A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (5 page)

In much of Eurasia and Africa private property was to develop among both the ruling class and the peasantry, but only over many centuries, with deep splits within ruling classes, bloody wars and sharp conflicts between exploited and exploiting classes.

Women everywhere lost out with the polarisation of society into classes and the rise of the state. There was a shift in their status, described by Frederick Engels more than a century ago as ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’. From being co-decision-makers with men, they were thrust into a position of dependence and subordination. The exact nature of the subordination varied enormously from one class society to another, and from class to class in each society. But it existed everywhere that class existed. So universal did it become that even today it is usually treated as an invariant product of human nature.

The change was rooted in the new relations that grew up between people with the production of a surplus. The new intensive production techniques tended to prioritise men’s labour over women’s for the first time. Gathering, the main source of nutrition for hunter-gatherer societies, had been fully compatible with childbearing and breastfeeding. So had early forms of agriculture based on the hoe. But heavy ploughing and herding of cattle and horses were not. Societies in which women did these things would have low birthrates and stagnating populations, and lose out to societies which excluded most women from these roles. Gordon Childe pointed out long ago that among ‘barbarians’, purely agricultural peoples, ‘whereas women normally hoe plots it is men who plough. And even in the oldest Sumerian and Egyptian documents the ploughmen really are males’.
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He suggested, ‘The plough…relieved women of the most exacting drudgery, but deprived them of the monopoly over the cereal crops and the social status which it conferred’.
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Key decisions about the future of the household or lineage became male decisions, since it was males who would implement them. Other changes which accompanied the growth of the surplus had a similar impact. Women could engage in local trade, and there were cases of women playing a part in warfare. But long distance trade and serious soldiering became male monopolies. Warriors and merchants were overwhelmingly male—and, as they increasingly exercised control over the surplus, ownership and power tended to become male prerogatives. The break up of the old clan lineages accentuated the trend. The individual adult woman was no longer part of a wider network of relationships which gave her some say over the use of productive means and some protection against arbitrary treatment. Instead, she became simply a ‘wife’, a subordinate in a strange household.
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Ruling class women were increasingly treated as one more possession of a male controller of the surplus, valued as an ornament, a source of sexual pleasure or as a breeder of heirs. They would be protected from hardship and external dangers, but also cocooned from any interaction with the wider social world. Life was very different for women in agricultural or artisan households. They still had a productive role and were engaged in endless toil. Nevertheless, it was their husbands who controlled relations between the household and the rest of society, imposing on the women and children the measures needed to ensure the household’s survival (including successive pregnancies for the wife).
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Among the exploiting and the exploited classes alike there was literally ‘patriarchy’—rule of the father over the other members of the household. Its imprint was soon to be found in all ideologies and all religions. Female gods and priestesses increasingly played a secondary role, surviving as mother figures or symbols of beauty rather than as active participants in the creation and organisation of the world.

Women’s roles were not changeless or uniform across all classes and societies. Women’s oppression among the peasantry took a very different form to that among the aristocracies—and a different form again among slaves who, whether male or female, were not allowed to live in households of their own. Widows were common everywhere, because of relatively high death rates among young adults, and often ended up running a peasant or artisan household, or even a kingdom, very much as a man would. In some societies women were denied all rights—in others they were allowed to own and inherit property, and to initiate divorce proceedings. The fact that women were everywhere oppressed did not mean that their oppression was everywhere the same, as the ‘patriarchy’ theories so common among feminist academics in the 1980s implied. It did, however, mean that their position was inferior to what it had been under primitive communism.

The growth of the first exploiting classes further influenced the whole development of society. The methods used by the exploiters to buttress their rule began to eat up a major portion of society’s resources. Expenditures on servants, on professional police or military forces, on building huge temples, palaces or tombs to celebrate their powers, necessitated further exploitation and oppression of the masses—and further justified exploitation and oppression as the only way to keep society going. There was also an added incentive for external warfare as a means of grabbing the resources of other societies. Yet endemic war caused further suffering for the mass of people. It also encouraged the emergence of ruling classes and states among neighboring peoples, as they came to accept that only the centralisation of the surplus into a few hands could provide them with the means of defence.
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Overall, however ‘functional’ for society as a whole the rise of a ruling group may once have been, beyond a certain point it became a drag on society. This was shown dramatically by events in the Middle East, the Indus Valley and the eastern Mediterranean between 1,000 and 1,500 years after the rise of the first civilisations.

No one who has seen the pyramids, temples, palaces or enormous statues of the first civilisations can fail to be impressed. Not only were there these monumental buildings. Just as impressive were stone houses that kept out the wind and rain—even, in some cases, with water supplies and sewerage systems. What is more, the people who built these did so without the knowledge of hardened metals, using tools elaborated out of stone or wood and sometimes copper or bronze.

The impact on the people who lived in and around these cities must have been even greater. The pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the ziggurats of Ur or Uruk, dominating the skyline even more than the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, would have been ever-present symbols of the power, the permanence and the stability of the state. They allowed the ruling class to believe its power was as eternal and unquestionable as the movement of the sun and the stars, while reinforcing feelings of powerlessness and insignificance among the mass of people.

