LECTURE | Rethinking Early States: Ancient Egypt, and Beyond | David Wengrow

minutes to get settled for the vocal quiet silence my phone is already silenced there's a guy aside from the public in English so I am it's a it's a really special pleasure um to um to represent the Museo egyptio in uh in introducing David wengro he is probably best known to to you and you sitting here and you who are watching us online uh for his uh that for the best the best-selling book he wrote with David Graber uh entitled the dawn of everything a new history of humanity uh translated in uh in 30 languages including Italian as you may have noticed coming in um and uh it's it is a book that uh challenges and narrative that is deeply embedded in our uh collect collective view of History you'll find it in every textbook it's a it's a story it's it's uh the story of how we were once uh living in an Eden of sorts and working only three hours a day and uh hunting rabbits or giraffes or whatever and Gathering berries and spend the rest of the day the day playing drums or playing with each other and and uh um uh and that's and then uh I'll and then we domesticate plans or as as some Scholars like to put it plants domesticated us and that's where all our troubles began and then social hierarchy sprang UPS as a class society and the for the the first early States uh arose and all the way down to um the uh civilization as we know it today that's that's is this is a narrative we've all learned to give for granted and this book uh challenges it it challenges it through uh bringing bringing to bear sweeping range of evidence that all the way from the the Pacific coast of Northern America through Eurasia Africa all the way to us to Australia and uh so it's not a book about Egypt Egypt uh actually I I found the first page Pages referring to Egypt it starts at at page 262. all of us and there is an account of the Neolithic and then in the Nile Valley and I'm smiling okay the egyptologist In Me Is All beaming and and I start reading it about about the Neolithic two pages later I'm on a canoe sailing from the Philippines carrying uh tubers and and and chickens and pigs as well as a few stowaway rats and uh to uh to Polynesia so it's no wonder that uh David wengro is a professor of comparative archeology at um at uh UCL Universe university University College London it is this book has a comparative perspective but the book returns to Egypt later and more extensively and um David is is also an egyptologist definitely an egyptologist he has uh he has conducted archaeological field work in in Africa as well as the Middle Middle East and uh among the the many books and articles uh he wrote uh one the the one one on the arc the entitled The archeology of early Egypt stands out so um uh tonight um Egypt will be more to the fore although he has promised me that he will also take us Beyond Egypt and I'm very um excited and eager to hear what he has to what he has to tell us thank you so much [Applause] that was an incredible summary of a book I wish I could do it that well um thank you very much for this invitation and thank you to the Friends of the museum to Dr Greco and all his colleagues um it's it's great to be able to come back to my roots a bit as an archaeologist which as we heard really did start with the the prehistory and the archeology of early Egypt and Mesopotamia but I thought it might also be fun uh particularly in this venue to go beyond Egypt so actually the issues that I want to talk about are much more General and they have to do with a word that we already heard this evening the state which is a term widely applied to ancient as well as modern societies and in a way that's the that's the problem and the issue that I want to address this evening because in our book The Dawn of everything there is in fact a chapter called why the state has no origin why the state has no origin and in it in that chapter David greber and I suggested that a really original approach to understanding relations of power and domination in deep history which we don't pretend to have done ourselves might not begin at all from the early centers of power like ancient Egypt the so-called ancient or archaic States but it might actually begin from their edges from their margins the times and the spaces in between now academic terminology as all the curators here will know very well has often consigned these places and spaces to a sort of marginal status through the basic schemes of classification for time and space I'm referring to the framing of centuries or even Millennia of human experience as pre -proto formative post terminal intermediate Etc which still shapes our presentation and our understanding of deep time and deep politics in most parts of the world now museums arguably I tend to think have played a rather conservative role here Museum goes across the world and most likely will be faced for example with the division of ancient Egyptian displays into Old Middle and New kingdoms separated by so-called intermediate periods which span roughly a third of Egypt's ancient history down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal Kings which is known simply as the late period in fact these intermediate periods saw some very interesting political developments of Their Own to take just one example and here we find out if it works there it is the third intermediate and late period so we're talking about roughly the eighth to the sixth centuries BC witnessed among other things the ascendants of women siren unmarried childless women to superordinate roles in government through an office known as the God's wife of our moon but this political Innovation which historically is very unusual at least to my knowledge is rarely discussed in general treatments because it's already framed in chronological terms as a kind of transitory or even decadent period the late period now where do these chronological schemes actually come from in the case of Egypt one might assume that they have some basis in ancient sources ancient written sources but actually they don't they are entirely modern inventions in the late 19th Century A.D mainly Prussian egyptologists introduced Reich or Empire periods into ancient Egypt and these were strongly modeled of an explicitly modeled on the development of modern European States cycling between periods of unification and supposed periods of social disintegration and these schemes echoed the geopolitical concerns of bismarck's Germany as much as any ancient reality after the first world war prominent egyptologists like Adolf Airman granted the intermediate periods their own place in history and Airman actually Drew in the key article he actually draws an explicit comparison between the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Bolshevik Revolution the early 20th century now as I said in the book we don't even try to unravel these schemes of classification our aims are actually much more modest which were really to try and arrive at a clearer definition of the forms of power or domination in opposition to which those intermediate or in-between times are defined and we try to do this as you said comparatively across multiple cases that have in the past been singled out as examples of early State formation having said that there is no agreed definition among Scholars