Chapter 11 : Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order

XI. Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order

Just as we have seen that status accumulation was more important than economic accumulation in the social hierarchies that developed into states, symbolic power was a question of vital importance for proto-states. Lacking a reliable degree of coercive power, the earliest states and the non-state hierarchies that preceded them had to concern themselves with the centralization and expansion of symbolic production, in order to unify and pacify their subjects, supplant the social practice of reciprocity, engineer a rupture with the old model of order, and establish a new model of authority.

The idea that “political power flows from the barrel of a gun” is largely true in a modern state, but in early states, though examples abound of political power descending from the edge of a blade, it most commonly flowed from the gods. Symbolic production was, above all, a religious activity, to the point that it becomes hard to imagine an early state without religion. A well developed, hierarchical religion seems to be almost as important as a patriarchal social organization and value system in the role of companion and motor to state formation.

Is there, inversely, a relation between atheism and statelessness? In Tacitus’s survey, beyond the boundaries of Schwabia, we come upon the people who do not pray, “unafraid of anything that man or god can do to them.” [175] Among hunter-gatherer societies, all of which have been stateless and egalitarian if not outright anti-authoritarian, the presence of gods is debatable. All documented examples traditionally believe in a living force connecting the entire world, such that no strong distinctions are made where Western thought deploys the mutually exclusive categories “human” and “animal” or “animate” and “inanimate.” Some hunter-gatherer belief systems hold this force to be impersonal—an energy or an immanent spirit—and others hold it to be personal—named and distinct spirits inhabiting every natural phenomenon, from a rock to a cloud to an insect. I would argue that it is a misnomer to categorize these spirits as gods, given that a horizontal, reciprocal relationship exists between them, and a person’s spirit, after death, can go on to inhabit another natural phenomenon. It is well documented how shamans or entire communities might insult or deprive a spirit who misbehaves. For example, an Ainu medicine man might withhold offerings of beer or call an unresponsive spirit an “idiot,” whereas the Mbuti would traditionally use the noisy molimo ritual to wake up the forest—seen as a spirit in its own right—if things were going wrong. [176]

Perhaps it is most accurate to understand these hunter-gatherer non-religions as the opposite of the Western scientific non-religion, which arbitrarily views the universe as being made up of dead matter and energy, and tends to negate such concepts as spirit or will. On balance, this can be described as an ultimately non-falsifiable belief that is just as mystical as hunter-gatherer belief systems, with its rituals of dissection and categorization instead of rituals of transformation and reciprocity. Empirical evidence on its side certainly includes proof of a chemical difference between a rock and a toad (something of a non sequitur within a hunter-gatherer worldview), whereas empirical evidence against it, to be fair, should include the way scientific belief systems and the social structures they animate are interrupting and destroying the planetary life support systems, or the inferior record with regards to human health that scientific societies have in comparison, not to statist monotheistic societies, but to nomadic animist societies. [177]

However, even if we accept a distinction between spirituality and religion, the correlation between atheism and statelessness ends with hunter-gatherer societies. Numerous stateless societies that have practiced sedentary agriculture, from Crete to Southeast Asia, have worshiped gods, though heterodox beliefs, female deities, localized deities, or non-hierarchical pantheons distinguish them from the ordered, patriarchal religions of states.

The fact that the spiritual grammar of hunter-gatherers has typically been incompatible with that of sedentary states might present another reason why state conduct towards hunter-gatherers is more often than not exterminatory whereas their policy towards stateless agriculturalists tends to be one of conquest and absorption. Surrounded by spiritually unintelligible hunter-gatherers, a proto-state with limited coercive powers has few options other than to displace them or respect their autonomy. Surrounded by stateless but sedentary and god-worshiping communities, the proto-state might easily devise the innovation of a system of symbolic production as a way to attract and convert its neighbors. The godless, nature-worshiping spirituality of hunter-gatherers, therefore, is not the only egalitarian belief system, but it is the most state-resistant.

The necropolis of the Mycenaeans, in this light, was not a “dead city” but a vital site of production. Whereas the commoners were buried in anonymous pits or shafts, the elite were buried in special tombs with descending paths of access that brought one closer to the underworld. Such architectural works, a short walk away from the settlements of the living, would be necessary to turn elite ancestors into intermediaries with the gods.

The building of pyramids and ziggurats in the Andes, in Egypt, and in Sumer attests to the organization of mass labor. However, the history of infrastructure development in both state and stateless societies leaves no doubt that such labor organization could be horizontal or vertical, an inconvenient fact most historians leave out. For our present purposes, the most relevant feature of these state-forming construction projects is what they tell us about the nature of power in early states.

A brief jaunt through the progression of state architecture is telling. When the bourgeoisie wrested control of the Western state away from the aristocracy, they financed the construction of gaudy yet beautiful buildings in the city centers—town halls, parliaments, train stations, opera houses, stock exchanges, and so forth—to demonstrate their greatness and their legitimacy, manufacturing a pedigree pointing back to the mythical origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece and Rome. Nowadays, when the state capacity for surveillance, domination, and coercive force is unequaled in the entire history of our species, the state in particular and the ruling class in general are incapable of constructing anything beautiful. Though more people than ever before go to train as architects, institutional buildings are insultingly ugly while the buildings of the rich are at best tacky and tasteless. The only impressive things present-day states are capable of building, things like supermax prisons or pit mines the size of cities, are kept out of view because the mere sight of them would tempt any sane, healthy person to go on a shooting rampage.

