Power in Hand: How Trade, the Temple, and War Gave the First States Control

Photo by Pavel Nekoranec on Unsplash

Last time, we imagined what life was like for humans before the invention of the state. Using historical-archaeological evidence, combined with observations of modern hunter-gatherers from around the world, we showed that the state was perhaps not the inevitable remedy to a meager and fear-filled prehistoric life. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that hunter-gatherers and nomads actively avoided integration into the urban, civilized polity.

But if ancient humans had so many reasons to avoid incorporation into the state, how did it consolidate its power? How did the first governments build a permanent, coercive authority over their citizenry, eventually becoming kingdoms and empires?

First Things First: Defining the State

Before we go any further, I’d like to briefly examine what we mean when we talk about “the state”.

For the purposes of this article, I provide Michael Mann’s definition (in turn based on the writings of sociologist Max Weber) — since his work will be our primary source here (1):

“The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality, in the sense that political relations radiate outward to cover a territorially demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making, backed up by physical violence. In prehistory, the introduction of the state converts temporary political authority and a permanent ceremonial center into permanent political power, institutionalized and routinized in its ability to use coercion over recalcitrant social members as necessary.”

In Volume 1 of his four-volume work The Sources of Social Power, Mann makes a solid case against the traditional, evolutionary view of the origins of the state. Contrary to popular narrative, he argues that civilization was not simply the “next step” of human evolution’s inevitable progression. Instead, it was an abnormal phenomenon that emerged on its own in only a few, specific cases — where the ecology encouraged it by “caging” people into fixed relationships.¹ While authority structures were common in prehistoric cities, they were typically based on kinship and did not embody permanent, coercive authority. The reason for this is that the people could always leave or depose them. They were not “caged” into fixed, interdependent relationships.

As Mann explains:

“The nub of these issues is the distinction between authority and power. The evolutionary theories offer plausible theories of the growth of authority. But they cannot explain satisfactorily how authority was converted into power that could be used either coercively against the people who granted authority in the first place or to deprive people of the rights of material subsistence. Indeed, we shall see that these conversions did not happen in prehistory. There were no general origins of the state and stratification. It is a false issue.”

Mann examines four different types of evolutionary theory that, in his view, all fall short. They are: liberal theories, functionalist theories, Marxist theories, and militarist theories. Here’s a quick summary of each.

Liberalism: Liberal theory explains the state’s origins from the perspective of individuals with interest in their own, personal private property; to protect that property, they form a rational “social contract”, agreeing to forfeit some rights in order to preserve others. This argument falls apart because private property likely did not exist before the state to the extent and significance that would inspire protective institutions; actually, you probably need the state in order to institutionalize private property to the extent liberal theorists imagine.

Functionalism: Mann describes functionalist theories as “varied”, but concentrates on the “redistributive chiefdom” theories of economic anthropologists. While the early state resembled a redistributive chiefdom in some ways, Mann emphasizes that redistributive chiefdoms actually represent collective power.² This power is typically egalitarian, based on kinship, and recoverable: the question then becomes, what led to the permanent forfeiture of authority that created the first states? This theory can explain some aspects of the state once formed, but it cannot explain origins, because redistributive chiefdoms did not naturally “evolve” to become the state.

Marxism: Like liberalism, Marxist theories of state origins rely on a concept of “private property” that probably didn’t exist before the state. Contrary to liberalism, Marxism sees the state as a way for the first “propertied classes” to cement exploitation of the lower classes. In reality, these classes were probably created within the context of the state, and not the other way around.

Militarism: Militarist theory argues that the earliest states emerged as a byproduct of warfare, when mobilized armies refused to step down from power — taking control of the city by force. The problem with this theory is that, before the state’s existence, mobilization of armies on a significant scale was not possible. The state was required to organize and coordinate armed forces in a structured and permanent way.

