half a millennium later (from around 2800 BC onwards) monarchy starts popping up everywhere: palaces, aristocratic burials and royal inscriptions, along with defensive walls for cities and organized militia to guard them.

Everyone had to give their labor free. Even the most powerful Mesopotamian rulers of later periods had to heave a basket of clay to the construction site of an important temple. Free citizens performed labor for weeks or even months. When they did, high-ranking clerics and administrators worked alongside artisans, shepherds and cereal farmers. Later kings could grant exemptions, allowing the rich to pay tax in lieu, or employ others to do the work for them. Still, all contributed in some way.

Even in periods of monarchy and empire, these seasonal projects were undertaken in a festive spirit, laborers receiving copious rewards of bread, beer, dates, cheese and meat. There was also something of the carnival about them. They were occasions when the moral order of the city spun on its axis, and distinctions between citizens dissolved away.  More lasting benefits for the citizenry at large included debt cancellation by the governor. Times of labor mobilization were thus seen as moments of absolute equality before the gods – when even slaves might be placed on an equal footing to their masters

Inhabitants shed their day-to-day identities as bakers or tavern keepers or inhabitants of such and such a neighborhood. If this is at least partly how cities were built, it’s hard to write such festivals off as pure symbolic display. What’s more, there were other institutions, also said to originate in the Predynastic age, which ensured that ordinary citizens had a significant hand in government. Even the most autocratic rulers of later city-states were answerable to a panoply of town councils, neighborhood wards and assemblies – in all of which women often participated alongside men.

These urban assemblies might not have been so powerful as those of ancient Greece – but, on the other hand, slavery was not nearly so developed in Mesopotamia, and women were not excluded from politics to anything like the same degree. The term used by modern scholars for this general state of affairs is ‘primitive democracy’. It’s not a very good term, since there’s no particular reason to think any of these institutions were in any way crude or unsophisticated.  District councils and assemblies of elders – representing the interests of urban publics – were not just a feature of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, there is evidence for them in all later periods of Mesopotamian history too, right down to the time of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires, whose memory lived on through biblical scripture,  and in the urban societies of neighboring peoples such as the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines and Israelites.

It is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the ancient Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly – or often several assemblies (for instance, different ones representing the interests of ‘the young’ and ‘the old’). This was the case even in areas such as the Syrian steppe and northern Mesopotamia, where traditions of monarchy ran deep. Still, we know very little about how these assemblies functioned, their composition, or often even where they met.

Some of the clearest evidence comes from between the ninth and seventh centuries BC. Assyrian emperors like Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal have been famous since biblical times for their brutality, creating monuments that boasted of the bloody vengeance they carried out against rebels. But when dealing with loyal subjects they were strikingly hands-off, often granting near-total autonomy to citizen bodies that made decisions collectively. Murder trials, divorce and property disputes seem to have been mostly in the hands of town councils. Texts found at Nippur give unusual details about the composition of one such assembly, summoned to act as a jury for a homicide case. Among those sitting we find one bird catcher, one potter, two gardeners and a soldier in the service of a temple.  Being a manual laborer did not exclude one from direct participation in law and politics.

So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely. None of this necessarily answers the question, ‘what was the nature of government in Mesopotamian cities before the appearance of kingship?’ (though it’s certainly suggestive).

The Gilgamesh epic (which begins in Predynastic Uruk) does speak of such assemblies, including one reserved for the young men of the city. To draw an obvious parallel: the Athenian agora in the time of Pericles (the fifth century BC) was also full of public temples, but the actual democratic assemblies took place in an open space called the Pnyx, with rotating membership – to run the everyday affairs of the city (all other citizens were expected to stand). Meetings at the Pnyx could involve anywhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people, groups comprising free adult males drawn from perhaps 20 per cent of the city’s total population.

The Great Court at Uruk is considerably larger, and while we have little idea what the total population of Uruk was in, say, 3500 BC, it’s hard to imagine it was anywhere near that of classical Athens. This suggests a wider range of participation, which would make sense if women were not entirely excluded and if early Uruk did not, like later Athens, define some 30% of its population as resident aliens with no voting rights, and up to 40% as slaves. Much of this remains speculative, but what’s clear is that in later periods things change.

By 2900 BC, we have evidence for local kings of rival city-states battling it out for supremacy over Uruk, in response to which a five-and-a-half-mile fortification wall (whose building was later attributed to Gilgamesh) went up around the city’s perimeter. Within a few centuries, city rulers were setting themselves up as neighbors of the goddesses and the gods, building their own palatial houses on the doorstep to the House of Heaven and stamping their names into its sacred brickwork.