as to what actually constitutes an early State I could bore you with any number of definitions but if you take the time and the trouble to dive into the literature you'll find this simply no elegant widely received or accepted definition at all but rather a series of competing arguments and debates that we really don't need to go into but the point is that this seemed like important groundwork because you know just from a logical point of view it's only once we're able to actually Define those forms of power clearly that we can even begin to understand what a movement against them or away from them might actually represent and I mean in something other than the purely negative language of interruption or chaos or Anarchy or collapse that is this might begin to allow us to recognize show positive acts of rejection or refusal or even perhaps of social Revolution and the main obstacle to a clear definition of these early forms of power we suggest in the book are precisely these kind of abstractions that come down to us from generations of theorizing about the evolution of human societies theorizing the began long before there was any real archaeological evidence to talk about and one of the most important of these abstractions we also suggest is the state itself now modern nation-states since the age of Revolution have been based on the principle of popular sovereignty the idea that the same power once held by Kings is now held by an entity called the people of course modern states are also much more than that we might view them as a kind of combination or amalgam of Three core institutional parts or Elements which as we know came together at a relatively recent point in modern history roughly between the the Treaty of Westphalia and the 17th century through to the 19th century and these are elements which some people today argue are actually in the process of drifting apart again and I'm referring not just to sovereignty but also to the principle of centralized Administration or bureaucracy and to a third element what we call democracy in its particular form that we practice it mostly in the form of national elections which by their very nature are political competitions completely different I would add from the the ancient Greek or Athenian notion of democracy which did not consider elections to be a democratic way of appointing leaders they preferred and magistrates they preferred random drawing Lots precisely because competitive elections as they perceived and as we now have a tendency to throw up these sort of megalomaniacs who enjoy power not particularly democratic I'll be talking a bit more about this next week at the bienna Democracy here in Turin now what I want to focus on this evening is something that's interested Scholars for more than a century I guess is precisely how and why these different elements of the state came together to produce this particular form of governance which today is ubiquitous from one end of the world to another I don't think there's any a priori reason to see this process as something that unfolds organically over thousands of years extending back to ancient Egypt or the classic Maya or Shang China although this is often what's done we know in modern history tells us that the global spread as it's sometimes called of nation states was anything but evolutionary in character and I'm assuming that nobody takes seriously any sort of spencerian definition of evolution as the survival of the fittest or anything like that we know that more often the spread of nation states has has generally taken the form of an imposition Often by armed Conquest colonialism Empire abetted by the enslavement mass murder and dispossession of entire peoples now if we consider more closely those three basic components of the modern state sovereignty bureaucracy and political competition we might see them as elaborations of actually much more basic forms of social domination this is an idea that David and I um sort of play with in the book we realized that actually if you think about it in essence sovereignty is generally conceived is in essence about exerting control over the legitimate use of force or violence either over a territory or over a particular population Administration in essence is about exerting control through the medium of knowledge or the circulation of information or misinformation and the Distortion of information and political competition as I discussed in essence is about personal Charisma now if you think about it these are forms or ways of exerting influence or power over other people which can work at any scale you like all the way down to an interaction between you and I in a private situation or a family or a household there's no particular reason to see them as properties of the state but of course we also know that just like domestic Patriarchs absolute Kings and sovereigns throughout history have taken the model of the household the patriarchal household as the kind of Paradigm for their own larger National or Regional polities and that would include ancient Egypt okay so we suggest that you know you can triangulate essentially between these three basic forms of of power and that the modern state is defined by a combination of all three which actually historically is highly unusual if we look at the archaeological record the deeper history of what have been called ancient States actually what we see much more typically is that these three basic forms of power almost never come together in any kind of obvious or organic way or in the kind of way that we tend to expect from governments today just as an initial illustration one of my other main research interests is the Middle East or what is sometimes called ancient Mesopotamia the modern countries of Iraq Syria parts of turkey research in those countries over the last few decades is really giving us a completely different picture of what was once called State formation actually we don't see the earliest appearance of Institutions like kingship or monarchy in the cities cities arise in this region about six thousand years ago in the fourth millennium BC most famously at the site of Uruk modern warca in central Iraq but actually there's almost no really compelling evidence for the institution of kingship until about 1500 years later where do we then see the initial emergence of things like palaces and Royal burials with human sacrifices and huge concentrations of metal work and other forms of wealth well it's actually not in these cities at all the cities certainly have some kind of administration there is certainly some kind of bureaucratic control over the flow of knowledge we have the invention of the the cuneiform script together with the Egyptian script the earliest in the world but these early uh sometimes centrally administered cities show no evidence of the other forms of power actually the earliest evidence for anything like aristocracy or monarchy appears out on their spatial margins up in the foothills of the Taurus and the Zagros Mountains in what today is Southern turkey and I draw particular attention to the work of Italian Scholars at a site called Aslan Tepe directed by the great Marcella frangipane from Sapienza University in Rome where they have found clear evidence of what they describe as a palazzo a palace dating to the middle or later part