Mann gives a thorough and convincing account as to why these theories are inadequate to explain the initial rise of the state. As lacking as they are to explain its origins, however, he believes they can shed light on the later processes that helped the state to consolidate its coercive power.

“All the theories are wrong,” he writes, “because they presuppose a general social evolution that had, in fact, stopped. Local history now took over. We will see, however, that, after a pause that moves us into the realm of history, all those theories began to have local and specific applicability.”

“What we have puzzled over is how the people were constrained to submit to coercive state power. They would freely give collective, representative authority, to chiefs, elders, and bigmen for purposes ranging from judicial regulation to warfare to feast organization. Chiefs could thence derive considerable rank prestige. But they could not convert that into permanent, coercive power. Archaeology enables us to see that this was, indeed, the case. There was no swift or steady evolution from rank authority to state power. Such a transition was rare, confined to a very few, unusual cases. The crucial archaeological evidence is time.”

So how did it happen? Below I’ll discuss Mann’s theory, which can be divided into three chronological “stages”. In each stage, a different type of power rises up to take the spotlight. It turns out they map well onto David Priestland’s theory of caste power (which we discussed in this article) — so I’m going to discuss them using his caste theory as a lens.

Merchant, Soldier, Sage: How Trade, the Temple, and the Military Solidified State Power

In his book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, David Priestland lays out a history of world power from the perspective of these three social “castes” — who have struggled for dominance pretty much since history began. Roughly speaking, the merchant represents economic power, the sage ideological power, and the soldier military power. (2) In essence, Mann describes these exact same power types, emerging one by one to give impetus to the state’s institutional control.

Priestland’s “merchant” category was ultimately based, in part, on the “economic” power that both Mann and Weber view as a fundamental power source. As the first social caging processes took hold amidst the alluvial social space, it was this economic power that Mann argues took center stage.

Recall that the initial social caging process, in Mann’s view, resulted from the gradual development of fixed social relationships radiating from an alluvial core. People closest to the floodplains, or located in strategic positions along a river, had the most desirable land — either in terms of production yields, or in terms of access to and control over terrain.

This is where Mann brings in liberal and Marxist theories as relevant again.

He writes:

“Liberalism located the original stimulus [for the state] in interpersonal differences of ability, hard work, and luck. As a general theory, it is absurd. But it has great relevance where adjacent occupied plots of land vary considerably in their productivity. In ancient irrigation accidental proximity to fertilized soil produced large differences in productivity (emphasized by Flannery 1974 as the heart of subsequent stratification). But we must also abandon the individual, so beloved of liberalism. This was family, village, and small-clan property. From revisionist Marxian theory we draw the notion of effective possession of such property by village and lineage elites. For irrigation also reinforces the cooperation of units larger than individual households.”

Land productivity was not the only driver of inequality. Land varied not just in fertility but in the usefulness of its location, in terms of the ability it granted to control trade, communication or resources:

“One further basis for permanent inequalities, arising out of lucky or schemed possession of land, was possession of a strategic position at the point of contact with more diffuse networks. River junctions, water-channel fords, plus crossroads and wells, offered the chance of controls exercised through marketplace and storage organization, as well as ‘protection rent,’ to adjacent settlers. Some scholars attribute much Sumerian social organization to strategic factors (e.g., Gibson 1976). As the rivers were so important to communications, most strategic positions were located on the core irrigated land.”

In other words, fixed private property in the alluvial river valley gave some people significant advantages over others — advantages that would not have been so marked in other locations. These factors did not create the state. But they did encourage a gradual increase in inequality, with most of the desirable land owned by local elites and worked by a peasantry. Elites within the core of the emerging city-state therefore had an economic advantage, with increased access to land, stockpiles of grain and animals, control over communication routes, and the ability to trade with outsiders for foreign goods.