While evidence of democratic self-governance is always a bit ambiguous (would anyone guess what was really going on in fifth-century Athens, from archaeological evidence alone?), evidence for royal rule, when it appears, is entirely unmistakable.

Let us just emphasize the remarkable number of industries that developed in these temple workshops, as documented in the cuneiform accounts. Among them we find the first large-scale dairy and wool production; also the manufacture of leavened bread, beer and wine, including facilities for standardized packaging. Some eighty varieties of fish – fresh- and saltwater – appear in the administrative accounts along with their associated oil and food products, preserved and stored in temple repositories. From this we can deduce that a primary economic function of this temple sector was to co-ordinate labor at key times of year, and to provide quality control for processed goods that differed from those made in ordinary households. This particular kind of work, unlike the maintenance of irrigation dykes and building of roads and embankments, was routinely carried out under central administrative control.

‘Uruk expansion’, as it is called in the archaeological literature, is puzzling. There’s no real evidence of violent conquest, no weapons or fortifications, yet at the same time there seems to have been an effort to transform – in effect, to colonize – the lives of nearby peoples, to disseminate the new habits of urban life. In this, the emissaries of Uruk seem to have proceeded with an almost missionary zeal. Temples were established, and with them new sorts of clothing, new dairy products, wines and woollens were disseminated to local populations. While these products might not have been entirely novel, what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guaranteeing purity and quality control.  The entire process was, in a sense, colonial, and it did not go unopposed. As it turns out, we cannot really understand the rise of what we have come to call ‘the state’ – and specifically of aristocracies and monarchies – except in the larger context of that counter-reaction.

The story of Arslantepe begins around 3300 BC, when a temple was built on the site. This temple resembled those of Uruk and her colonies, with storage areas for food and carefully arranged archives of administrative seals, just as in any temple of the Mesopotamian floodplain. But within a few generations the temple was dismantled, and in its place was built a massive private structure enclosing a grand audience chamber and living quarters, as well as storage areas, including an armory. An assemblage of swords and spearheads – finely crafted of arsenic-rich copper and quite unlike anything found in public buildings of the lowlands at this time – signals not only control over, but a celebration of the means to enact violence: a new aesthetics of personal combat and killing. The excavators have labelled this building the world’s ‘earliest known palace’.

From 3100 BC, across the hilly country of what’s now eastern Turkey, and then in other places on the edge of urban civilization, we see evidence for the rise of a warrior aristocracy, heavily armed with metal spears and swords, living in what appear to be hill forts or small palaces. All traces of bureaucracy disappear.  And for the first time also tombs of men who, in life, were clearly considered heroic individuals of some sort, accompanied to the afterlife by prodigious quantities of metal weaponry, treasures, elaborate textiles and drinking gear. Everything about these tombs and their makers, living on the frontiers of urban life, bespeaks a spirit of extravagance.

Copious amounts of fine food, drink and personal jewelry were deposited. There are signs that such funerals could spiral into spectacles of competitive one-upmanship, as what must have been priceless trophies, heirlooms and prizes of unparalleled magnificence were offered up or even intentionally destroyed; some, too, are accompanied by subsidiary burials of those apparently slaughtered at the graveside as offerings. Unlike the isolated ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the Ice Age, there are whole cemeteries full of such burials.

We see exactly the kind of physical infrastructure (forts, storehouses) we might expect from a society dominated by some sort of warrior aristocracy.  Here we have the very beginnings of an aristocratic ethos with a long afterlife and some wide ramifications in the history of Eurasia. These societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.

As archaeologists have more recently discovered, there is a very real pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior.  And it appears time and again around the fringes of urban life

Instead of a single center, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. ‘Politics’, in such societies, was composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life.

Often, massive amounts of loot or wealth were squandered, sacrificed or given away in such theatrical performances. Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures.

Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but ultimately hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Genghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi. At Mohenjo-daro, it seems, the focus of civic life was not a palace or cenotaph, but a public facility for purifying the body.

So long as the Great Bath was in use – and it was for some centuries – we find no evidence of industrial activities nearby. The narrowing lanes on the acropolis effectively prevented the use of ox-drawn carts and similar commercial traffic.

CHAPTER 9 HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

We know now that the city of Teotihuacan had its heyday eight centuries before the coming of the Mexica, and more than 1,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish. Its foundation dates to around 100 BC, and its decline to around AD 600. We also know that, in the course of those centuries, Teotihuacan became a city of such grandeur and sophistication that it could easily be put on a par with Rome at the height of its imperial power.