of the fourth millennium BC and also what they call a royal burial among these really tiny you know demographically very small populations up in the Foothills way outside the cities and centuries before anything like a palace or a royal tomb shows its face down in the the great Urban centers of the Tigris and the Euphrates so we have this disconnection now I guess one could argue that states the state first emerged in this region when the two forms of authority the bureaucratic or administrative order of the cities and this kind of political palatial charismatic order of the Highlands somehow came together in what historians call the early dynastic period but even in much later times there is very little to suggest that the rulers of Mesopotamian city-states achieved any significant measure of sovereignty or even made any such claims so we're still a very long way from anything like an embryonic version of the modern state now conversely we can also point to historical examples of political systems where you have sovereignty in the absence of any kind of administrative apparatus or any formal Arena of political competition anthropologists have long discussed cases like the so-called Divine kingship of the of South Sudan or the Naches sometimes called tealoel of Louisiana these are two cases in point where in each case in relatively recent times royal power was centered on capitals Central places respectively the Wrath or Kings compound at a place called fashoda these days called kodok in the Western Nile province of South Sudan and the so-called Great Village of the Natchez King these days known as the Fatherland site in a place called Adams County and these places contain shrines we have music they contain shrines with music and where rulers would follow a very elaborate schedule of daily rituals where there were complex ceremonies these were Royal households which also comprise the sort of eclectic mixture of Royal wives who were often very powerful and other kin and servants and dependents and retainers now within their rather small kingdoms the Shiloh Wrath and the Natchez king or great Sun as he was known wielded absolute power of command they could do pretty much anything they liked they could order summary executions they could appropriate goods pretty much as they had a mind to but in both cases a variety of documentary sources confirm that these sovereigns lacked any effective way of extending or stabilizing their power beyond the immediate perimeter of the Royal Court or even beyond their physical persons and these these arrangements are kind of funny because actually what what archeology shows is that a lot of other people uh spent most of their time running away from the court or doing everything possible to distance themselves from these centers of power um and led much more free lives elsewhere this also seems to be the case with Marcello's site of Aslan Tepe where the establishment of the palace in the late fourth millennium BC is actually associated with a contraction a shrinkage of the overall scale of the site so people see some big honcho setting up uh sharp and the first thing they do is run away and there's very little to stop them running away so the basic argument is that when we look at these times and places in human history which are usually taken to Mark the origins of the state the question we're asking is could we in fact be seeing something else could we in fact be seeing how very different kinds of Power crystallized in each case with a particular partial combination or juxtaposition of violence knowledge and Charisma it's a model that we're trying out basically and I think one way to test the the value or the validity of a new model is to see if it actually helps to explain cases which seemed difficult or anomalous under the pre-existing model and in that in this instance that means we're talking about ancient polities which mobilized and organized enormous numbers of people at the behest of leaders or Elites but that somehow just don't seem to fit any of the usual definitions of a state or perhaps that are clearly organized around certain principles that we associate with States but are just as clearly lacking in others now there are many such examples in the archaeological record and the inability the difficulty that researchers have accounting for them is really striking and frankly a bit of an embarrassment in fact there are so many anomalies in this regard that one begins to wonder if the whole thing is really just an artifact of our own conceptual limitations let's take and here I'm going to go wildly Beyond Egypt sorry um let's take for example the Olmec civilization civilization variously referred to by 20th century Scholars as an artistic or cultural Horizon straddling the Isthmus of Tejon tepec including parts of Guatemala Honduras and much of southern Mexico often considered to be the mother culture of all later Mesoamerican civilizations having invented the Region's characteristic calendar systems glyphic writing and ceremonial ball games now archaeologists have come to recognize that there is an Olmec Heartland an Olmec Center of sorts and it's in the marshlands of Veracruz where you have these swamp cities sort of rising out of the mud places like San Lorenzo and laventa along the fringes of Mexico's Gulf Coast but the internal structure of these Olmec cities is still very poorly understood most of them seem to be centered on ceremonial precincts we have large Earthen pyramid Mounds we have pyramids surrounded by extensive suburbs and as currently reconstructed by archaeologists these Monumental centers stand in relative isolation among a very you know surrounded by this very fragmented landscape of small maze farming settlements and seasonal hunter-gatherer camps I suspect all this is going to change those of you familiar with the impact of lidar Technologies this amazing aerial sensing technology where you can peer down from the sky through the forest canopy and actually perceive architectural traces in the lands completely non-invasive form of archeology but it's revolutionizing the archeology of areas under tree cover also in places like Yucatan so I expect there will shortly be much more evidence of human settlement if not already in the meantime archaeologists like Warren Hill John Clark Jeffrey blomster and others have reconstructed an intriguing relationship between competitive games ball games drawing participants and Spectators from a wide Hinterland and the rise of this Olmec aristocracy and this is not least owing to these famous extraordinary colossal carvings these Monumental heads which are carved out of Basalt it's incredibly laborious you imagine to produce you know some of you may have seen these enormous things and intriguingly these heads appear to be actual portraits of individuals men wearing the leather helmets of ball players they're not actually that dissimilar from Modern American football hats helmets and they're each emblazoned with these individualizing kind of Insignia and all the known examples are sufficiently similar that we can say there is some kind of shared ideal of beauty masculine Beauty perhaps but they're all equally different to be seen as unique portraits of particular champions so we have this intense Fusion of political competition and organized spectacle