On the contrary, though I find power and its ostentation to be disgusting, I have to admit that elite architecture from earlier eras is both impressive and beautiful. This attention to effect speaks volumes about the weak grasp early states had on coercive power, and the relative importance of symbolic power. With few exceptions, early states built monuments that tended to impress viewers.

In Sumer, as in the Andes, proto-states built great pyramids that were initially open structures used in spectacular public rituals. It seems that in at least some cases, these pyramids preceded the cities that grew up around them, meaning that a concentration of spiritual power enabled a concentration of political and economic power. In 3000 BCE at the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, elites ordered the building of the White Temple on the ruins of an earlier temple, atop the ziggurat dedicated to the Sky God. This temple was covered in precious gypsum stone, which reflects sunlight, and positioned so that it would be visible from across the Sumerian plain. It was a master stroke of status competition with other city-states, attraction of subjects from independent farming settlements, assertion of a privileged relationship with divinity, and a legitimation of its owners’ claims of privilege; in a phrase, it enabled the production of symbolic power. What’s more, the construction of closed temples for elite use allowed public religion to take on a secretive character, necessary for the professionalization of a priestly class and conducive to maintaining the privileges of a hierarchical society’s upper strata. Deprived of the full exercise or knowledge of their society’s spirituality, the lower strata could not hope to fully exercise or understand political power.

In the pre-Warring States era of ancient China (1100–500 BCE), the growing bureaucracy was complemented by a bureaucratic religion. Just as there was a detailed hierarchy of greater and lesser functionaries and officials, there was a hierarchy of greater and lesser gods and spirits; just as every legal process required a specific bureaucratic ritual, every spiritual supplication had its corresponding sacred ritual. In this way, the Chinese state naturalized its structures and also trained its subjects to honor and participate in them. [178] The divine state and its procedures were a mirror of the earthly state and its procedures; both were organized in formal bureaucratic hierarchies. [179] This is a striking iteration of religion as a state-building spectacle, a mechanism we will see repeated in other examples in this chapter.

But more than just a spectacle, Chinese state religion was also a system of organization. Joseph Needham argues that the I Ching, which apparently contradicts the scientific tendency of administrative thought in the ancient Chinese states, was useful because:

its symbolic system of ritualized divinations closely mirrored the administrative organization of neo-Confucian bureaucracy […and] constituted a structural framework for organizing and classifying diverse phenomena, a “giant filing system” that enabled all ideas and concepts to be neatly stylized and “fitted in to the [bureaucratic] system without difficulty.” [180]

Religion also gave the ancient Chinese states the rupture they needed to break with the earlier family and clan system of hierarchical but non-state social organization. Local spirits and divine ancestors were preserved and honored within the state religion; they were included, but at a lower ranking. “Psychologically, then, the relationship of the people to their ancestral spirits closely resembled the contractual bond of interdependency linking clients to their patrons.” [181]

Communities or family groups could appeal to their village spirits and ancestors to act as protectors or intermediaries vis-à-vis the more powerful, distant, and impersonal gods and spirits that form an intermediate strata, corresponding to administrative organs linking the districts to the imperial court, which found its own parallel in the court of the Jade Emperor. Though markedly hierarchical, the Chinese pantheon was not static; on the contrary it was itself a site of power plays. The earthly emperor recognized specific deities as deserving worship, “bestowed title and rank upon them and occasionally demoted them again.” [182]

In the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1000 BCE), state power was consolidated in ancient China. The “hereditary theocrats,” ruling “under a conditional grant of divine authority,” eventually secured an absolute monopoly on access to the sacred and established fixed rules for the secession of power. [183] In subsequent dynasties, the monarchs cemented their absolute right to rule, and the rituals of order and the concept of the Mandate of Heaven were secularized, as discussed previously.

The example of the Roman early state provides another interesting example. The Romans seemed to observe a strict formalism, a duty in the observance of rituals, sacrifices, and celebrations. Theirs was a spirituality of numbers and binaries that took on a simultaneously religious and administrative significance. The symbolic preference for the number thirty even determined an ideal social organization in thirty curiae. It would be easy to dismiss their fetishization of certain numbers and binaries, their insistent adherence to rites and observances, as a primitive anomaly within an otherwise efficient and militaristic social organization. It can only be explained by superstition. Yet the concept of superstition is inappropriately applied in the study of other societies, because it amounts to a voluntary blindness, an arrogant faith that all one’s own practices and beliefs are reasonable, and that any divergent practices and beliefs in another society can be immediately chalked up to error, rather than functional and reasonable elements of their particular history.

In the case of the Romans, theirs was not an irrational, intuitive faith in the signs of the world. Rather, Roman superstition and hierurgy had a disciplined, administrative character. Though empathetic speculation may be decidedly unscientific, it can also help us break the Otherness of different cultures and, at the risk of projecting, shed a little light on practices that to us seem alien and to their practitioners were perfectly reasonable. Hypotheses must be tested and abandoned as the evidence requires; nonetheless, much-maligned imagination is a driving force of theory.