Even conservative estimates place its population at around 100,000 (perhaps as much as five times the likely population of Mohenjo-daro, Uruk or any of the other early Eurasian cities we discussed in the last chapter). At its zenith, there were probably at least a million people distributed across the Valley of Mexico and surrounding lands, many of whom had only visited the great city once, or perhaps only knew someone who had, but nonetheless considered Teotihuacan the most important place in the entire world.

All the evidence suggests that Teotihuacan had, at its height of its power, found a way to govern itself without overlords – as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan. Yet it did so with a very different technological foundation, and on an even larger scale.

As we’ve seen, when kings appear in the historical record, they tend to leave unmistakeable traces. We can expect to find palaces, rich burials and monuments celebrating their conquests. All this is true in Mesoamerica as well. In the wider region, the paradigm is set by a series of dynastic polities, located far from the Valley of Mexico in the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands. Today’s historians know these polities as the Classic Maya (c.AD 150–900 – the term ‘classic’ is also applied to their ancient written language and to the chronological period in question). Cities like Tikal, Calakmul or Palenque were dominated by royal temples, ball-courts (settings for competitive, sometimes lethal games), images of war and humiliated captives (often publicly killed after ball games), complex calendrical rituals celebrating royal ancestors, and records of the deeds and biographies of living kings. In the modern imagination this has become the ‘standard package’ of Mesoamerican kingship, associated with ancient cities throughout the region from Monte Alban (in Oaxaca, c.AD 500–800) to Tula (in central Mexico, c.AD 850–1150), and arguably reaching as far north as Cahokia (near what’s now East St Louis, c.AD 800–1200).

In Teotihuacan, all this seems to have been strikingly absent. Unlike in the Mayan cities, there are few written inscriptions in general but plenty of pictorial art. Teotihuacan’s citizens were prolific craft specialists and makers of images, leaving behind everything from monumental stone sculptures to diminutive terracotta figures that could be held in the palm, as well as vivid wall paintings bustling with human activity (picture something like the carnivalesque feel of a Bruegel street scene and you are not too far off). Still, nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate – unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec, where this is a constant theme. The ceremonial ball-court is also conspicuous by its absence at Teotihuacan.

Nor are there any equivalents to the great tombs of Sihyaj Chan K’awiil at Tikal or K’inich Janaab Pakal in Palenque. And not for lack of trying.

The city’s artists appear to have been aware of formal and compositional principles found among their Mesoamerican neighbors, and to have set about deliberately inverting them. Where Maya and Zapotec art draws on a tradition of relief carving derived from the earlier Olmec kings of Veracruz, favoring curves and flowing forms, the sculpture of Teotihuacan shows humans and humanoid figures as flat composites, tightly fitted to angular blocks.

So yet another case of conscious cultural inversion – or what we’ve been calling schismogenesis – but this time on the scale of urban civilizations. If the visual arts of Teotihuacan celebrated anything, Pasztory insisted, then it was the community as a whole and its collective values, which – over a period of some centuries – successfully prevented the emergence of ‘dynastic personality cults’.

The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines.

The tropical forest kingdoms of the Classic Maya ruins lie to the east: in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and within the modern countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. In the fifth century AD, something remarkable happens in the art and writing of some of these Maya city-states, including the largest and most prominent among them, Tikal. Finely carved scenes on Mayan monuments of this period show figures seated on thrones, and wearing what can be instantly recognized as foreign, Teotihuacan-style dress and weaponry (the spear-throwers called atlatls, feathered shields, and so on), clearly distinct from the garb and finery of local rulers.

So why are there images of what appear to be Teotihuacano lords on thrones in Tikal, when there are no similar images of lords sitting on thrones at Teotihuacan itself? Second, how could Teotihuacan ever have mounted a successful military expedition against a kingdom over 600 miles away? It’s possible we are just dealing here with local lords who had a taste for exotica. We know from art and inscriptions that Maya grandees sometimes enjoyed dressing up in Teotihuacan warrior gear, sometimes beheld visions of Teotihuacan spirits after ritual bloodletting, and generally liked to style themselves ‘Lords and Ladies of the West’. The city was certainly far enough away for the Maya to see it as a place of exotic fantasies, some kind of distant Shangri-La. But there are reasons to suspect it was more than just that. For one thing, people did regularly move back and forth. Obsidian from Teotihuacan adorned the Maya gods, and Teotihuacan’s deities wore green quetzal feathers from the Maya lowlands. Mercenaries and traders went both ways, pilgrimages and diplomatic visits followed; immigrants from Teotihuacan built temples in Maya cities.