and it's easy to appreciate why the Olmec are often seen as the cultural progenitors of all these later Mesoamerican kingdoms and Empires that had similar practices but actually there's very little evidence that Olmec polities themselves ever created an infrastructure for dominating a large population as far as we know there was no stable military or administrative apparatus which might have allowed these rulers to extend their power over a large Hinterland instead what we see is this remarkable spread of cultural influence radiating outwards from these ceremonial centers which themselves may have only have been densely occupied on particular occasions ceremonial seasonal occasions if we turn to South America this is exactly the kind of map I I don't like because it misrepresents the past so we're looking here at ancient polities which predate modern nation states by thousands of years hundreds of thousands of years but as you can see they're all beautifully represented exactly as if they were sort of post-westphalian nation states polygons with very clear National boundaries of course this is all nonsense but you know it's an interesting challenge for museums and Heritage sites I think to think about how does one otherwise represent centers and peripheries clearly not like this but anyway there it is gives you an idea it's just supposed to give you an idea of what there was before the famous Inca Empire which was a whole series of these other polities in and around the Peruvian Andes and the adjacent Coastal drainages which in the literature are tentatively called early States now Scholars like Jeffrey quilter and Michelle Coons have discussed how the first Europeans to study the remains of these early Peruvian polities things like the moche polity or huari or Tijuana coup simply tended to assume to assume that any City or group of cities with Monumental art and architecture exerting some kind of influence over a large Hinterland must be capitals of states or Empires and it's an assumption that persisted well into the 20th century but actually as with the Olmec case a surprisingly large amount of that influence comes in the form of images images distributed on little ceramic vessels on objects of personal adornment on textiles rather than in the spread of administrative military or commercial institutions the Technologies of a westphalian nation state let's consider very briefly Chavin dejuantar this is I think I've lost the slide it's another artist this is a center located high up in the masna Valley of the Peruvian Andes now archaeologists once believed Chavin to have been the core of a pre-inka Empire a state controlling a hinterland that reached all the way from the Amazonian rainforest to the East and the Pacific coast in the west encompassing most of the Highlands and Coastal drainages in between this level of power seemed commensurate with the scale and the sophistication of chavin's cut stone architecture its abundance of monumental sculpture and the appearance of Chavin artistic motifs on Pottery jewelry and fabrics across this wider region but in fact as quilter and cones and others have pointed out there is really no evidence to suggest that Chavin was some kind of Rome of the Andes actually to better understand the kind of polity that Chavin really was they argue requires us to look much more closely at its imagery unlike that of the almec Chavin art does not readily lend itself to reconstructing narratives pictorial narratives Chavin images are different and complex in other ways we have these designs of crested Eagles that sort of curl in on themselves and they vanish into a kind of maze of ornament you have these human faces that grow fangs or contort into grimaces and it takes a long time actually for the eye to become attuned to the images so they actually stand out from this tangle tangle of of images and you can sort of train yourself to tease out and become sensitive to recurrent features tropical forest animals like Jaguars snakes and Caiman but just as you sort of focus in on them they slip away from the field of vision sort of winding in and out of each other's bodies or merging into complex patterns now these are sometimes described in the literature as monsters but they're nothing like the sort of chimeras that you get on Merchant Pottery or for that matter on Ancient Greek pottery or in Mesopotamian sculpture they're not those kind of composite figures we're in a completely different sort of visual Universe here it's really the realm of the shapeshifter where nobody is ever stable and you have to do this kind of diligent mental training to even tease out what's going on and there's actually a lot of circumstantial evidence from Chavin including things like snuff spoons and images of of hallucinogenic plants vilca leaves the so-called San Pedro cactus very powerful and also human-like figures you can see one there with mucus that actually gushes down from their noses now this is all about how the experience of art was related to psychoactive visions and Altered States Of Consciousness actually those very little in chavin's Monumental landscape that seems to have anything to do with secular government there are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters almost everything that survives on the other hand seems connected with a ritual and with the Revelation or the concealment of esoteric knowledge including the famous old temple with its Stone labyrinths and hanging staircases which seemed to be designed for individual trials or initiations perhaps Vision quests these kind of tortuous Journeys that end in narrow corridors only large enough for one person to go through and beyond that in the middle of it all is this tiny Sanctum which contains a monolith elanzone a monolith carved with this dense tangle sort of web of images so it's in the middle of this dark maze illuminated by these little slats so you can see that no viewer could ever have perceived the whole thing at once now I'd suggest that if Chavin was in any sense an Empire it was an empire built on control over images linked to esoteric knowledge and clearly this is also true in some sense of almac rulership but the latter the Olmec does present a very distinct emphasis as well on spectacle competition and the personal attributes of political leaders which has no obvious equivalent that I'm aware of in the Chavin case now clearly any use of the term Empire here is about as loose and imprecise as it could possibly be neither of these cases far as we can tell was remotely similar say to the Roman or the Han Empires or indeed to the later Inca and Aztec nor do they fulfill any of the important criteria for Statehood at least not on most standard sociological definitions like the Monopoly of violence or levels of administrative hierarchy so the usual practice in archeology has been to describe regimes like this as complex Chieftains or you know use other kinds of jargon that just seem sort of hopelessly inadequate and so we thought instead why don't we try to look at these rather puzzling cases through the lens of our three Elementary forms of domination control over violence control over knowledge and charismatic politics how each perhaps stresses a particular form of domination to an exceptional degree and develops it on an unusually large scale we