Irritation

Prompted by the article in the NYRB about ancient cities at reference 1, I opted to buy reference 3 rather than reference 2, these being the two vehicles for the article. As it turned out, I may have backed the wrong horse.

Reference 3 is 250 pages of popular history from one James C. Scott, an older academic who has spent serious time overseas, who has helped the CIA in its crusade against young commies and who moonlights as a sheep farmer. Day job: Sterling Professor, Political Science; Acting Director, Agrarian Studies; Professor, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Anthropology and Institute for Social and Policy Studies. At Yale - whose press, it has to be said, did a good job on the paperback version of his book - which I got new for a tenner from ebay.

The book reads rather like a tract from the far right, by someone who hates governments and all their works. Especially taxation. And with sturdy hunter gatherers, free from the shackles of states, presented in a nice rosy glow. Lots of sweeping generalisations. Lots of ground covered. No doubt backed by considerable scholarship, but I found it all rather tiresome and I had to push to finish.

Despite this, the central argument of the book is not without interest. That the first large urban settlements - with perhaps 50,000 inhabitants - maybe 5,000 years ago - probably depended on a great deal of coercion to keep most of those inhabitants busy in the fields and in the textile factories - activities which produced the stuff which could be traded for all the stuff that they could not produce - not least stone, timber, metals and jewels. Most of these settlements were located on alluvial plains where growing grain was relatively easy and where water transport from up-river and all its goodies was available. A place called Uruk, of which I had not previously heard is the exemplar - for which see reference 4.

Scott makes much of the fact that living conditions for most of the inhabitants of these places were probably pretty grim. Inter alia, because the concentration of domesticated animals - human or otherwise - made for a great deal of stinks, pestilence, disease and plague. And mono-crop agriculture was not so clever either. In fact, life as a hunter gatherer was much to be preferred - if only you were able to get back to it. And why on earth would you have packed it in in the first place?

I learn that in some of these places you find lots - thousands - of more or less identical and rather ugly pots, with distinctive bevelled edges, thought to be used to provide two litre daily rations of either beer or barley for the workers. Reference 5 probably tells one all one needs to know about them and probably also I can go and look at one at the British Museum.

He claims that in practise there was plenty of coming and going of people - often in the form of captives or slaves - between the various worlds: the settled states, the herds of horse riding barbarians and the free men of the woods, the hunter gatherers.

Also that most of these urban settlements were pretty precarious, unlikely to survive more than a few reigns. A bad ruler, a failed harvest, a plague or an attack by the barbarians was all too likely to bring them down. But given that they had a monopoly on monuments and writing, they were the places which figure in our histories. The silver lining was that after a few millennia, most of the barbarians learnt that tribute & protection paid better than rape & pillage.

Which takes us to the ancient Chinese proverb: 'you can conquer a kingdom on horseback, but to rule it you have to dismount'. Although, according to Bing, this is a slightly garbled version of a saying attributed to Genghis Khan: 'conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard'. Almost the same thing, I suppose.

Reference 1: The First Mean Streets - Tim Flannery - 2020.

Reference 2: Cities: The First 6,000 Years - Monica L. Smith - 2019.

Reference 3: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States - James C. Scott - 2017.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk.

Reference 5: The Bevelled-Rim Bowls: Their Purpose and Significance - A. R. Millard - 1988. I eventually got a read-only version from JSTOR - but a quick skim discounts the ration pot theory in favour of moulds in which to bake bread.

PS: the piece in the NYRB included a picture of something called the Standard of Ur, a Sumerian artefact getting on for 5,000 years old. What the caption did not explain that the artefact was found in quite small pieces and what you have now in the British Museum is a reconstruction of the pieces in the form of a hollow box, with the facing panel something less than 10 inches by 20 inches. Thought to portray the king and his close friends settling down to a banquet.