Against the Grain
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative. Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family--all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
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What Hacker News says
- > When archaeological evidence shows that people largely stopped farming, it usually means that those people largely stopped existing
No, there are signs of habitation. If you look at the evidence from the alluvial plain around ancient Babylon and similar cities from the early history of cities in the region you see people returning to fishing, hunting, and sort of opportunistic planting on river banks. These cities had a tenuous grasp, and people would often just leave, or the city would collapse and people would stop doing intensive agriculture. People would abandon irrigation channels which they had been forced to dig and simply just go fishing. James C. Scott's Against the Grain covers the archeology nicely.
- There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.
- James Scott, in his book Against the Grain, offers an in-depth and nuanced exploration of the factors that led to the appearance of projects such as writing and irrigation channels in Mesopotamia as intensive agriculture gradually became the only possible means of sustenance. There was a lot more going on than a simple/linear intensification, and it was less cut and dry than the brief summary given of that development in this article would suggest.
Jennifer Pournelle's 2003 paper[1] presenting new evidence for the area's landscape in antiquity is also quite eye opening, as the presence of the coast further inland than was previously believed upended a lot of long-established notions about the development of civilization there.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Litto...
- Graeber's entire body of work is fantastic - there's a "mythology of progress" that's endemic to modern western culture, in which the current moment and way we live are the inevitable outcomes and apotheosis of human nature, that it's all natural and the way things simply must be. Graeber's books are an enjoyable, accessible dismantling of this mythology. "Debt: the first 5000 years" is an essential read, and both "The Utopia of Rules" and "Bullshit Jobs" are fantastic.
(If you're through Graeber's library and still looking for intellectual bricks to throw, James C Scott is a good chaser - "Seeing like a State" is a profoundly enlightening book, and "Against the Grain" is something of a diet "Dawn of Everything". I have heard great things about "The Art of Not Being Governed", but it's a bit denser than the other two and I haven't made my way though it yet.)
- You're working with the assumption that settling in large groups, creating a "state", and tending to agriculture represents progress for the people involved. I'd recommend checking out Scott's "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" for an alternative look at those assumptions.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States...
- Adding to other resources shared here, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has written about the evolution of writing (not strictly the alphabet), and much is available online: https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing... The roots of writing seems to be in counting/tallying marks, i.e. accounting. Another great book, "Against the Grain" by James Scott, describes how both tallying and writing developed hand-in-hand with the state.
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