could refer to these as perhaps first order regimes because they seem to be organized around just one of the three Elementary forms of domestication knowledge control for the Chavin and charismatic politics for the Olmec to the relative neglect not the exclusion but the relative neglect of the other two and then to fully illustrate the model of first order regimes obviously one would also have to ask if you can have the other possibility where you have control over violence or a principle of sovereignty without an apparatus for controlling knowledge or a competitive political field and as we've seen you can we've already discussed two examples the Sherlock of South Sudan and the Natchez of Southern Louisiana which is widely regarded as the only Undisputed case of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande the rulers of those polities enjoyed an absolute power that would have satisfied an Egyptian pharaoh or a Sapa Inca but they had little capacity as we've discussed to extend that power beyond their immediate physical Ambit and to my knowledge it's never occurred to anyone to refer to those cases as a state now I want to turn embarrassingly briefly to a number of other cases the ones which are usually canonically almost considered to be straightforward examples of archaic States or Empires I'm talking about Old Kingdom Egypt early dynastic Mesopotamia Shang China Inca Peru and the classic Maya we could begin by noting some very significant parallels between Egypt and Peru which I think is one of the best arguments against any sort of environmental determinism because you can't possibly imagine two Landscapes that are more different than the sort of vertical archipelagos of Peru and the Nile Valley um but here we have two cases where the principle of sovereignty became armed with a bureaucracy and did manage to extend itself across a large territory in a more or less uniform Manner and there are other similarities as well which go down to really uncanny details like the mummification of dead rulers and the way that such mummified rulers continue to maintain their own rural Estates and also how living Kings were sometimes treated as almost god-like creatures who had to make periodic tours of their domains both societies also seem to share a certain antipathy to cities and urban life their capitals their official capitals were essentially ceremonial centers stages for Royal display with relatively few permanent residents and the ruling Elites in their art and so on preferred to depict and imagine their subjects as living in a realm of bucolic Estates and hunting grounds but other so-called early States followed completely different paths early dynastic Mesopotamia was made up of some dozens of city-states of varying sizes each governed by its own charismatic warrior king all vying and competing for dominance it's only very occasionally in the history of this period that one ruler gains enough of an upper hand to create anything that might be described as the beginnings of a unified Kingdom or even an Empire the cities they ostensibly ruled over had already been around for centuries they were commercial hubs with strong traditions of self-governance each with its own City Gods who presided over local systems of administration in temples Kings in this case almost never claim to be Gods but rather the god servant or supporter or vice gerund or sometimes heroic defender on Earth in short a kind of delegate of sovereign power that properly resides in heaven and those of you familiar with the Sumerian king list and the story of the origins of kingship kingship comes down from heaven it already exists up there not down here and the result was a kind of dynamic tension between these two principles as we noted earlier which originally began in opposition to each other the administrative order of the river valleys on the one hand and this kind of heroic charismatic politics of the surrounding Highlands sovereignty in the last resort was for the Gods the classic Maya classic Maya lowlands were different again to be a ruler or a how was to be a kind of Hunter and a god impersonator first rank a warrior whose body on entering battle or during dance rituals became hosts and received the spirit of an ancestral hero or a deity or these dreamlike monsters Royal households internally were definitely structured according to quite elaborate ranks and offices but there's actually very little to suggest that Maya sovereigns possessed an extensive bureaucratic apparatus to manage the subject's affairs a house or to be in a house or a ruler seems to have been to be like a sort of miniature God and if anything is projected out into the cosmos in the classic Maya case it is precisely the principle of bureaucracy a sort of cosmic bureaucracy so with the emergence of hereditary rulership the Maya Cosmos itself Comes To Be Imagined as a kind of administrative hierarchy governed by predictable laws a kind of intricate set of celestial or sometimes Subterranean Wheels within wheels so that you can actually establish the exact birthdays and death dates of the divinities the major Gods thousands of years back into the past so for example there is a deity called muan mat who we know was born on the 7th of December 3121 BC seven years before the creation of the universe even though it might never occur to the same people who are doing that to actually register things like the number of their citizens or the amount of wealth or the birth dates of their own subjects now if we start looking at Chiang China things will only get more complicated like the Inca capital of Cusco the Shang Capital at anyang was designed as a kind of pivot of the four quarters sort of cosmological anchor for the entire Kingdom laid out as this Grand stage of Royal ritual and like both Cusco and the Egyptian capital of Memphis the city served as home to the Royal cemeteries and their attached Mortuary temples as well as a living Administration anyang's industrial quarters produced vast quantities of bronze vessels and Jades used to commune with ancestors but in most important ways we find very little similarity between the Shang and either Old Kingdom Egypt or Inca Peru Shang rulers did not claim sovereignty over an extended area they couldn't even travel safely let alone issue commands outside a narrow band of territories clustered on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River close to the Royal Court even there one is left with a sense the Chang rulers didn't claim sovereignty in the same sense as an Egyptian Peruvian or even Maya ruler clearest evidence for this is the exceptional importance of Divination in early Chinese polity and we know that divination becomes important in Egypt as well particularly in the New Kingdom but I think in the Old Kingdom it doesn't appear to have anything like that status so in this case in China any Royal decision whether we're talking about war or alliances or founding new cities or even very trivial things like extending the Royal hunting grounds could only proceed if it was first approved by the ultimate authorities who were the gods and the ancestral spirits shell and Bone oracles were stored for consultation now it is possible that writing was also used for much more mundane everyday purposes perhaps on perishable media that don't survive