Yet if the pyramids, the statues and sometimes the buildings endured, the societies which produced them sooner or later entered deep crisis. The city states of Mesopotamia were involved in incessant warfare with each other before succumbing in around 2300 BC to a conqueror from the north, Sargon, who welded the whole Fertile Crescent into a great empire which fell prey to other conquerors after his death. The ‘Old Kingdom’ Egypt of the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara
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fell apart in a century and a half of civil war and massive social disruption (the so called ‘first intermediate period’ of 2181 to 2040 BC). The Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-dero were abandoned after more than a millennium in around 1500 BC. About 100 years later it was the turn of the civilisation of Crete, exemplified by the magnificent palace at Knossos, to fall apart—to be followed soon after by the Myceneaen civilisation which dominated mainland Greece. And just as the rise of civilisation was replicated in Meso-America, so was the record of sudden collapse. People abandoned, in turn, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the southern Maya centres, leaving whole cities as empty monuments to bewilder, in turn, the Aztecs, the Spanish Conquistadores and ourselves.

There has been much historical speculation as to what caused each of these crises of early civilisation. But underlying the different attempts at explanation, certain factors stand out.

First, there is the record of ever-greater expenditure of resources by the ruling class on itself and its monuments. The temples, the palaces and the tombs grew ever more extensive over the centuries, the opulence of upper class lifestyles ever greater, the effort that went into extracting the surplus from the cultivators ever more intense, the trade networks bringing rare products over enormous distances ever longer.

In Egypt the surviving texts show the state administration to have been ‘mainly concerned with facilitating the transfer of produce’ to the various centres which made up the ‘court’, and with supervising construction work rather than with maintaining the agricultural system’, so putting ‘serious pressures on the agricultural surplus’.
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The picture in Mesopotamia seems to have been very similar, with the added pressure of war between the different city states as well as with pastoral peoples around the fringes of their civilisation.

The growth in the power and wealth of the ruling class drove the living standards of the mass of people down to the minimum necessary for survival—and sometimes even lower. So although the craftspeople working for the temples or palaces developed new techniques, particularly in the use of copper and bronze, ‘the peasant masses from whom…the surplus…was gathered could hardly afford the new equipment. In practice, the cultivators and quarrymen of Egypt had to be content with neolithic tools. Wool in Sumer was still plucked, not shorn. Even in the Indus cities chert [stone] knives are common enough to suggest a shortage of metal tools’.
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The ever-greater absorption of resources by the ruling class was accompanied by a massive slowdown in the growth of humanity’s ability to control and understand the natural world. Gordon Childe contrasted the massive advances made by comparatively poor and illiterate communities in the early period leading up to the ‘urban revolution’ with what followed the establishment of the great states:

The advances which did occur (‘iron, water wheels, alphabetic writing, pure mathematics’) were not made inside the ‘great civilisations’, but among ‘barbarian peoples’ on their periphery.
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Bruce Trigger contrasts the early dynastic period in Egypt (3000-2800 BC), which ‘appears to have been a time of great creativity and inventiveness’ with the period after, when ‘control by scribes and bureaucrats’ discouraged change in methods of production, so that ‘development ceased’.
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The sheer scale of the exploitation of the mass of the population—an exploitation that grew in direct proportion to the growth in the magnificence of the temples, palaces, tombs and ruling class lifestyles—ensured stagnation of the means of providing a livelihood for society as a whole.

That section of society which had been freed from daily toil in the fields no longer had any interest in furthering humanity’s control over nature. ‘Many of the revolutionary steps in progress—harnessing animals’ motive power, the sail, metal tools—originally appeared as “labour saving devices”. But the new rulers now commanded almost unlimited resources of labour…they saw no need to bother about labour saving inventions’.
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Rulers who reinforced their power over the masses by encouraging superstition—the Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs claimed god-like powers for themselves—had no interest in encouraging scientific endeavour among society’s small literate minority of priests and full time administrators. These were stuck with the body of knowledge developed early in the urban revolution, treating it with almost religious reverence, copying texts and transmitting established ideas, but no longer attempting new lines of enquiry. Not for the last time in history, science degenerated into scholasticism and scholasticism into magic as the centuries proceeded.
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The literate elite ended up holding back rather than advancing humanity’s control over nature.

A ruling class that had arisen out of advances in human productive powers now prevented further advances. But without such advances its own rapaciousness was bound to exhaust society’s resources, until the means of livelihood became insufficient to provide for the mass of the population. At that point it only required a slight change in climate for people to starve and society to shake to its core. This happened in Egypt at the end of the ‘Old Kingdom’, when a fall in the level of the Nile floods caused difficulties with irrigation. Willey and Shimkin suggest similar ‘over-exploitation’ by the ruling class brought about the collapse of the ‘classic’ Mayan civilisation of Meso-America about 1,200 years ago:

Class struggles in the first civilisations

The impoverishment of the exploited classes responsible for feeding the rest of society necessarily brought a clash of interests between the different classes.