Reading up on the early Romans, one gets the sense that their symbolic traditions and religious observances were adhered to with an iron will, as though they were subconsciously aware that they lacked other social glues. And the fervor with which it seems, from this great distance, they dedicated themselves to sacrifices and bacchanalia reminds me of frat boys, each trying to be the loudest in singing the school fight song, observing all the rituals unquestioningly, getting drunk every weekend as though it’s their duty, subsuming traumas received and most of all inflicted, becoming effective trauma machines. In the end, they were probably not so different from us, and their adherence to seemingly arbitrary symbolic and spiritual rituals probably gave them a great advantage in surviving a world of growing political conflicts, and founding a new society that would quickly grow far beyond the scales that kinship and other traditional systems could hope to organize.

Spiritual power played a role in engineering a rupture with the value systems of earlier, non-state societies. The bellicose, patriarchal Mycenaeans give us a dramatic example of this. Conquering the Cretans but preserving their most important spiritual and commercial centers, like the temple complex at Knossos, the Mycenaeans communicated their dominance with the symbol of a warhorse placing its hoof on the head of the cosmic bull, which for the Cretans was a hermaphroditic symbol of fertility. The ritual killing of bulls in the Iberian Peninsula may represent a similar symbolic rupture, an intentional offense against an earlier society. The pre-Indo-European Basques preserve alternate, bull-centered rituals in which the animals are the protagonists and not the victims, though after centuries of co-optation by a patriarchal society, the running of the bulls is now just another form of testosterone tourism devoid of any respect for the beasts.

Ecocentric and matrifocal peoples who inhabited the lands the Indo-Europeans would come to conquer, such as the Naga tribe in India, frequently worshiped snakes, which the Indo-Europeans generally held to be evil. Consequently, a negative snake symbolism is common throughout Indo-European cultures.

Symbolic inversions relating to femininity and maternity also have a special place in processes of state formation. As mentioned in Chapter IX, divine ancestors who were worshiped in order to legitimate earthly hierarchies were nearly always men. The father as founder and creator is a symbolic replacement for the mother creator commonly worshiped in stateless societies (though it must be mentioned that, contrary to the assertions of essentialist feminist historians, earth mothers and great spirits were frequently hermaphroditic, in the first case, or impersonal and genderless in the second). Given the frequency with which divine male ancestors are creators of some kind (founders of cities, progenitors of lineages, discoverers of fire or metallurgy), patriarchal ancestor cults allow men to co-opt and monopolize the symbolic realm of creation.

Men’s monopolization of spirituality usually did not occur in a clean break with earlier belief systems, just as the Catholic Church could not abolish pagan gods, but had to turn them into saints. Many statist priestly classes co-opted the feminine symbols of earlier spiritualities. [184] The priest’s gown reflects a forgotten evolution by which men, to act as spiritual intermediaries in certain societies, dressed as women.

The early states of the Congo basin developed a unique pathway for the patriarchal co-optation of feminine symbolic power, with female co-rulers legitimizing the power of the male paramount rulers.

One of the characteristic features of the Congo basin early states was the institute of women-corulers […] True, they had lost their influence rather considerably by the end of the 19th century. But their reverence persisted, and women-corulers had their own courts and guards. As for the Balunda, the lukokesha had even her own villages, which were not under the rule of the mwata-yamvo [male paramount ruler]. Her word was crucial in nominating a new paramount ruler and in many other cases. During ceremonies she was seated in the most honorary place and had the first word. [185]

Such an institution reflects the relative weakness of patriarchy in the Congo states. In fact, here we glimpse a phenomenon that deserves further investigation: why were the pre-colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa so soft and non-imperialistic in comparison to other states? Were other early states—most of which disappeared or progressed before they could be documented by outside observers—equally soft? Is it an ethnocentric reading of the archaeological evidence that has given us a more patriarchal, brutal, and autocratic image? Did the well-known anarchic character of many sub-Saharan African societies hold developing states in check, forcing them to sustain themselves through the organization of trade rather than engineering the exploitation of their own subjects?

In any case, the gender complementarity [186] of many African societies was eroded by European colonial influence. [187] British, French, Portuguese, and other colonizers saw patriarchies where none existed. By only dealing with male institutions and leaders, and ignoring or even annihilating female institutions and leaders, they gradually created the very societies they had projected.

Another method of symbolic rupture concerns the figure of foreign rulers. Multiple West African states were founded by members of the royal families of neighboring societies, or by expatriates, who lived for a time with the royal families of neighboring societies. [188] These neighboring societies may or may not have themselves been states, and the royal families referenced in so many legends of politogenesis may have been ruling dynasties, or simply families with a high status. It is also perfectly feasible that returning expatriates or traveling foreigners might have claimed connection to distant royalty in order to awe locals and justify a special position of leadership not supported by kinship relations. Multiple legends mention state founders who arrive with royal devices or other symbols of divine grace and leadership. These may have been symbols endowed with that exact meaning in the neighboring society (in which an elite or ruling family was sending out franchise-makers with their blessings), or they may have been strange tokens, the meaning of which the errant state-makers exaggerated or invented.

The operative factor is the mystification of legitimacy. Most societies produce and justify status as a direct relationship to autochthonous power structures. Yet the expatriate or foreign would-be ruler has no immediate power or claim to social status within the society they come to rule. Instead they enjoy the same mystique as an “Indian princess” or the King of Siam might have in the West. By claiming a royalty status that is foreign, and thus exotic, and thus boundless, such a ruler can effectively win the loyalty of the preexisting hierarchies that would otherwise resist state formation. His lack of status becomes a stroke of good luck from a statist viewpoint. Lacking a role in the existing hierarchies, he can place himself atop all the lesser leaders, who would never tolerate their competitors (other chiefs, other high-status families) gaining power over them, and who are also prevented from amassing power by traditional inverse hierarchies. Such hierarchies, common to stateless societies, allow low-status people to keep their leaders in check. But they might have limited effect on someone completely external to the social structure. With the help of a symbolic interruption that exotic tokens of royalty might provide, a foreign ruler can justify the new position that they occupy at the top of a social pyramid. In fact, it might be the masses or the lesser leaders themselves who put the new king on the throne, in order to gain an advantage in their own power struggles.