there's no clear evidence at this time for other forms of administrative Archives of the kind that becomes so characteristic of later Chinese polities nor anything much in the way of an administrative apparatus like the classic Maya Shang rulers routinely waged War to acquire stocks of living human victims for sacrifices rival courts to the Shang had their own ancestors and sacrifices and diviners and while they appeared to have recognized the Shang as Paramount there seems to be no contradiction between that and actually competing with them in war or other tournaments so in terms of the specific theory that we've been trying to develop here where the three Elementary forms of domination control of violence control over knowledge and charismatic Authority can each crystallize into its own institutional form I think all of these cases might be described as second order regimes of domination so we have first order regimes like the Olmec the Chavin or the Natchez which develop just one part of the Triad and then we have the typically much more violent Arrangements of these second order regimes where two of the three principles of domination are brought together in some spectacular and unprecedented way and which two it might have been clearly varies from case to case Egypt's first rulers combined literate Administration with sovereignty and there's no clear illustration of that those colleagues who've worked at the the mortuary areas of abidos in southern Egypt where you have these extraordinary burials of human retainers of the Court sometimes numbering in the hundreds or even in the thousands dating to the first and the early part of the second Dynasty who a lot of circumstantial and occasionally direct evidence suggests were ritually killed in order to be buried around the central tombs of the earliest Egyptian rulers there's no clear illustration of personal sovereignty I think than that on the other hand we have these Mesopotamian Kings who navigate between administrative order and a kind of competitive heroic politics and then we have the classic Maya achals who seemed to somehow fuse heroic politics with sovereignty now it's not as if any of these principles of domination was completely absent in any one case actually what often seems to happen is that two of them crystallize into actual forms of government and the third one is largely pushed out of the realm of human Affairs altogether and kind of displaced onto the non-human Cosmos as with Divine sovereignty in China or Mesopotamia or the cosmic bureaucracy of the classic Maya equally and I want to stress this when we speak of an absence of charismatic politics in Old Kingdom Egypt or Inca Peru we're talking about the lack of a kind of star system or a Hall of Fame where you have institutional rivalries between Warlords or local magnates we are most definitely not speaking about an absence of individual personalities and actually I think one could argue which we sort of do in the book that the transition from the so-called Old Kingdom to the so-called first intermediate period in Egypt might be usefully characterized as a kind of shift from patrimonial sovereignty to local charismatic Politics as widely accepted forms of governance so I want to sort of draw things to a conclusion with a question which is uh what does it mean today to describe all these varying forms of power as common manifestations of just one institutional form the early State the archaic state I would suggest this has a range of effects which actually add very little to our comprehension of the past and May in fact even disguise some important aspects of power relations in the past and maybe even in the present one such effect is to leave largely unspecified the forms of power concerned which in turn renders their disappearance or collapse or reconfiguration largely incomprehensible in Social or historical terms as their chronological labels suggest those periods in which people of the past moved away from or against specific forms of organized power are instead recast as temporary interruptions or lag times in some kind of meta-historical process of state power consolidating itself this is what we're supposed to think now I think no doubt part of the reason for this thinking and why it persists is that early states are still often thought of as bringing into being completely new forms of social power as if power appeared from a kind of vacuum but actually what David Graber and I tried to show in our book The Dawn of everything is that this idea too has very little basis in archaeological evidence which really as far back as it takes us in these kind of questions presents exactly the opposite impression of societies before the state we get a picture of Neolithic or even non-agricultural societies hunter-gatherer societies that were no strangers to our three forms of power or even to the idea of Revolution if we Define that broadly I think it was Tolstoy who said A revolution is based basically a change that occurs in a people's relation to power in the book we look at evidence for hunter-gatherers who alternated their political systems between hierarchical even kingly and egalitarian forms on a routine basis achieving structural changes Transformations sometimes within the scope of a single calendar year changes that conventional Theory tells us ought to belong to the kind of long durray of social evolution often these kind of structural reversals took place seasonally coinciding with periods of annual abundance or scarcity sometimes it happens by confining certain forms of power and property relations to very particular contexts ritual or ceremonial so we have kind of play Kings or theatrical Kings long before we have kingship we discuss cases of societies that refused specific forms of Power by moving away from them societies that elected back in pre-history to do the opposite of their neighbors following alternative political paths with cumulative effects that gave rise to these extensive zones of cultural uniformity and differentiation that archaeologists don't know how to describe what used to be called culture areas sometimes interaction spheres or networks Etc now the basic point that we venture is that all of this and more was happening in different ways across all the world's continents many thousands of years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling the state and indeed long before the coming of agriculture now of course all of this is a very long way from 20th century narratives of global history structured as we heard around the two great revolutions the Neolithic Revolution and the urban Revolution as the great thresholds of human political development straddling those thousands of years before the age of enlightenment and the great political Revolutions of the last few centuries in the book and I can only touch on this extremely briefly we also note how contemporary archeology reveals our three Elementary forms of Social Power sovereignty competitive politics and specialized Administration to first appear in isolation from each other among demographically small groups long before their incorporation into centralized forms of governance I've lost track these days of how many small-scale kingdoms were supposed to have in Egypt before the first dynasty we have Dynasty zero Dynasty zero zero