SOUTH ASIA

The earliest recorded reference to caste in South Asia comes only 1,000 years later, in the Rig Veda – an anthology of sacrificial hymns, probably composed around 1200 BC. The system, as described in later Sanskrit epics, consisted of four hereditary ranks or varnas: priests (brahmins), warriors or nobles (kshatriyas), farmers and traders (vaishyas) and laborers (shudras); and also those so lowly as to be excluded from the varnas entirely. The very top ranks belong to world-renouncers, whose abstention from trappings of personal status raises them to a higher spiritual plane. Commerce, industry and status rivalries may all thrive, but the wealth, power or prosperity being fought over is always seen as of lesser value – in the great scheme of things – than the purity of priestly caste.

Despite the great gaps in time between our sources, it might allow us to make sense of some of Mohenjo-daro’s otherwise puzzling features, such as the fact that those residential buildings most closely resembling palaces are not located on the Upper Citadel but crammed into the streets of the Lower Town – that bit closer to the mud, sewage pipes and paddy fields, where such jostling for worldly status seems to have properly belonged. Clearly, we can’t just project the social world evoked in Sanskrit literature indiscriminately on to the much earlier Indus civilization. In the Bronze Age Indus valley there is no evidence of anything like a kshatriya class of warrior-nobles. Even the largest cities, like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, yield no evidence of spectacular sacrifices or feasts, no pictorial narratives of military prowess or celebrations of famous deeds, no sign of tournaments in which anyone vied over titles and treasures, no aristocratic burials. And if such things were going on in the Indus cities at the time, there would be ways to know.

Indus civilization wasn’t some kind of commercial or spiritual arcadia; nor was it an entirely peaceful society.  But neither does it contain any evidence for charismatic authority figures: war leaders, lawgivers and the like.

Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense? If the Upper Citadel at Mohenjo-daro really was dominated by some sort of ascetic order, literally ‘higher’ than everyone else, and the area around the citadel by wealthy merchants, then there was a clear hierarchy between groups. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization. Now, you might at this point be objecting: ‘well, yes, technically that may be true, but honestly, what’s the chance that they weren’t hierarchical, or that the pure or the wealthy did not have greater say in running the city’s affairs?’ In fact, it seems very difficult for most of us even to imagine how self-conscious egalitarianism on a large scale would work. But this again simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together.

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history.

It is more useful, we suggest, to level the interpretive playing field by asking if there are cases of such things happening in later, better-documented periods of South Asian history. In fact, such cases are not difficult to find. Consider the social milieu from which Buddhist monasteries, or sangha, arose. The word sangha was actually first used for the popular assemblies that governed many South Asian cities in the Buddha’s lifetime – roughly the fifth century BC – and early Buddhist texts insist that the Buddha was himself inspired by the example of these republics, and in particular the importance they accorded to convening full and frequent public assemblies.

We might go further still and ask: are there any known examples of societies with formal caste hierarchies, in which practical governance nonetheless takes place on egalitarian lines? It may seem paradoxical but the answer, again, is yes: there is plenty of evidence for such arrangements, some of which continue to this day. Perhaps best documented is the seka system on the island of Bali, whose population adopted Hinduism in the Middle Ages. Balinese are not only divided by caste: their society is conceived as a total hierarchy in which not just every group but every individual knows (or at least, should know) their exact position in relation to everyone else. In principle, then, there are no equals, and most Balinese would argue that in the greater cosmic scheme of things, this must always be so.

At the same time, however, practical affairs such as the management of communities, temples and agricultural life are organized according to the seka system, in which everyone is expected to participate on equal terms and come to decisions by consensus. For instance, if a neighborhood association meets to discuss repairing the roofs of public buildings, or what to serve for food during an upcoming dance contest, those who consider themselves particularly high and mighty, offended by the prospect of having to sit in a circle on the ground with lowly neighbors, may choose not to attend; but in that case they are obliged to pay fines for non-attendance – fines which are then used to pay for the feast or the repairs.

We currently have no way of knowing if such a system prevailed in the Indus valley over 4,000 years ago. The example merely serves to underscore that there is no necessary correspondence between overarching concepts of social hierarchy and the practical mechanics of local governance.

The same is, incidentally, true of kingdoms and empires. One very common theory held that these tended to first appear in river valleys, because agriculture there involved the maintenance of complex irrigation systems, which in turn required some form of administrative co-ordination and control. Bali again provides the perfect counter-example. For most of its history Bali was divided into a series of kingdoms, endlessly squabbling over this or that. It is also famous as a rather small volcanic island which manages to support one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture. Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of ‘water-temples’, through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.

It is possible to express these differences at a purely formal level. A self-conscious ethos of egalitarianism, at any point in history, might take either of two diametrically opposing forms. We can insist that everyone is, or should be, precisely the same (at least in the ways that we consider important); or alternatively, we can insist that everyone is so utterly different from each other that there are simply no criteria for comparison (for example, we are all unique individuals, and so there is no basis upon which any one of us can be considered better than another). Real-life egalitarianism will normally tend to involve a bit of both.