For such a pyramid to morph into a state, however, the ruler would need a bureaucracy and a legion of officials, appointed from the top, capable of reworking and controlling the entire social hierarchy. Such an evolution might take generations, and usually requires another factor (warfare, an increase in trade, the arrival or development of a new religion) for the ruler to overcome the autonomy that other layers in the hierarchy preserve. Or, the pyramid might never become a state, either persevering as a stable weak hierarchy or shedding its upper layers to return to a relatively anti-authoritarian social organization.

The Bini provide a good example of why statist religion needed to enable the centralization of spiritual power. Among the Benin chiefdoms, senior leaders of the community councils were limited by their sacral and ritual duties, which prevented them from acting effectively as profane leaders (organizing military and administrative tasks). In the more powerful chiefdoms, therefore, enigie appeared to perform the profane administrative and militaristic functions that the edionwere, the spiritual leaders, could not. However, there remained an ambiguity between the two types of leadership, and the Bini society never developed a successful military engine that might have opened a path to politogenesis. The odionwere, the spiritual powers he mobilized, and the ancestors he represented, were tied to his local community, and therefore were not effective for complementing or surpassing the profane power of the onigie at the chiefdom-wide or macropolitical levels. [189] The two types of leadership, organized at different scales, could not complement each other; given the relative importance of religion over warfare, the profane leaders lacked the legitimacy to surpass the spiritual leaders; and given the decentralization of ritual practices in individual communities, the spiritual leaders lacked the scale of organization to surpass the profane leaders. A localized spirituality, therefore, amounted to a fatal barrier to state formation.

Changes in the organization of political power were often accompanied by changes in cosmologies and divine pantheons. On multiple continents, from Sumer to the Nile to the Andes, the figure of the Sun God reflects the growth of state authority. From a diverse and potentially horizontal pantheon of deities, the Sun God emerges as a supreme god, parallel to multiple political and spiritual processes: the centralization of state authority with supreme rulers dominating lesser rulers; the monopolization of spirituality by a professional priestly class, who need to streamline the pantheon and dilute the importance of localized deities outside their control; and the alienation of spirituality, with the ascendance of a supreme god who is apart from and above the earth and his worshipers. In Southeast Asia, the Buddha played this role, and state formation was in part the process of subordinating local deities to this supreme symbol of enlightenment. [190] In other historical moments, a single god replaces a diverse pantheon to achieve the same effect, as when the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten promulgated the worship of a single deity, Aten. Though the figure of a sun god certainly lends itself to a statist mentality, there is no essential or intrinsic symbolic relationship. Divine hierarchies frequently change as different factions gain power over the state apparatus. Even a goddess can be used by a state-building project, as when Isis became preeminent in the Egyptian pantheon. The common feature is the establishment of a supreme figure that can order the spiritual universe in a hierarchical fashion.

According to Andean oral culture, the Tiwanaku state was abandoned or overthrown in part because “the other gods were crying,” which is to say people decided to decentralize their spiritual practices so as to again honor the localized deities who had been abandoned in favor of the Sun God controlled by the state. [191]

In the stateless, horizontal model, shamans, witches, and medicine men were generally responding to a calling; to exercise their office they had to demonstrate some talent and be recognized by the community. Their primary activity was in relation to the community and not in relation to other shamans. In contrast, a professionalized priestly class could be self-regulating, and was probably hierarchical from the beginning. At sites of spiritual accumulation—settlements built around sacred shrines or monuments—holy men could come together in larger numbers, they could write the rules of their own conduct, and they could determine the norms of the sacred site and eventually of the surrounding settlement. They could also determine who could be included within their cult, enabling the creation of elaborate hierarchies that new initiates would accept in exchange for access to privilege and status.

The concentration of spiritual power enabled the centralization of political power, putting a vital component of state formation in place. A professionalized class of priests, supported by donations, sacrifices, and religious offerings but lacking anything beyond symbolic and spiritual power over the rest of society, created a ritual arena in which greater levels of hierarchy could be performed. Professional rituals were a stage that accustomed profane spectators to the leadership roles that played out among the priests. Those priests, within their closed cult, could enact far more intense expressions of authority and obedience than they could ever impose on the rest of the community. But because religion is spectacle, their very performance of internal authority ended up reshaping ideas of hierarchy reproduced in the society at large.

It is no coincidence that supreme rulers in many early states were also the heads of religious hierarchies. In the proto-city-states of Sumer, the rulers were priest-kings. In the Baluba, Bakunda, and Bakuba states of Central Africa, “The paramount ruler was both an embodiment of a divine spirit and a priest.” [192] We find another example in East Asia:

As the principal earthly diviner of heavenly intent, the king himself was the supreme high priest of ancient China. He was Son of Heaven, Tianzi, ordained by the God on High, Shang Di; and it was his duty to offer appropriate, timely sacrifices to the various deities as well as to accurately read and react to heavenly portents so as to ensure the well-being of his people. [193]

Written languages and number systems play a special role in state formation. Though they are not always linked to states, writing and mathematics are most likely to appear in statist societies, whereas societies in resistance to state domination, though they are perfectly capable of developing or maintaining both, are most likely to give them up, using illiteracy as a preventive tactic against bureaucracy and the hierarchy that accompanies it. [194] What is most curious, within the considerations of the present chapter, is that in early states on multiple continents, writing and number systems played a dual purpose, finding their greatest use in both religion and trade.