and back to strange cemeteries like this prehistoric pre-dynastic Cemetery dating to the middle of the fourth millennium BC so we're about 500 years earlier than the first named Royal Dynasty but we already have these vast tombs not just of human beings but this place has actually been described as the world's first Zoo because they're in these burials of all kinds of exotic animals like little elephants and monkeys and rhinos and gardeners what it's clearly some kind of vast cosmological statement but who knows what um but there's no evidence in this case of anything like an extensive Administration or standing armies or any of the other signs of State formation those of you who are interested in prehistoric Europe will know that we have evidence for warrior aristocracies long before we have evidence for anything like Administration or kingship and then we have the Curious Case of these village-scale bureaucracies which appear in Mesopotamia thousands of years before the emergence of City Life nobody knows why they do this these are Village settlements like this one excavated by a Dutch and Syrian archaeologists before the Civil War at a site called Tel Sabi abiad in the balik valley where you have a tiny village of maybe two or three hundred people where they actually invent these highly specialized forms of administration using clay seals and ceilings and even keeping archives like little village bureaus or records of transactions in these tiny communities nobody knows why but it certainly doesn't fit the picture of bureaucracy as part of State formation now we could also note that these same kinds of Institutions seem to be either lacking or at least highly attenuated in a surprising number of the world's first known cities for example again very very briefly I can only touch on this we have these amazing so-called Mega sites now in Ukraine north of the Black Sea between the southern bug and the Napa Rivers these huge settlements thousands of people forming concentric patterns of houses with no temples no palaces no Royal burials no Central Administration very few signs of inequality at all and then we have other cases like the much discussed Bronze Age cities of the Indus Valley or the later phases of urban life at teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico that we go into in the book The basic point I want to make is that it wouldn't be exaggerating I think to say that really at this point in time an entirely new picture is emerging of what was once called State formation and if I might venture one final generalization it seems likely in view of all this that actually the most important and revolutionary studies of the roots of social power and domination in future will in fact begin not at the level of grand evolutionary abstractions but actually at the small scale the level of gender relations age groups and domestic servitude the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy but also the deepest forms of structural violence and in pursuing those kind of studies we suggest it will be important to distinguish these Elementary forms of Social Power how they've come together and drifted apart looking at the affinities and the tensions between them in different cases and also the many ways in which people and articular times in particular places throughout human history have in fact succeeded in containing those forms of power and even being free of them thank you very much foreign thank you thank you David uh you did take us Way Beyond ancient Egypt but the ride was well worth it and um and now it's uh um it's to you the audience that there any questions you'd like to ask and any of the two languages that uh yeah please okay um thank you very much Professor for your lesson I first of all would like to apologize for my horrible English but I don't know I apologize for my non-existent Italian no no need for that no no I swear I promise I will do my best and I also hope not to be too much off topic with this but [Music] your much of your recent work has dealt with uh Concepts like rethinking like just today or the dawn of everything itself so my question for you is this um would you agree with me if I said that in a broader sense uh learning from the past so uh thanks to the disciplines of humanities such as archeology or history might be tools for imagination and creativity not only to stay inside the present but also to imagine the the future times to make it clearer and even simpler we could say that we study um and we know what worked and what didn't I I say we because I'm an archaeologist myself and what didn't work so knowing that it it could be uh an occasion to decide all together the future times to come in a political political perspective and I mean political in in the Greek sense like so the the art of the policy itself and to make it again even clearer and simpler um I utterly believe that all I've all I've referred to now uh might be a sort of a tool among the the the the many to crush the the famous there's an alternative um which is based upon the common sentence like things have always gone this way so if we if we know our art we might do our part in the in the society from that point of view thank you very much thank you I can agree with almost everything you said and you said it very eloquently but there's just one part of it that I would not personally agree with which is the idea that one could or should look to the Past uh as an a kind of trial run for the present or you know with the aim of saying this could work or this couldn't work I suspect this is the wrong way to go simply because you know it's not how history works I mean the you know so many so many different factors I think the everything else you said I can completely Embrace which is really essentially the point of of the book I wrote with David is to show that precisely those points of human history that we're always told were kind of points of no return with XYZ consequences actually weren't the invention of agriculture the appearance of cities the origins of the state these things are supposed to set our species on a particular kind of pathway but actually what we see empirically is a whole series of other Pathways crossing over some of them have followed some of them are not followed so for me it's more a question of looking at the way that our grand narratives of the past actually constrain our thinking about the present and the future in the sense that an urban planner might say no this is impossible you cannot have a participatory democratically organized system on this well why not what's the evidence oh well it goes back to the origin of cities well actually no it doesn't so it's much more a case of actually querying quite forensically Case by case these so-called points of no return and actually showing that in the past human beings have been much more fluid and much more inventive around those kind of transitions in which case it becomes much more reasonable to ask why we too can't be more fluid that makes sense but I wouldn't look to the Past for direct kind of you know yes no answers or exact models that one might imitate personally volunteering I'll ask the question over but no no good evening professor wengro and thank you very much for your amazing lecture um I would say I totally agree with you except probably one point