Yet it could be argued that Mesopotamia – with its standardized household products, allocation of uniform payments to temple employees, and public assemblies – seems to have largely embraced the first version. Ukrainian mega-sites, in which each household seems to have developed its own unique artistic style and, presumably, idiosyncratic domestic rituals, embraced the second.

The Indus valley appears – if our interpretation is broadly correct – to represent yet a third possibility, where rigorous equality in certain areas (even the bricks were all precisely the same size) was complemented by explicit hierarchy in others.  We are not arguing that the very first cities to appear in any region of the world were invariably founded on egalitarian principles What we are saying is that archaeological evidence shows this to have been a surprisingly common pattern, which goes against conventional evolutionary assumptions about the effects of scale on human society. In each of the cases we’ve considered so far – Ukrainian mega-sites, Uruk Mesopotamia, the Indus valley – a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites.

Like the Ukrainian cities, those of the Indus were eventually abandoned entirely, to be replaced by societies of much smaller scale where heroic aristocrats held sway. In Mesopotamian cities palaces eventually appear. Overall, one might be forgiven for thinking that history was progressing uniformly in an authoritarian direction. And in the very long run it was; at least, by the time we have written histories, lords and kings and would-be world emperors have popped up almost everywhere

Still, rushing to this conclusion would be unwise. Dramatic reversals have sometimes taken place in the other direction – for instance in China. Before the Shang, nothing particularly interesting was supposed to have happened. Astonishingly, some of the most striking ‘Neolithic’ leaps towards urban life are now known to have taken place in the far north, on the frontier with Mongolia. Nobody expected archaeologists to find there, of all places, a 4,000-year-old city, extending over 400 hectares, with a great stone wall enclosing palaces and a step-pyramid, lording it over a subservient rural hinterland nearly 1,000 years pre-Shang.

The excavations at Shimao, on the Tuwei River, have revealed all this, along with abundant evidence for sophisticated crafts – including bone-working and bronze-casting – and warfare, including the mass killing and burial of captives, in around 2000 BC. Here we sense a much livelier political scene than was ever imagined in the annals of later courtly tradition. Some of it had a grisly aspect, including the decapitation of captured foes, and the burial of some thousands of ancestral jade axes and scepters in cracks between great stone blocks of the city wall, not to be found or seen again until the prying eyes of archaeologists uncovered them over four millennia later. The likely intention of all this was to disrupt, demoralize and delegitimize rival lineages (‘all in all, you’re just another jade in the wall’).

Between 2300 and 1800 BC, Taosi went through three phases of expansion. First, a fortified town of 60 hectares arose on the ruins of a village, expanding subsequently to a city of 300 hectares. In these early and middle periods, Taosi presents evidence for social stratification almost as dramatic as what we see at Shimao, or indeed what we might expect of a later imperial Chinese capital. There were massive enclosure walls, road systems and large, protected storage areas; also rigid segregation between commoner and elite quarters, with craft workshops and a calendrical monument clustered around what was most likely some sort of palace. Burials in the early town cemetery of Taosi fell into clearly distinct social classes. Commoner tombs were modest; elite tombs were full of hundreds of lacquered vessels, ceremonial jade axes and remains of extravagant pork feasts.

Then suddenly, around 2000 BC, everything seems to change. The city wall was razed flat, and clearly had lost its status as a capital, and was in a state of anarchy. What’s more, there are clues that this was a conscious process of transformation, most likely involving a significant degree of violence. Commoner graves burst in on the elite cemetery, and in the palace district a mass burial, with signs of torture and grotesque violations of the corpses, appears to be evidence for what the excavator describes as an ‘act of political retribution’.

The ostensible ‘state of anarchy’ (elsewhere described as ‘collapse and chaos’) lasted for a considerable period of time, between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi during the latter period actually grew from 280 to 300 hectares. This sounds a lot less like collapse than an age of widespread prosperity, following the abolition of a rigid class system. It suggests that after the destruction of the palace, people did not fall into a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ but simply got on with their lives – presumably under what they considered a more equitable system of local self-governance.

Here, on the banks of the Fen River, we might conceivably be in the presence of evidence for the world’s first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting. Other interpretations are no doubt possible. But at the very least, the case of Taosi invites us to consider the world’s earliest cities as places of self-conscious social experimentation, where very different visions of what a city could be like might clash – sometimes peacefully, sometimes erupting in bursts of extraordinary violence. Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized.