insuperable divisions between rulers and ruled and society is ruled from the top down. These models have no place for interaction between rulers and ruled or the mutual influence between citizens and political structure, what can be termed the dualism of agency and structure. As will be made clear in the sections 2.5-9, approaches that focus on multiple strategies for power and the role of agency in the political structure can explain polities in the ancient world better than theories based on hierarchies and reconstructions based on institutions alone.
2.2 Climbing to state-hood: the neo-evolutionary ladder
model
Neo-evolutionism in the fields of ancient history and archaeology refers to the writings of anthropologically oriented scholars from the 1940s onwards that were concerned with the development of human civilisation and the state.191 The theory involves a succession of stages in the development of pre-industrial societies, labelled
191 Childe, “The urban revolution,” 1959; Adams, The evolution of urban society, 1966; Fried, The evolution of political society, 1967; Service, Origins of the state and civilisation, 1975; Van De Mieroop, The ancient Mesopotamian city, 1997. For a short critical review, cf. Yoffee, Myths of the archaic state, 2005, 8-15
savagery, barbarism, and civilisation vel sim.192 According to neo-evolutionist theory, human societies on their way to civilisation or state-hood have evolved through a succession of such identifiable stages. Elman Service states that “mobile hunting- gathering bands, the more settled horticultural villages, and the dense, nearly-urban populations of chiefdoms and primitive empires may be viewed as evolutionary stages, each with appropriate kinds of cultural institutions”.193 According to Morton
Fried, at the top of the evolutionary ladder is a stratified society with political institutions on state level. The stratified society is characterised by an unevenly distributed access to basic resources. These socio-economic differences are protected by state institutions and the state thus develops from these relations and the
institutions that protect them.194 This model obviously draws on Karl Marx’ ideas
about society as evolving through stages characterised by specific modes of
production.195 A will be seen (2.3), Marx’ model of the Asiatic mode of production in particular has played a significant role in the interpretation of Near Eastern societies. The neo-evolutionary model has a great advantage over models based on diffusion of statehood from a supposed cradle of civilisation in that it can explain the development of the state as socio-economic changes regardless of cultural contacts. However, as will be argued in the following, with its rigorous division of rulers and ruled, most of the political dynamics between citizens and the governing institutions are left out of the analysis.
A milestone in the application of neo-evolutionary theory is the monograph The
Evolution of Urban Society by Robert McC. Adams (1966). Adams explained the
separate developments of the state in early Mesopotamia and prehispanic Mexico in
192 Cf. Childe, “The urban revolution,” 1959, 3 193 Service, Cultural evolutionism, 1971, 73
194 Fried, The evolution of political society, 1967, 185-186
purely socio-economic terms. Interestingly, he terms “urban society” in the
singular.196 This implies that although the development in Mexico was historically
unrelated to Mesopotamia, the two are structurally parallel. Since the publication of
The Evolution of Urban Society, the neo-evolutionary theory and its step-ladder model
has been the most influential approach to state formation in ancient Near Eastern studies.197 The neo-evolutionary theory has been applied to a great variety of
societies, from the rise of the Zulu state in modern times to the origins of civilization in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, Egypt and China.198 It is the focus on parallelism
of structures rather than cultural diffusion that gives neo-evolutionary theory and its models its universal appeal among archaeologists and historians.
The neo-evolutionary approach can be exemplified by the work of Morton Fried, who offers an evolutionary model where society goes through successive stages of
economic and political organisation measured in degrees of limited access to basic resources and formalised hierarchy. These stages are termed egalitarian, ranked and stratified society. At the top of the ladder is a stratified society that becomes a state.199 Thus, ancient societies are regarded as developing state-like structures to protect privileges and organise the exploitation of economic and social inequality. The stratified society that develops into an early state has a large group of exploited that are held in place by the developing state structures and these structures do not work in their interests, but are beyond their influence. The early state is a stark contrast to the egalitarian bands of pre-state societies, where influence is distributed evenly among all members. Nothing remains of this egalitarian organisation in the early state, which can only be analysed as relations between rulers and ruled.
196 Adams, The evolution of urban society, 1966
197 Van De Mieroop, The ancient Mesopotamian city, 1997, 27-28 198 Cf. Service, Origins of the state and civilization, 1975
Even if the simplified trajectory of an evolution in disparate stages is accepted, it may be asked how complete the transition from one evolutionary stage to the next was. Were all relations transformed when moving from the level of a tribe into an early state? It can be argued that increased hierarchy only covers one aspect of political integration, that between rulers and the ruled. It does not describe all socio-political relations between people or how society was organised at all levels. The early state has little room for strategies for power other than those of the group at the top of the hierarchy, the élite. The only dimension of power is leadership, manifested in the early state and its institutions. This aspect of neo-evolutionist theory is criticised by Adam T. Smith, who argues that “the State must give way to studies that investigate the active constitution of political authority”. He points out that theories of the archaic state operate with a leap to statehood rather than the active constitution of
authority.200 Smith argues that studies should focus on conditions that create
authority, rather than the state as a unit.201 I agree that this it is necessary to study how
authority is created through strategies, in order to understand ancient politics. However, Smith does not indicate how the actions of the masses can be included in a study of the constitution of authority, focusing instead on landscapes and their manipulation or utilisation by regimes as constituting factors.202 In my opinion, there
must be an explicit investigation of the role of all citizens, not just the élite and the governing institutions, in order to understand ancient polities and their politics. Agency from levels of the social structure below the élite is outside the early state model. This is a problem that cannot be addressed solely by looking at landscape. The
199 Fried, The evolution of political society, 1967 200 Smith, The political landscape, 2003, 80-81 201 Smith, The political landscape, 2003, 102 202 Cf. Smith, The political landscape, 2003, 107-108
spatial dimension of Mesopotamian cities and their political implications will be discussed further below (2.9).