In Sumer, Egypt, the Andes, and China, early writing systems recorded religious beliefs and trade balances. In the case of Sumer, Mesoamerica, Crete, and continental Europe, writing was developed before the emergence of supreme leaders and before the prolific use of writing to record their deeds—the predominant notion of history up until the present day. Written records may be seen as a simple convenience from the standpoint of a merchant, and the existence of writing in the stateless, mercantile civilizations of the Indus River Valley and ancient Crete attest to this pragmatism. But as far as religion was concerned, writing gave priests the possibility to “classify” cult beliefs, to develop a measurable body of knowledge that could be systematically imparted to novices, and to secure a special role within emerging power structures as scribes and chroniclers.

We might assume that number systems and early mathematics were exclusively pragmatic in their social usage, but in fact, in early states they enjoyed a mystical status and a considerable symbolic power. If we accept what might appear to be a commonsense division between religion and commerce, then we can again assume that for the merchants, numbers were but a pragmatic means for measuring debt and production. However, the other principal use of early mathematics was in complex architecture, which in the case of Sumer, Egypt, the Andes, and perhaps to a lesser extent China, meant almost exclusively the construction of buildings of religious significance. The figure of the architect as public servant building secular buildings as a trade emerged much later. Many of the first state-employed architects may have been priests and religious men. The priest-architect who designed Egypt’s first pyramid, Imhotep, is better remembered than the pharaoh who was buried there; in fact, Imhotep was immortalized as a god.

In Tiwanaku, a pre-Incan civilization in the Andes, numerology was fundamental to the religious order. Three was an important number, because it enumerated the elements (water, earth, and sky). Four was important for the four directions. Their sum is seven, another important number for the Tiwanaku priests. Seven times seven is forty-nine. Tiwanaku religious architecture often includes rectangles of forty-eight elements, a nice round number, the product of twelve times four (or three times four times four). Forty-eight reaches its perfection at forty-nine, representing the forty-eight leaders of Tiwanaku’s ideal spiritual/political organizational scheme, plus the supreme leader or god.

The Mayan calendar is another iteration of the spiritual importance that states place on numbers. The cosmological belief that time was cyclical and that the same events occurred on the same dates of different calendar cycles was a driving force in how Mayan states recorded—and fought over—history. For the Mayan elite, recording events ensured a “perpetual cycle in the future and on the contrary, to destroy a monument signified to destroy the future.” When one Mayan kingdom was defeated by two rivals, they engraved the story of their victory in a hieroglyphic stairway. When the first kingdom got its revenge fifty years later, they rearranged the engraved stones “to create a historical and chronological nonsense.” In sum, “It was very important for [the Mayans] not only to connect a contemporary fact with its mythological prototype but also to set an exact chronological distance between them.” [195]

Calendars were important to the early state in China as well.

Even such ostensibly secularized, scientific activities as calendrical calculation and meteorological observation had profound political implications. Thus the promulgation of China’s earliest lunar calendar—reputedly fixed by Shang dynasty rulers—was aimed less at responding to the immediate economic needs of farmers (who in any event continued to regulate their activities primarily by the onset of floods, the coming of rains, and the helical rising of certain stars) than at satisfying the ritual requirements of charismatic, sacrally-oriented dynastic elites. [196]

What if the overlap between the interests of merchants and priests in multiple early states is no coincidence? I believe that what may be the most common model of primary state formation is based on the consolidation and centralization of interregional networks in which no practical distinction existed between spiritual and material commerce. This is the sacred commerce state. In such a model, commerce cannot be characterized as a mercantile concern motivated principally by profit. To understand the model, we have to imagine a world in which the pilgrimage and the trade venture are potentially indistinguishable; in which priests are also scribes, accountants, surveyors, architects, insurance agents, and brokers; in which holy sites are also meccas of artistic and artisanal production; the most valuable goods are those with spiritual and symbolic significance; and temples or temple grounds also serve as markets for trade goods.

The sacred commerce state is the one that captures such a network of spiritual and material commerce, instrumentalizes and bureaucratizes the professional religious order that already exists within the network (the ruling class and the instigators of politogenesis will probably emerge from the priestly order, or otherwise be a charismatic warrior-king and entourage who obtain its good graces), centralizes the network and its productive processes, and impels an expansion of symbolic production. Some of the best-known early states may be examples of this model.

Dating to around 4000 BCE, Uruk was the first city in the world. Prior and also contemporaneous to Uruk, the Fertile Crescent was filled with small farming settlements going back several thousand years to the development of agriculture in the region between 10,000 and 8000 BCE. In the centuries before and after the founding of Uruk, these settlements tended to contain small shrines, governed over by ensi, or priest-kings, assisted by a council of elders. They constituted a weak central power with a primarily religious authority, probably backed by age and lineage hierarchies.