But economic relationships also became fixed between the core and the periphery — not just in the center. Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists on the outside of the city-state complex, eyeing an increasingly-centralized store of food and goods near the core, found ways to raid and trade with the civilized people within. Thus, fixed relationships began to develop between the people at the core and the people on the outside. The line between “barbarian” and “civilized” began to blur as the gravity of civilization started to pull in people from the edges. People within the irrigated center became dependent on each other, and nomads and pastoralists on the outside became interdependent with the city-dwellers — who led more routine and scheduled lives.

As wealth inequality increased, leaving more and more of the city’s arable land in the hands of a growing elite, the propertied class began to withdraw from production. It was this class that became merchants, craftsmen, and the state’s first officials and priests.

This brings us to the second phase of power consolidation — what Mann believes to be the most pivotal. In the second phase, the power of the temples — Mann’s “ideological” power, or Priestland’s “sages” — began to take the wheel. The “sage” performed two key roles where the consolidation of state power was concerned. The first was clerical: the invention of writing, and with it, accounting — the ability to manage and keep track of stores, and thus also to tax citizens. The second was to provide social cohesion, through the management of social norms, and narrative. Both of these abilities together allowed central bureaucrats to organize people on a scale previously unheard of.

“The importance of the temple was fairly general among the earliest civilizations […] Steward (1963: 201–2) notes that extensive social cooperation in irrigation agriculture was virtually everywhere associated with a strong priesthood in the New World cases as well as the Old World ones. He argues that a relatively egalitarian group engaged in cooperation had unusually strong needs for normative solidarity. Modern scholars resist the religious connotations of the word ‘priesthood’ in Mesopotamia. They regard priests as more secular, more administrative and political, as a diplomatic corps, irrigation managers, and redistributors. Through a process whose details are not known to us, the temple emerges as the first state of history. As irrigation proceeded, more extensive labor cooperation was required.”

In other words, the early priesthood performed the administrative functions of coordinating labor and managing the irrigation process. They were also accountants. Their job was to keep track of supplies, organize agricultural endeavors, and dole out centrally-stored resources in times of famine. This is where redistributive functional theories become applicable; the temples did perform something of a redistributive function in the early state, taxing people, feeding the priesthood, and providing for families in need.

“The temples budgeted and organized production and redistribution in a detailed, sophisticated way — so much for the costs of production, so much in temple consumption, so much in tax, so much as reinvestment in seed, and so forth,” Mann tells us.

But the priesthood was more than simply a redistributive chiefdom. Particularly remarkable is the claim quoted above: that the temple emerges as the first state in history. Though their first job was accounting, storage and redistribution, those elements alone existed before the state. Before writing, people used sticks and clay tokens to keep count of their livestock and grain. (3) Writing allowed them to be organized on a much more massive and precise scale; and this was crucial. But writing was also crucial to the state’s power for another reason: it allowed for the codification of social norms.

“Writing is technically useful,” says Mann. “ It can further the goals and stabilize the meaning system of any dominant group — priests, warriors, merchants, rulers.”

Even though most people in early Mesopotamia were not literate, priest-scribes at centralized ceremonial centers could still use their archives to disseminate ideas to a wider group, affecting religion, morality, and social perspectives, and harmonizing people to the same yearly rituals of cooperative agriculture. As discussed earlier, greater social cooperation in early states was tied to a strong priesthood — a centralized ceremonial center that could build a narrative around a common undertaking. And while the first literary archives overwhelmingly represent lists, mythology and religion were not far behind.³

“Artistic forms and ideologies diffused quickly among [Sumerians] because, broadly, they sought solutions to the same problems. The cycle of the seasons; the importance of silt; the unpredictable beneficence of the river; relations with herders, gatherer-hunters, and foreign merchants; emerging social and territorial fixity — all led to broad similarity of culture, science, morality, and metaphysics.”

The other set of social norms that writing helped to codify was that of property relations. This was another huge driver of state power, and probably more important than myth and religion — at least in the beginning.