that you seem so stressed at the beginning as far as understood you try to deconstruct the so-called determinism of the environmental features of this society which is true of course I cannot say Egypt is the land of Nile full stop because it's very simplistic but in a way of course many of the differences that you know characterize Egypt Mesopotamia China and whatever are indeed based on the environment so I if I fully understood your your you know your talk it seems that you want to really deconstruct these environmental feature you just consider sovereignty uh really actually Administration et cetera Etc if you look at the actual cases that we present in the book we actually go into quite a lot of detail on the environmental context I think the key term that you use is based on the environment what do you mean by that what for example I can make just one example of course it's a very long discussion but the feature of Egypt we denial that really unites all the country sometimes yes okay but in general from the Delta to us one at least it's not the same that you have a Mesopotamia because the regime of the decrease and the fratis is completely different of course so this is this has an effect in the end I don't personally see any tension between accepting the obvious physical realities of the landscape and actually looking historically at what institutions have developed within them I think the what is not convincing to me is the idea that the environment determines those forms in any simple or direct way okay I think we have to to discuss it more in another lecture thank you very much anyway okay I mean otherwise you'd have to explain for example the the Striking similarities between Inca or Peruvian kingship and Egyptian kingship into completely different environments how would you explain that of course I don't say that now Egypt is only the result of the environment but I think that many differences can be explained through the environmental features not all of course not every certain things for sure yeah and we do thank you for your lesson I will I would like to ask about the accumulation of wealth in your model uh in which way the accumulation of wealth can be could be interact with all the parts of the model it's only a side effect or can be a cause or what can be well there's a Real Fashion at the moment in archeology for measuring stuff like trying to find objective measures of wealth so there's a huge number of studies going on in all different parts of the world a lot of them are very interesting which basically apply the tools of modern economics even down to kind of uh guineogenic coefficients you know to try and estimate wealth differentials in societies going all the way back to prehistoric hunter-gatherers I think some of those studies are very interesting but what what they often do or rather don't do is ask why wealth actually matters or whether wealth actually matters in the ways that we tend to assume I think we tend to assume for the obvious reason that we live in capitalist societies that wealth can automatically be translated into power but there's no anthropological or particular reason there's no scientific reason to assume that this is a culturally Universal attitude to wealth actually we have cases that we discuss in the book like the indigenous societies of the Eastern Woodlands of North America where clearly there was no obvious way to translate material wealth into social influence or power even landed wealth you know these were not strictly egalitarian societies you had wealth differentials but it didn't mean that you could instantly translate those into the ability to tell people what to do or extract their labor so I think there's a kind of level of conceptual difficulty about the accumulation of wealth which is sometimes skipped over in archaeological analysis it's not that the wealth accumulation isn't important actually my main research project at the moment is on one of those early Bronze Age cemeteries up in the highlands of turkey at a site called near the town of sirt where you have incredible concentrations of metallic wealth engraves at a time when there is no evidence for states or even Chieftains in that region and these are the burials of teenagers they're all aged between about 12 and 16. and you see the concentration of these incredible amounts of lost wax cast metal work and and metal Weaponry in a ritual context that has no obvious counterpart outside of that context in the world of everyday settlement remains or Regional you know trade systems or interaction so what's going on there I mean clearly it would be much too simplistic to just say well these are royal tombs we need you know another level or maybe multiple levels of analysis yeah very clear thank you that can be a point to to think about the future also thank you maybe maybe I'll throw in a question sure um I'm I always I've always thought of um well Egyptian kinship in particular but not only that you spoke of sovereignty of the king being able to to kill almost on a whim wantonly and uh to um sort of take whatever he wants to wield a form of power um that is apparently absolutely it's a display of power to me and to my mind uh that uh that King is potentially a a puppet who is harnessed by forces behind him people who are actually running things and I see that in Egypt in many in many periods but I I also I also know that this this kind of relationship between the king and and I'll use a word that you haven't used Elite um is um kind of a very important factor in the Dynamics of power and sovereignty and there's uh a fine discussion of this uh uh in a book you you cite in in your in your book which is uh Claude May Asus anthropology the womb of Ireland exactly exactly exactly and the the Anthropologist by Claude mayesu and where he describes exactly this this kind of thing any any thoughts on this yeah I mean it's actually like a level of detail and and Nuance that would require another book in itself but it's certainly the case you're right I mean what we're talking about here are kind of I guess the idealized institutional forms of power rather than Integrity of how courts actually functioned I mean I think it would work in the Maya case probably all these cases for example where you have an ostensibly patriarchal household actually it's the senior females who are calling the shots a lot of the time and determining who's in and who's out um it's a level of detail that in in the book we didn't couldn't really go into without sort of getting into a whole other area but um certainly wouldn't dispute at all what you're saying so what we're trying to do rather is Define the kind of official or sanctioned idea of power the kind of sign of power under which all of this goes on thank you are there any other questions if there are any more questions then uh I would like to thank Professor Wenger again so much for this uh We've really seen a lecture that has ventured in terrains that are very important to to our understanding of ancient Egypt even when we weren't talking about ancient Egypt at all so um I um thank you very much for uh for a one for a wonderful talk David thank you

Channel: Museo Egizio

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Length: 82min 35sec (4955 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023