The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

In this lengthy chapter, the subtitle summarizes the authors’ project well: “Eurasia’s first urbanites—in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine and China—and how they built cities without kings.”

The authors investigate the rise of the earliest cities, debate the conventional notion that larger scale civilizations inevitably lead to inequality, and provide detailed evidence for early egalitarian arrangements in urban settlements. They also reflect on the ways in which societies—whether they be forager-based or urban—are always, in some sense, imaginary. That is, the people of any given group imagine themselves to be a part of a particular clan, or a member of a specific totemic band, or a citizen of a city or nation state: “Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality. And crucially, it exists in the mind after it becomes physical reality” (281). This is how most people refer to themselves, as “sons and daughters” of this tribe, or that state, “a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles, and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual” (281). Thus, the authors presume that various peoples can imagine a wide variety of possibilities for any given society.

The authors then turn their attention to the reasons for the rise of cities. Ecological factors, they determine, played a significant role. First, the great rivers around the world began to settle into relatively stable patterns about 7000 years ago; second, “the melting of polar glaciers slowed down” which “allowed sea levels the world over to stabilize” (286). Thus, humans were drawn to these places, with their rich soil and access to the sea; they could farm and forage, hunt, and fish. But because, at these sites, evidence is literally washed away, most historians and archeologists have neglected to note that cities came into existence much earlier than previously thought without the hierarchical organization and social stratification that eventually marked the rise of later cities, whose archeological remains are more accessible.

Next, the authors explore what archeologists call “mega-sites” in present-day Ukraine. They take issue with the label: “the very use of the term ‘mega-site’ is a kind of euphemism, signaling to a wider audience that these should not be thought of as proper cities but as something more like villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size” (289). They continue, arguing that these mega-site locations appear to be organized in complex and self-conscious ways, noting the residents’ ecological stewardship. The authors suggest that “[w]e should also consider if the inhabitants of the mega-sites consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation” (293).

Moreover, there is no clear evidence to suggest that there was a centralized authority. The houses are arranged in a circular fashion, with larger “assembly houses” (294) placed at intervals. Looking at modern Basque cities in southwestern France which are organized this way, the authors surmise that “such circular arrangements can form part of self-conscious egalitarian projects” (295), thus “ensuring relations of equality are preserved over the long term, with an almost complete absence of internal conflict” (296). While they admit that the actuality of this kind of egalitarian arrangement cannot be known with certainty about the prehistoric Ukrainian mega-sites, there is at least some evidence to suggest it might have been so.

Moving on to the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, the authors work to challenged received ideas here, as well. While there is evidence to suggest that Mesopotamia was, at one point, a “land of kings,” its earliest cities do not appear to have top-down hierarchical arrangements. The practice of “corvée” or “obligatory labour on civic projects exacted from free citizens” (299) reveals an egalitarian division of labor, at least during times of civic expansion or improvement. Governors and citizens, masters and slaves, men, and women alike all worked together to build and fortify their settlements. These “primitive democracies” were ruled, mainly, by councils and groupings of ordinary citizens—even if there were kings or autocrats in power: “In terms of day-to-day affairs, city dwellers (even under monarchies) largely governed themselves, presumably much as they had before kings appeared on the scene to begin with” (303). In other words, there was a remarkable degree of autonomy for citizens within these early cities.

Moving on to the famous Sumerian city of Uruk, the authors speculate that, while evidence is scarce, there is no reason not to suggest that, before the rise of an aristocratic class, the city was governed by assembly. The reason that evidence is scarce is two-fold: first democratic assemblies might have been (as in ancient Athens) held in open fields rather than in archeologically preserved structures. Second, there would not necessarily have been reason to keep written documentation of these kinds of gatherings. Just as the epic tradition flourished as an oral custom for thousands of years before being transmitted to parchment, so too might democratic processes and decision-making.

The authors also discuss what archeologists call the “Uruk expansion” (309). This describes the ways in which Uruk habits of trade eventually came to produce colonies throughout the region; this might be the earliest known example of the practice of colonization. In that process, as in the previous example of Californian and West Coast tribes from Chapter 5, certain groups of peoples resisted the acculturation of the Uruks. Thus, rather than follow the bureaucratic administration of the great city from afar, certain groups developed what became known as “heroic societies” (311) (as depicted in Beowulf with its grand mead halls). These societies are nearly always to be found “on the margins of bureaucratically organized cities” (311) and exist as a counterpoint to that kind of urban arrangement. Those “heroic societies” eventually begin to exhibit the hallmarks of aristocracy, predating the arrival of such markers of inequality to the cities themselves.