Mann speaks of the importance of central stores and accounting for cementing private property norms:

“The stores appear to have been at the center of Sumerian power organization. Perhaps the gods were fundamentally guardians of the stores. In the stores private-property rights and central political authority merged into one, expressed as a set of seals and eventually as writing and civilization itself. Writing was later turned to the telling of myth and religion. But its first and always its major purpose was to stabilize and institutionalize the two emerging, merging sets of authority relations, private property and the state.”

The temple-state, however, probably remained largely democratic at this stage. Writing and the ritual center made it possible to institutionalize government; however, a third phase was necessary in order for coercive power to become real.

Priestland’s “soldier” — what Mann calls “military” power ⁴— lent the final hand to the state’s emergent arm of control. As the priesthood emerged to keep track of resources and administer mass organization, storehouses became more centralized — as we discussed above. But centralized stores, convenient for local organization, are also convenient targets for barbarians or nearby cities to raid. It became necessary to defend these stores. During this period, fortified walls began to emerge, and with them, the military and its kings gathered strength.

“ Personages appear who are named lugal and reside in large building complexes called é-gal — translated as ‘king’ and ‘palace.’ They appear in texts alongside new terms for military activities. If we engage in the risky business of giving dates to the first rulers mentioned in the king list (written down in about 1800 B.C.), we get to about the twenty-seventh century for the first great kings, Enmerkar of Uruk and Gilgamesh, his famous successor.”

Mann argues that the innovations of the temple-state were necessary in order for the military to gain access to organized power. Writing and social management techniques could easily translate from the priesthood to war, but the coordinated army was an invention of the state (rather than its creator).

“ We can reintroduce militarist theories of the origins of the state […] not to explain origins but to assist in the explanation of further state development,” Mann writes.

“Managerial techniques that had been applied already to irrigation, to redistribution and exchange, and to patron-client relations between core and periphery could develop military offshoots. High-investment defense at first predominated, both in fortifications and in the dense, slow-moving phalanxes of infantry and animal carts that constituted the early armies. Such formations boost centralized command, coordination, and supply.”

At some point the democratic, sagely state assembly was replaced by the despotic warrior-king. We can speculate about precisely how; but the evidence is ambiguous. Some scholars believe the state’s internal military took over, gaining power in an arms race to protect their storehouses from foreign raiders. Others believe military forces came from outside the city-state, as contracted barbarian mercenaries and nomadic marcher lords turned to conquest. It’s likely that it was a two-part process, beginning with the former and ending with the latter:

“The irrigation successes of the city-states made them more attractive as prey to poorer upland neighbors. The records also document many boundary disputes between the city-states themselves. The two types of conflict made defense more critical and led to the construction of massive city walls in the mid-third millennium. Simultaneously, we deduce that war leaders consolidated their rule into kingship.”

As Sumer became more militarized, they partnered with barbarian mercenaries in their hinterlands to protect trade routes and defend their core. Mann believes that, perhaps, evolving barbarian military technology contributed to the city-state’s eventual conquest. In any case, it was Sargon of Akkad — a marcher lord — who ultimately took control of Sumer, establishing what scholars believe to be history’s first true “empire of domination”.

We see painted here a gradual progression towards coercive authority, in phases that lend the spotlight to each of Priestland’s power types in succession. In the first place, alluvial ecology created a social caging process that fixed people and territory into certain relationships. This allowed for economic power relations to ossify. Writing and the priesthood further cemented these economic relationships. Above all, this development was an innovation in management and mass social organization. As accounting became institutionalized, labor coordinated on a mass scale, and a “priestly” caste liberated from agricultural labor to preside over it all, resources grew in number and centralization. Thus, they had to be defended from raiding barbarians and other city-states. The social management techniques developed by the priesthood could also be used to manage a cohesive military force, which ultimately took over —at first, likely, from within, before it was seized by outsiders.

