Graeber, an anthropologist and political activist, and Wengrow, a British archaeologist, are the authors of the recently published book The Dawn of Everything. A new History of Humanity, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp.704.
It is a book that has thrilled Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Noam Chomsky and many other American public intellectuals. The success was sadly marred by the untimely death of one of the two authors, David Graeber, just on the eve of the book's publication.
The work of Graeber and Wengrow is cut from the same cloth and has the same ambition as Sapiens. From Beasts to Gods: A Brief History of Humankind by Yval Noah Harari or Collapse. How Societies Choose to Die or Live, by Jared Diamond.
A few weeks after its publication The Dawn of Everything had reached third place in Amazon's best-selling books and the publisher proceeded to print another 75 copies in addition to the 50 of the first edition.
It is a 704-page volume with 63 pages of bibliography, which aims to summarize the historical significance of the new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that have never come out of specialized journals to land in the public debate.
Wengrow says the book shows "an entirely new picture of man's past and its possibilities that are slowly coming to light."
The "New York Times" in the "Opinion" section has published an extensive intervention by the two authors, taken from the book, entitled Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World. GoWare offers it entirely in Italian translation.
IS SOMETHING WENT WRONG?
Most of human history is irretrievably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for at least 200.000 years, but we have almost no idea what has been going on for most of that time.
In northern Spain, for example, in the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were made over a period of at least 10.000 years, between 25.000 and 15.000 BC Presumably, many important events took place during that period. We have no news on most of them.
This is of little importance to most people, as they rarely think about the vast time span covered by human history. There aren't even many reasons to do so.
This is usually done when one wants to know why the world is in chaos and why human beings so often treat each other badly. It happens when you look for the reasons for war, greed, exploitation and indifference to the suffering of others. Have we always been like this, or did something go terribly wrong at some point?
One of the first men to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality which he submitted to a competition in 1754.
THERE WAS ONCE IT IS NO MORE
Once, Rousseau wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childhood innocence, in a condition of absolute equality. These gathering groups were egalitarian because they were isolated from each other and their material needs were simple.
According to Rousseau it was only after the agricultural revolution and the rise of the cities that this happy condition came to an end. Urban life led to the advent of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost all the evil of human life appeared: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats who demand that we spend most of our life filling in forms.
Rousseau lost the essay contest, but the story he told became the dominant narrative of human history, laying the foundation upon which contemporary “big history” writers – such as Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari – built the stories of how our societies have evolved.
These writers often speak of inequality as the natural result of living in larger groups with surplus resources. For example, Harari writes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that, after the advent of agriculture, rulers and elites arose "everywhere ... living off the peasants' food surplus and leaving them only a mere subsistence."
THE COMPANY PACKAGE
For a long time, archaeological evidence – from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and elsewhere – seemed to confirm this. If there are enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show that there begins to divide into social classes.
Inequality can be seen emerging precisely in the archaeological record with the appearance of temples and palaces, inhabited by rulers and their kinship, warehouses and workshops, managed by administrators and supervisors.
Civilization seemed to be a package: it was misery and suffering for those who would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debtors, but it also allowed art, technology and science to develop.
This state of affairs has bred a wistful pessimism about the human condition encoded in common sense: yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might only be possible if you are a pygmy or a Kalahari bushman.
THE INEVITABILITY OF INEQUALITY
But if you want to live in a city like New York or London or Shanghai – if you want all the good things that come from the concentration of people and resources – then you have to accept the bad stuff too. For generations, these assumptions have been part of the story of the origin of the company.
The story we learn in school has made us more tolerant of a world where some can turn their wealth into power over others, while others are told their needs aren't important and their lives have no intrinsic value.
As a result, we are more inclined to believe that inequality is just an inevitable consequence of living in large, complex, urban and technologically sophisticated societies.
A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW
We want to offer a completely different picture of human history. We believe that much that has been discovered in recent decades, by archaeologists and others in related disciplines, runs counter to the common wisdom propounded by modern "big history" writers.
What this new evidence shows is that a surprising number of the world's first cities were organized along strongly egalitarian lines.
In some regions, we now know, urban populations governed themselves for centuries without any need for temples and palaces; in others, temples and palaces never surfaced and there is simply no evidence of an administrator class or any other type of ruling stratum.
It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not necessarily imply a particular form of political organization and is never found. Far from resigning ourselves to inequality, the new picture now emerging from humanity's deep past may open our eyes to egalitarian possibilities we might never otherwise have considered.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES
Wherever cities have emerged, they have defined a new phase in world history. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people first appeared about 6.000 years ago.
Conventional history says that cities developed largely through advances in technology as a result of the agricultural revolution, which set off a chain of developments that made it possible to sustain large numbers of people living in one place.
In reality, one of the first most populous cities appeared not in Eurasia – with its many technical and logistical advantages – but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-drawn transport, and very little in the way of metallurgy. or literate bureaucracy.
In short, it is easy to overestimate the importance of new technologies in setting the general direction of change.
MESOAMERICAN AND CHINESE CITIES
Almost everywhere in these early cities we find grand, self-aware declarations of civic solidarity such as the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns that clearly reflect some kind of urban-scale planning.
Where we have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens who refer to themselves simply as "the people" of a given city (or often its "children"), united by devotion to ancestors founders, to gods or heroes, to the civic infrastructure and ritual calendar.
In the Chinese province of Shandong, urban settlements were present more than a thousand years before the earliest known royal dynasties. Similar discoveries have emerged in the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centers of truly enormous size – bearing no evidence of monarchy or stratification – can now be dated as far back as 1000 BC, long before the rise of classical Maya kings and dynasties.