The basic class divide was that between the ruling minority and the mass of dependent peasant cultivators. The growing exactions of the rulers must have caused clashes between the two. But, to be honest, we know little about these. In so far as tomb paintings or temple inscriptions depict the mass of people, it is as people bowing down to and waiting on their ‘superiors’. This is hardly surprising—it has been the preferred way of depicting the masses for ruling classes throughout history.

Nevertheless, a number of archaeologists and historians suggest the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom involved a ‘social revolution’, quoting a later text known as the ‘Admonitions of the Ipuwer’, which imagines a situation in which ‘servant girls can usurp the places of their mistresses, officials are forced to do the bidding of uncouth men, and the children of princes are dashed against the wall’.
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In a somewhat similar way, the collapse of the Meso-American civilisations of Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the southern Mayas is often ascribed to peasant revolts.
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But the tensions that arose were not just between the rulers and the exploited peasants. The evidence from all the early civilisations points to growing fissures within the ruling class.

In Mesopotamia and Meso-America the first ruling classes seem to have been the priests of the temples. But kings began to emerge in Mesopotamia alongside the priesthoods as secular administration and warfare became important, and a non-priestly aristocracy with its own estates (and dependent peasant cultivators) rose alongside those of the temples and the royal palace. Similarly, in Meso-America the warrior elite seems to have enjoyed growing power.
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In Egypt the kings were dependent on regional priests and governors for administering the 500 miles of the Nile Valley and ensuring the continual flow of food, material and labour to the royal capital. Land grants used to buy the loyalty of such groups enabled them, over the centuries, to siphon off a chunk of the total surplus for themselves and to exercise a degree of power independent of the central monarch. One sign of this was the way in which priests and civil administrators began to build lavish tombs imitative of the pharaohs, even if considerably smaller.

The rise of new exploiting groups alongside the old had a double effect. On the one hand, it meant an ever larger layer of people living off the surplus and put increased pressure on the cultivators. On the other, it meant challenges could arise to the monolithic power of the original rulers, from people who themselves controlled resources, armed power or the dissemination of ideas. So it seems the collapse into crisis of Old Kingdom Egypt was, in part at least, a result of provincial governors and chief priests putting their own interests above those of the central monarchy—leading, according to Kemp, to ‘civil war…among men whose aspirations were of a thoroughly traditional nature’.
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The splits within the ruling class were accompanied by the growth of new subordinate classes. Specialist groups of craft workers—carpenters, stonemasons, leather workers, weavers, workers in metals—had begun to appear as increased agricultural productivity allowed some people to be freed from working in the fields. The concentration of a growing surplus in the hands of the ruling classes gave an added impetus. The priests and kings demanded an ever growing supply of luxury goods for themselves and their attendants along with ever more elaborate temples, tombs and palaces. But this meant concentrating around the palaces, tombs and temples the skilled labour which could make such things. A whole new class of artisans grew up as part of the core population of the new cities.

Typical were those who built the pyramids of Giza and carved out the tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. ‘Contrary to popular belief’ these ‘were not constructed by slaves, nor…by men who were subsequently put to death in order to protect hidden royal treasures’.
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The forced labour of large numbers of peasants may have been used to move huge chunks of rock. But writings from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC in Thebes (present day Luxor) show the quarrying, carving and carpentry to have been the work of skilled craftsmen. They lived in a special village of stone houses and were paid sufficient wages in the form of grain, oil and fish to keep a family of ten—giving them an income about three times that of the average land worker. Their eight hour day left many with time to improve their living standards by doing additional private work, and some were skilled enough to be among the very few people able to read and write. They were not completely free. They were subject to arbitrary acts of oppression from the scribes and foremen in charge of them and, on at least one occasion, those deemed ‘surplus’ to the requirements of the pharaoh’s vizier were compelled to undertake forced labour.
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But in 1170 BC, backed by their wives, they took part in history’s first recorded strikes when their rations were late and their families faced hunger.
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These were not wage workers in the modern sense, since they were not free to choose who they worked for, were paid in kind and depended for their livelihood on the centralised distribution of goods by the state. This limited their ability to act independently of the state or to develop views which challenged it. Significantly, they worshipped the gods of the royal class and deified kings as well as favoured gods of their own. Nevertheless, geographical concentration and literacy had given an oppressed and exploited class the confidence to challenge the rulers of a kingdom a millennium and a half old. It was a portent for the distant future, when there would be such a class hundreds of millions strong.

A trader class began to develop alongside the artisan class in most of the early civilisations. Trade had already taken place in pre-class societies: flints mined in one place would be used hundreds of miles away, for instance. Now it grew in importance as the emerging ruling class sought luxuries and raw materials for the building of temples and palaces. Many of these could only be obtained if individuals or groups were prepared to make long, arduous and often dangerous journeys. Such people were scarcely likely to be from the pampered ranks of the ruling class itself. They were either from the exploited cultivator class or from outside the cities, especially from the pastoralist groups who roamed the open lands between the urban centres. As trade grew in importance, so did the traders, beginning to accumulate enough wealth to be able exert pressure of their own on the ruling class. A point was eventually reached when towns and cities began to develop which were run by the trading merchant classes—like the city of Sippar in the Fertile Crescent.