Some Caveats and Limitations

It’s important to note that, even under an empire of domination, early states still did not exercise cohesive control over their citizens. This picture paints the rise of the coercive state, but it does not describe the same “coercive state” we’re familiar with today. Beyond the city-state’s core, even a militant king had little control over his subjects. There were many networks of intersecting power throughout the early state system.

Also important to note is that, in this analysis, Mann concentrates specifically on the case of Sumer. He generalizes this theory to his overall model of civilization, going over each unique case in detail, and discussing deviations;⁵ but in the end, we have to keep in mind that “Sumer” and “all pristine developing civilizations” are not the same thing. This is a general model that is based on the rise of the first pristine civilization, which is the most well-documented example. It applies to other examples with more or less variation.

Conclusion: Why it Matters for Us

A key takeaway is that no one power source led, by itself, to the consolidation of social control in the hands of the state. Rather, several distinct types of power actors each took the limelight at different points, contributing to the rising mechanics of a caged system. But it’s noteworthy that Mann considers the role of the priesthood — or, as I would say, the ideological phase — to be the most pivotal in building those mechanics.

This is a publication about narrative, where it intersects with power, now and throughout history. We are not isolating narrative from other power sources as the sole cause of world events; that’s why I think it is important to discuss Priestland’s “merchant, soldier, sage” alongside Mann’s work on the four sources of social power. But narrative is of particular interest to us here. The idea that ideology — through writing, accounting, and the unity of social norms — gave the state the tools it needed to exist is enormous. Without these things, according to Mann, the state simply could not organize itself on a large enough scale to become institutionalized.

As we move forward, we’re going to remain a while longer in the realm of ancient history. But our focus is going to gradually shift towards the role of narrative in creating society, in mobilizing production and resources, and in creating relationships between those at the center…and those who chose to remain outside.

Notes

1. According to Mann, alluvial river valleys provided the perfect ecology for what he calls the “social cage”. Ultra-fertilized soil on the alluvial floodplain lured people to settle permanently, giving up their nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles. Meanwhile, mountains, swamps, and arid deserts on the outskirts made it difficult to leave the fertile urban core, once established. Within these permanent floodplain settlements, relationships became fixed, people became increasingly interdependent, and differences in land arability led to institutionalized socioeconomic inequality. This is discussed here.
2. A redistributive chiefdom is a social group in which members owe tribute or labor to a “bigman” or “chief”. This chief hoards the wealth of the community, with the expectation that he will redistibute it as needed. In reality, most chiefs and bigmen are expected to throw lavish feasts for their tribes, give generously to those who need it, and rarely assume the wealth of the tribe for themselves. It is a huge responsibility. If such leaders abuse their power they are quickly deposed, or deserted by their followers. This is why Mann talks about the “collective” nature of their power, and delineates it from the coercive power of the state.
3. The period Mann examines when he talks about early Mesopotamian writing is between 3500 BC to about 2000 BC.
4. As discussed before, Weber and others tend to combine “military” power and “political” power under the single banner of “political” power. Mann differs from this view, asserting that guerillas, rebels and others can exert military power without having official political power. Therefore, he divides his power sources into four, including “economic”, “ideological”, “military” and “political”. Priestland ultimately uses three categories (“economic”, “ideological”, and Mann’s “military”), acknowledging that political power can be wielded at different times by different castes of people. My view is based on theirs, though closer to Priestland’s, and ultimately slightly different. I would assert that “political” power, rather than being wholesale “wielded at different times [by different people]” (as Priestland suggests), is actually always a combination of the other three types of power. I believe political power is made up of these other power types, by its very nature, and is not a separate “power source” on its own. I can discuss this later in detail if my readers wish.
5. And there are deviations.

Sources

1. Mann, Michael (2005). The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge University Press: New York. (Original publication 1986).
2. Priestland, David (2012). Merchant, Soldier, Sage. The Penguin Press: New York.
3. Nemet-Nejat, Karen Rhea (1998). Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Greenwood Press: Connecticut.