Around 4000 BCE, a ziggurat or pyramid was built to the Sun God An at Uruk, parallel or even previous to the growth of that settlement as a city. Other cities arose in the region, such as Eridu. Between 3400 and 3000 BCE, increasingly elaborate temples were built, often atop the ziggurats and often atop the ruins of old temples. The presence of ruined or demolished temples suggests changing and even opposing religious beliefs, whereas the growing prevalence of closed structures of worship (temples commanding the previously open platforms of the ziggurats) suggests the development of professionalized, elite, and secretive religious institutions. Temple construction, using stones quarried as far as sixty kilometers away, suggests regional trade and a costly emphasis on religious power. Simultaneously, writing was developed, with the first engraved tablets dating to around 3500 BCE, and a functional ideographic writing system dating to 3100 BCE. Early writing in Sumer was used to record religious and commercial information, and later to record the histories of supreme rulers.

Around 2900 BCE, great changes took place in the Fertile Crescent. Many earlier buildings were destroyed, and the new, fortress-like buildings suggest conditions of warfare. A nine kilometer city wall was built at Uruk, whose dominance was undermined by other emerging city-states. The first historically attested supreme ruler in Sumer, Enmebaragesi, who ruled from the city of Kish, appeared in 2600 BCE. From this time forward, though probably starting earlier, the polities of Mesopotamia were slave societies based on the hyper-exploitation of agricultural laborers and the capture of workers from rival polities. At the time of Hammurabi’s law code (1780 BCE), Mesopotamian society is divided into men (full citizens), free men (dependents lacking full rights), and slaves (with the status of property). Within each of these categories were invisibilized subsets with few or no rights: women and children.

State power was increasingly secularized after 2900 BCE, as was the case in other states where power was initially almost exclusively spiritual in nature. Ensi, now the heads of city-states, were elected by national assemblies and had profane military duties in addition to ritual ones. The lugal, a supreme ruler who governed multiple cities (or at least tried to), was elected from among the ensi and was responsible for public actions though eventually, perhaps as religious power was detached from rituals and shrines and reattached to representatives of the state, the lugal came to be considered a god. Perhaps instrumental to this transition was the intensely symbolic location of sacrality in the physical accouterments of leadership, to the extent that a ruler could not exist separately from the signs of his authority. For example, “the scepter, the staff, and the nose-rope,” which symbolized the ruler as a “faithful shepherd,” were also considered to contain deities, as was the throne; meanwhile the flag and “the monument were the symbols of his power over the communities and the conquered territories where his monument was installed.” [197] Sometimes thrones themselves received offerings, perhaps connected to the worship of deceased rulers. As for the dais in the temple, originally it was the place reserved for the statue of a god, but subsequently it became the place in the temple where the ruler sat, again illustrating a direct transference of authority.

Nonetheless, the deification of the ruler did not translate into despotic authority. On the contrary, the ruler was expected to earn respect and heed counsel.

We know from the oldest royal inscriptions that Sumerian kings had to have remarkable force, huge energy, external appeal causing people’s love, worship and trembling, as well as to be ruthless to their enemies and to pay their special attention to gods’ and elders’ advice. [198]

Early in this sequence, power was predominantly symbolic and religious, and Uruk was unrivaled as the holiest and most awe-inspiring site. This position would also have given it vital trade advantages in the regional network, allowing it to become the home of artisans and merchants who would have gradually surpassed the farmers in symbolic and spiritual wealth. At this time, before the appearance of organized warfare and supreme rulers, the most elaborate buildings were communal structures rather than private palaces, and the sites of religious ritual (the ziggurats) were open-air structures, though their symbology was doubtlessly hierarchical and celestially oriented. With the greater concentration of spiritual power, a professionalizing priest class supported by religious offerings could monopolize the places of ritual and worship, changing the traditional belief systems to favor values of hierarchy and obedience.

Uruk’s dominance excited the jealousy of elites in other nascent cities, leading to warfare. However, the increase in hostility only intensified the unity of this authoritarian regional system, creating the possibility for the elite of one city-state to dominate the others, exercising a power that was not only symbolic but also coercive. The day-to-day glue of the regional system, however, was still based in the commerce of spirituality and goods.

The priests of Nippur, for example, traditionally conferred the kingship for the whole of Sumer. Nippur was the home of the sacred shrine of Enlil, the second most important god; the city had no other claim to power. It was built, and rebuilt, on a site especially prone to flooding, and the settlement was maintained at great cost to the inhabitants despite repeated water damage. It was, in other words, not a pragmatic settlement located to profit off some economic advantage, but a religious settlement located at a site of spiritual importance, and this importance was recognized by all the other cities in the regional system.

The Tiwanaku state formed in the Andes around 300 CE. Like the Inca state that followed it, it was a fusion of Quechua and Aymara cultures that monopolized the rich trade between the products of the jungle valleys in Las Yungas (tropical fruits and staples, medicines, feathers) and those of the high plateau, the Altiplano (potatoes, cereals, salt, wool). People practiced agriculture in this region already starting around 5000 BCE, and going back at least to 1500 BCE there was a small farming settlement at the site that would later become capital. Archaeological evidence from this settlement shows neither social divisions nor religious monuments, though trade in ceramics, obsidian, gold, and silver was practiced. Starting around 100 CE, it is believed that the Tiwanaku site took on significance as a spiritual center. It became the capital of the emerging state between 300 and 400 CE, and reached urban proportions around 600 CE. At its peak, the population of the capital city measured in the tens of thousands, and the three valleys that made up the center of the territory may have sustained a population in the hundreds of thousands or even surpassing a million. [199]

As in other regions, we see a relatively stable stateless period persisting for a long time after the development of agriculture and sedentary living, and a relatively rapid increase in hierarchy, stratification, and the centralization of power once an organized religious cult perfects the ability to shape the spiritual beliefs of the broader society.