THE EXAMPLES OF THE UKRAINE AND MOLDOVA SITES
What held these first urbanization experiments together, if not a king, soldiers and bureaucrats? For answers, we could turn to some other startling discoveries in the interior grasslands of Eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities just as large and ancient as those in Mesopotamia.
The first date back to about 4100 BC While the Mesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, initially took shape around temples, and later also royal palaces, the prehistoric cities of Ukraine and Moldavia they were astonishing experiments in decentralized urbanization.
These sites were planned in the image of a great circle – or series of circles – of dwellings, with no buildings prominent or excluded. They were divided into neighborhoods with assembly buildings for public gatherings.
If all this sounds a bit dull or “simple”, we should keep in mind the ecology of these early Ukrainian cities. Living on the frontier of forest and steppe, the inhabitants were not only grain farmers and cattle breeders, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint and copper, and kept gardens within the city limits, consuming apples, pears, cherries , acorns, hazelnuts and apricots – all served on painted ceramics, which are considered among the best aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world.
NO HIERARCHY
Researchers are not unanimous about the kind of social arrangements all this required, but most agree that the logistical problems were enormous.
The residents certainly produced a surplus and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or fight for booty, but in eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites.
The real complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. A careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through local decision-making processes, in households and in neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration.
STORIES IGNORED
And yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites are almost never mentioned in the literature. When this happens, academics tend to refer to them as "megasites" rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they shouldn't be thought of as actual cities, but as villages that for some reason have sprawled out of bounds. in purely dimensional terms.
Some even refer to them as “overgrown villages”. How do you explain this reluctance to welcome Ukrainian mega-sites into the enchanted circle of urban origins? For anyone with even the slightest interest in the origin of cities has heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost none of Taljanky or Nebelivka.
COST OF HAPPINESS
It is difficult here not to recall Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. It is a tale of an imaginary city that has done without kings, wars, slaves or secret police.
We have a tendency, notes Le Guin, to dismiss such a community as "simple", but in reality these citizens of Omelas were not "simple people, they were not naive shepherds, peaceful nobles, bland utopians. They were no less complex than us."
The problem is only that we have a bad habit of "considering happiness as something rather utopian, if not trivial".
LeGuin was right. Of course, we have no idea how happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidanetske or Nebelivka were, compared to the lords of the steppes who littered the neighboring territories with mounds full of treasures, or even the servants ritually sacrificed at their funerals (albeit we can imagine).
And as anyone familiar with the novel knows, even Omelas' happiness had a moral cost that was difficult to accept if known.
THE CENTRAL DILEMMA: IS AN EQUALITY SOCIETY POSSIBLE?
But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have found ways to govern and feed large populations without the need for temples, palaces, and military fortifications—that is, without overt displays of arrogance and cruelty—are somehow less complex of those who have not taken a different path?
Why should we hesitate to deign such a place with the name of “city”? The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjacent regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, which is a considerably longer time period than most subsequent urban settlements.
Eventually they were abandoned. We still don't know why. What they offer us, meanwhile, is significant: it is further proof that a highly egalitarian society was possible on a large urban scale.
INEQUALITY OUT OF CONTROL
Why should these discoveries of a dark and distant past be important to us, people today?
Since the Great Recession of 2008, the issue of inequality – and with it the long-term history of inequality – has become a major topic of debate.
A consensus of sorts has emerged among intellectuals and also, to some extent, among the political classes, that levels of social inequality have gotten out of hand and that most of the world's problems stem, one way or another , by an ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
A very small percentage of the population controls the fate of almost everyone else and does so in increasingly disastrous ways.
Cities have become emblems of this state of affairs. Whether in Cape Town or San Francisco, we are no longer disturbed or surprised by the sight of ever-expanding slums – sidewalks filled with makeshift tents or shelters overflowing with the homeless and destitute.
AN IMPORTANT PRECEDENT
To begin to reverse this trajectory is an immense task. But there is a historical precedent for this too. Around the beginning of the common era, thousands gathered in the Valley of Mexico to found a city we know today as Teotihuacan.
Within a few centuries it became the largest settlement in Mesoamerica. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, its residents rerouted the San Juan River to flow through the heart of their new metropolis.
In the central district pyramids arose where ritual killings took place. What we might expect to see next is the construction of lavish palaces for warrior-rulers. Instead, the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path.
Around AD 300, the people of Teotihuacan changed course, redirecting their efforts away from the construction of large monuments and directing resources towards building high-quality housing for the majority of the residents who numbered around 100.000.
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
Of course, the past cannot provide immediate solutions to the crises and challenges of the present. The obstacles are daunting, but what our research shows is that we can no longer rely on the forces of history and evolution.
This has a number of important implications: first, we should be much less pessimistic about our future, given that the mere fact that large parts of the world's population now live in cities may not determine how we live, at least to the extent that we might assume today.
What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways of living.
The technology to support less centralized and greener urban environments – suited to modern demographic realities – already exists. The predecessors of our modern cities include not only the proto-megacity, but also the proto-garden city, the proto-superblock, and a cornucopia of other urban forms, just waiting for us to reclaim them.
In the face of inequality and climate catastrophe, they offer the only possible future for the world's cities, and therefore for our planet. All we lack now is the political imagination to make it happen. History teaches us that the better world we want to build existed before and could exist again".
. . .
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. A new History of Humanity, The New York Times, November 4, 2021