Next, the authors investigate the early civilization of Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus plain, in what is modern Pakistan, “South Asia’s first urban culture” (313). To illustrate another way in which urban settlements could take shape, the authors point out that this society appeared to be organized around a large central bath, rather than a central administrative building or aristocratic temple. As they note, “[a]ll this is redolent of the inequality of the caste system, with its hierarchical division of social functions, organized on an ascending scale of purity” (317). While the caste system “is about as ‘unequal’ as any social system can possibly be” (317), it is not altogether clear that this inequality extends to how the city was governed. That is, just because the organizing social principle is unequal, it does not necessarily follow that the political one was. The authors base their argument on the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that a warrior caste existed at Mohenjo-Daro, not to mention a lack of evidence for nobility or other dominant authority figures.

Finally, the authors make the case that some early cities rejected hierarchical rule and returned to a more egalitarian form of social organization. For this, they turn to China, in pre-dynastic times. On the far northern frontier—where the “barbarians” would later reside beyond the Great Wall (and, presumably, the reach of civilization)—a large city was unearthed. The archeological evidence suggests that it was once a prosperous, and hierarchically ruled, settlement—until it was not. Burial evidence reveals that commoners began to be buried with the (former?) elites, and a mass grave at the palace indicates a potential reprisal from the ruled. It is possible, the authors claim, that the citizens overthrew their unjust leaders and reverted to a more “equitable system of local governance” (326).

All these examples reveal that the governing organizations of the earliest cities was dynamic, differentiated, and more complex than previously imagined.

The authors shift their attention from Eurasia to Mesoamerica. As the subtitle, “The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas,” suggests, the authors find similar evidence in Mesoamerica to indicate that egalitarian forms of government existed in early cities, just as they did in Ukraine, Mesopotamia, and the Indus valley. They begin by exploring one of the earliest established urban settlements in the Americas: Teotihuacan.

The archeological evidence indicates that Teotihuacan was a large city of at least 100,000 inhabitants which managed to govern itself via assemblies and/or other “democratic” arrangements. For example, common features such as royal temples, sacrificial ball-courts, and calendrical ritual celebrations of rulers—the typical trappings of early Mesoamerican urban centers—seem “to have been strikingly absent” in Teotihuacan (330). In addition, “nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate—unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec” (331). This is, again, likely the result of schismogenesis, the process of defining one’s culture against that of another.

The authors also investigate the relationship that the Mayans had to the city of Teotihuacan. There is representation in the archeological remains of some Mayan cities of Teotihuacans as “stranger kings” (335). This is notable because there is no evidence of the portrayal of kings in Teotihuacan itself. The authors conclude that these representations reveal more about the Mayans than about the residents of Teotihuacan. Relying on additional evidence from later Mayan culture at Chichen Itza, the authors conclude that “we seem to be dealing with a feeling among the Maya that kings really should come from somewhere else” (335-36). Thus, pictorial representations of Teotihuacan kings in Mayan art should not be taken as proof that there were kings ruling the ancient city.

Instead, the authors argue, Teotihuacan provides archeological evidence that (like the example from China’s northern frontiers in the previous chapter) it began as a hierarchical city, complete with pyramids, temples, and top-down political arrangements but then shifted to a more egalitarian system of governance. Indeed, it appears as if “the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal,” building apartment-like dwellings of equal quality for all residents about two hundred years after the city’s inception (341). There were also “three-temple complexes” constructed throughout the city, “one for every 100 apartment blocks,” which suggests that assemblies or councils might have met there to make local governing decisions. This arrangement lasted for a couple of centuries before Teotihuacan was abandoned. The authors imply that the social fabric of what became an increasingly diverse city (as evidenced by the remains of different ritual and artistic traditions) frayed irrevocably. There is no evidence of foreign incursion or war.

Last, the authors explore the case of Tlaxcala, the city-state that eventually allied with the Spaniards and caused the downfall of the neighboring Aztecs. They rely on little known texts that counter the prevailing narrative, specifically the unfinished Crónica de la Nueva España from the mid-16th century. In this account, the deliberations among the citizens of Tlaxcala about whether to join the Spaniards or not are recounted as democratic debates. As the authors explain, these accounts are “not the workings of a royal court but of a mature urban parliament” (353). They also note that, part of the reason these accounts have been overlooked is the result of European bias. Certainly, the Amerindians could not have engaged in such complex and sophisticated deliberations. Tlaxcala, in contrast to the great Aztec cities of the day, was democratic and egalitarian in nature: “There is no sign of a palace or central temple, and no major ball-court” where human sacrifices typically took place (357). Tlaxcala appears to be a 15th-century incarnation of 4th-century Teotihuacan, at least in part—and it remained so up until the time of the arrival of the Europeans.