Though at the empire’s peak the population density was remarkably high, this is not at all reflective of the conditions pertaining to the pre-state period, when the population was so dispersed that would-be elites faced a major barrier to the concentration of power. The ceremonial centers created by religious cults, therefore, had an important seduction effect, bringing together populations, at least temporarily, in regions with dispersed settlements. Temporary, celebratory gatherings at ceremonial centers were useful for trade, creating a momentary super abundance that are probably better conceptualized as giant regional parties than as markets, but they were not useful for sustained economic activity until such time as a large number of people could be captivated, convinced to settle in a proto-urban location. Accordingly, from a statist viewpoint, the most important function of these periodic ceremonial gatherings was to erect an ephemeral but recurring school, a central point where the emergent priestly class could impart spiritual lessons, influencing the worldview of the rest of the society in a way that eventually favored state formation.

Trade between the highlands, the jungle, and the coast long predated the state and the religious cult. Since people practiced a gift economy, goods were more likely to be imbued with spiritual significance than with any kind of quantitative exchange value. The necessary evolution for state formation, then, was from spiritual commoning, in which everyone had access to sacred acts of creation, artistry, and gift-giving, to fixed spiritual values allowing for a centralized process of spiritual production. Some of the most important trade goods circulated in the network eventually dominated and intensified by the Tiwanaku state were ritual items, which, by the very nature of their being ritualized, possessed a fixed rather than a subjective spiritual value. By changing the value paradigm, the emerging priests could make themselves indispensable to trade by controlling the very rites by which goods were fixed with a value. The new spirituality, therefore, had to negate the subjective—what is useful, what is beautiful (to me)—and manufacture a social consensus on what was objectively valuable. Value, in its earliest iterations, is not the product of a free market, but of a professional conspiracy.

The Tiwanaku elite lived within a sacred compound—built with a moat to give it the appearance of a floating island—that commoners were allowed into, it is believed, only during special ceremonies. Cult knowledge, such as images from creation stories, was recorded in engravings exclusively located on the inside of the compound. Religious rites were complex, involving hallucinogens that had to be carefully administered, astronomical knowledge, and human sacrifice and ritual disemboweling. Sacred elites monopolized commerce and redistributed goods across the entire society. They expanded their empire by establishing trade missions and state cults in neighboring societies, gradually winning their subordination through peaceful means, though they were not above attacking and stealing the religious monuments of defiant neighbors. Stolen monuments were invariably placed in a submissive position within symbolic religious arrangements back at the capital.

Around 950 CE, possibly in response to a climatic change reducing agricultural productivity, a large part of the population abandoned the theocratic state. Its temples had fallen to ruins by the time the Inca state arose.

One of the most rapidly emerging early states appeared along the Nile River during the Early Dynastic period of ancient Egypt. The standard theories cite gradual population growth leading to land shortages, warfare, and domination by the strongest chiefdom; or need for extensive irrigation to control flooding, but as Dmitri Proussakov points out, settlement patterns were actually irregular and population was low in Upper Egypt at the time of politogenesis, and there is no evidence that a general irrigation system existed at that time (drainage, in fact, appears to be the main infrastructural activity encouraged by the early state). All the supposed preconditions for state formation are lacking: a shortage of resources; an external military threat; or the influence of other states. [200]

The Nile Valley was populated by numerous independent chiefdoms that alternated between war and trade. Before the reign of King Narmer, one of those chiefs, there was little to suggest that any of them was on the point of erecting a state. The chiefdom centered at This—the home of the pharaohs who would eventually unify the Nile under one state—dominated Upper Egypt, but even there their authority was more reciprocal or status-driven than state-like. They did, however, excel in the use of large boats to transport collective work crews, soldiers, cargo, and the pharaoh himself in expeditions of a ritual, commercial, or military nature.

Around 3100 BCE, possible flooding and a rise in sea level seems to have sent a wave of ecological refugees out of the Nile Delta and into to Upper Egypt, Canaan, and other neighboring lands. Something on the scale of 120,000 people, with all their livestock arrived, in Upper Egypt, which was dominated by the Thinite pharaohs. Symbolically defeated and subordinated by King Narmer, they were “naturalized” and allowed to settle, providing a basis for state power.

Subjugation of such a multitude of people could not fail to result in unprecedented growth of [the] personal authority of Thinite rulers and to raise the military-economic potential of the “Thinite Kingdom”. For instance, the ‘captives’ might have been recruited to build Memphis, the future capital of Egypt, under Narmer’s successor Horus Aha [..] Archaeological excavations reveal the Memphis region to be rather densely populated at the earliest Dynastic times. [201]

But in a powerful showing of reciprocity, the totem of the Delta people, the hawk, was elevated to become the chief deity of the emerging state; Horus replaced Seth, the traditional god of Upper Egypt, in preeminence. [202] Such reciprocity is a sure sign that state authority had not yet been established and that Narmer, at least at the beginning of his reign, was the head of a chiefdom and not a state.