According to Fried, leadership is obtained through the control of the means of production. The uneven distribution of the means of production means that some will be able to exert power over others. With the institutionalisation of access to resources, society becomes formally hierarchic. The institutionalisation of private property, increased population and restricted access to land leads to exploitation of the labour of those who do not own land.203
In this scenario of the development of hierarchies, a further problem with neo- evolutionary theory becomes evident: it operates with a closed perspective on society, with no alternatives for those with restricted access to resources. If people had no alternative, the hierarchy would necessarily be absolute, in consequence of the uneven ratio of winners to losers in a zero-sum game for prosperity and the need for
maintenance by force of the existing relations of property. This was, however, not always the case in developing societies in the past. As pointed out by Elizabeth C. Stone, differences in property relations do not necessarily lead to coercion, because there are alternative strategies for marginalised groups, including emigration and changes in subsistence strategies from agriculture to nomadic pasturage.204 It can also
be argued that land ownership does not result in unbreakable hierarchies, because land can be held in common by families, so that their poorer members have at least some access to resources. In consideration of such alternatives, the strict hierarchy of an early state society is less self-evident.
203 Fried, The evolution of political society, 1967, 191-196; ibid. 224-226 204 Stone, “City-states and their centers,” 1997, 16-17
It could be argued that the state emerged exactly as a cage to hem people in and provide workers on the available land that was controlled by the élite. However, would it not be easier to make life in the state attractive than to prevent people from fleeing? The latter approach to state formation can be found in Elman Service, also a neo-evolutionist, who introduces the concept of chiefdom as an intermediary level between egalitarian segmental societies and true states.205 Rather than looking at the early state as confirming and protecting socio-economic inequality, Service
emphasises what he terms integrative theories: the chief is able to establish a state based on chiefdom because a state is more effective in promoting the interests of the members of society. The chief shapes the further development of society towards a state.206
A weakness with Service’s model is that it does not explain why people would willingly give up their autonomy, other than that they would wish to avoid the negative consequences of anarchy. It can be argued that the alternative to the despotic rule of a chief is not chaos: institutionalised leadership in a stratified society does not necessarily stand in opposition to forms of popular participation in politics,
institutionalised or not. However, popular participation has no place in Service’s model for society’s path from chiefdom to the true state; it describes the result of integration in terms of increased hierarchy.
Neo-evolutionist theory operates with a step-ladder model where the theoretical end- point of social evolution is an early state, before the development of true states. A
205 Service, Origins of the state and civilization, 1975, 15-16; Service, “Classical and modern theories of the origins of government,” 1978
mentioned above, the universal application of neo-evolutionist theory is emphasised by its advocates. Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalník, editors of a volume published in 1978 titled The Early State, claim that comparative studies “have demonstrated that the structure, functioning and evolution of early states of all times and places show marked similarities”.207 Claessen and Skalník propose a working
definition of the early state as “the organization for the regulation of social relations in a society that is divided into two divergent social classes, the rulers and the ruled”.208 In the same volume, Ronald Cohen analyses the state as characterised by
the division between rulers and ruled into a dualistic class system. The ruling group is culturally differentiated from those who are ruled.209 In his view, “the details of political culture focus on the value of superior-subordinate relations”.210 Thus, early states produce “an ideological support system” to promote a political culture which legitimises hierarchical control.211
The state understood in neo-evolutionist terms is the manifestation of the relations between rulers and ruled. All social and political relations are described in terms of a subordinate-superior division. Peter Skalník emphasises that early states were characterised by the presence of a political economy, where competition for office was a key concern.212 However, political activity was restricted to the ruling
hierarchy: “in the political sphere the division between the state and the community, the rulers and the ruled was complete”.213 Thus, only the élite take part in running the
207 Claessen & Skalník, “The early state: Theories and hypotheses,” 1978, 5 208 Claessen & Skalník, “The early state: Theories and hypotheses,” 1978, 21 209 Cohen, “State origins: A reappraisal,” 1978, 66
210 Cohen, “State origins: A reappraisal,” 1978, 67 211 Cohen, “State origins: A reappraisal,” 1978, 69 212 Skalník, “The early state as a process,” 1978, 609 213 Skalník, “The early state as a process,” 1978, 610
polity and reaching decisions. As in the models of Fried and Service discussed above, popular participation in politics is impossible, or at any rate falls outside the analysis of power relations.
In neo-evolutionary theory, the Greek poleis, where citizens ruled and were being ruled in turn, do not fit. Presumably, Greek political practices must be regarded as exceptions to the principles of political evolution of increased stratification towards hierarchy and despotic rule. In neo-evolutionist approaches, citizens are treated as passive and powerless. The state is described in terms of hierarchy solely and does not take into consideration other possibilities for political integration, including initiatives from outside the élite and the existence of vertical ties between rich and poor that transcend hierarchy. An explanation of the state in terms of increased hierarchy based on land ownership and other relations of property ignores other processes of political and social integration, among them the self-determined wish to live in a state society and the solidarity of the citizen community. The view of egalitarian relations of power as primitive and belonging to an early stage in the process of state formation further excludes alternatives to the early state model and its hierarchic organisation.
The view of power and social cohesion found in the neo-evolutionary theory is also found in two other influential models for ancient polities, the two-sector model and the patrimonial household model that will be discussed briefly in the following, before discussing alternative approaches to the analysis of ancient polities.