The organization and administration of such a large population, dislocated at least in part from its traditional community structures, would have provided a unique opportunity for bureaucratic innovation, also liberating the king from his chiefly role as the head of a single kinship group, and the representative of a single localized deity. We can assume that the refugees were not transformed into a permanent subordinate caste, as the Aryans did with the conquered Dasas, since it was presumably the Delta people who returned to (re)build Memphis—now under the authority of the This pharaohs—during the reign of the very next ruler. This likelihood seems to confirm that the capture of the 120,000 was a primarily symbolic victory and not a full military humiliation that might have wreaked the psychological consequences necessary for creating a new underclass.

As the Egyptian polity grew and took on the features of a state, it did not spread as a cohesive territorial unit but as a network of discrete enclaves amid weaker but independent chiefdoms. The capitals of the emerging Egyptian state, This and Memphis, were sites for the worship of deceased pharaohs, whereas the other enclaves, such as Hierakonpolis, Elkab, Koptos, Buto, and Sais, were each dedicated to a specific god or goddess. It was the River Nile that connected them all, allowing a rudimentary state to govern dispersed settlements separated by hundreds of kilometers and surrounded by neutral or hostile chiefdoms. [203]

Boats and ritual activities on the river had long been important to Egyptian tribal elites, and the use of large cargo or troop boats powered by many rowers allowed “selective colonization of the Nile banks, sailing safely to occupied territories” and “avoiding destructive overland battles.” The pharaoh, representing Horus, sailed the Nile twice a year in an important ceremonial procession, ensuring the administrative unity of the state and also reenacting a creation myth in which the divine ruler traveled the world with his possessions and “thus established the world order.” [204] Boats were even buried next to kings in their sacred tombs.

The Egyptian proto-state took advantage of its symbolic monopoly of the river (or at least a privileged access to the river that no chiefdom was powerful enough to obstruct) in order to monopolize trade between the enclaves, which in addition to displaying religious specialization also produced different material goods. By the time of Horus Den in the First Dynasty, the state owned numerous granaries and other storage facilities that conceded an advantage in trade and extra power when climatic changes or Nile flooding provoked scarcity. Simultaneous to this expansion, the number of administrative officials increased.

Commerce along the river in the form of ceremonial gift-giving played an important role in the spiritual expansion and political unification of the early Egyptian state. The This kings made lavish gifts and built temples honoring local deities in then-unconquered Middle Egypt or other autonomous stretches of the river. Similar to the expansion strategy of the Inca state and various Buddhist states of Southeast Asia, early Egypt did not rely exclusively on military conquest but sought religious alliances. In the temples, state gods were symbolically unified with local deities, rendering a sign of respect to the unconquered culture and also clearing the path for its integration. Granted, such gift-giving rituals are not typical of state authority, which is based on the command relationship; however, they do constitute a strategy for eventual incorporation. They also decrease hostilities that could interfere with the cohesiveness of the enclaves. Lesser chiefdoms that accepted the gifts were recognizing the Egyptian state as the uncontested power on the Nile. However, since the Thinite pharaohs had to give more valuable gifts than they received in order to preserve their supreme status, the semi-autonomous chiefs rose in status upon receipt of the gifts, especially relative to their own populations. In time, their accumulation of power allowed them to challenge the enclave state. [205] However, the symbolic power of the state was the motor of this crisis; though they were able to challenge state dominance, the other chiefdoms were also becoming more statelike. Pharaonic gift-giving was a cratoforming exercise that broke the power of the first state and laid the groundwork for the emergence of a larger and more unified state.

In the time of the early Second Dynasty, there was a political crisis that saw the fragmentation of the enclave-based state, with the result that the pharaohs, relocated in the larger city of Memphis, were cut off from their ancestral home at This. When the Egyptian state regained its force, it unified the whole of the Nile in one territorial body backed by the non-reciprocal force of military conquest, ending the enclave system and also the reliance on a spiritual, trade, and gift-giving network that followed the course of the river. Religious power remained central, as seen in the growth of the cult of the sun god Ra and the frenetic construction of pyramids to honor the divine pharaohs.

The Egyptian example is distinct from primary state formation in the Andes and Sumer. The position of a supreme ruler appeared earlier in the evolution of the Egyptian state than in these other examples. There may be elements of the royal court state model of politogenesis, with warfare between hierarchical chiefdoms enabling the emergence of a supreme ruler simultaneous to the establishment of spiritual trade networks; however, an anomaly among states, patriarchy in Egyptian society was remarkably light, with multiple women rulers. Massive monument building also followed rather than preceded state formation. It was not until the Third Dynasty that the first pyramids were built, though the Egyptian, Andean, and Sumerian pyramids make a poor comparison, since the pyramids of the former were not places of spectacular public worship but sites for the adoration and divinity-building of deceased pharaohs. It may be that the Nile itself provided the stage for the sort of spectacular ceremonies that Sumerian and Andean early states performed on their ziggurats and ceremonial platforms.

In any case, the models should be taken as rough patterns rather than strict typologies (the latter being a sort of production of knowledge in which classification and abstraction, with the advantage of allowing quantification, outweigh and obstruct observation and understanding). I think that this admittedly incomplete survey has shown that if our attention to detail is rigorous enough, we can describe as many pathways to state formation as there have been states in the history of the world. Overarching patterns, though, contradict a good deal of doctrine and help us to perceive the nature (and perhaps points of weakness) of the State.

But before we turn our attention to the lessons that might help us reclaim our freedom and our destiny from this leviathan that has dominated us for too long, I want to reach back a little further, to explore a few more questions that remain.