When I received Dorothea’s book [see previous blog entry] from the University of Toronto’s compact storage facility.[1] I was rewarded in a way that I could not have guessed. In fact, the coincidence involved is so extreme that I hesitate to relate it, for fear of being thought a hoaxer.
What I had expected was that the grown-up girl of Millais’ painting would have written a conventional English Lady’s book of memoirs, and Victorian gentility, unrelated to my concerns. Instead, it turned out to be profoundly relevant to the discussion in the previous blog. Dorothea Thorpe, grown up to be Lady Charnworth, wrote about her hobby: collecting the hand-written letters of intellectual figures of the past which seem to her to reveal their characters, or bring alive the history of their times. Mere signatures, she stated flatly, did not interest her. Nor did the usual list of “worthies” (archbishops, landed gentry and generals). Her interest lay in precisely the kind of exploration and historical imagination that was the point of my blog entry! She was particularly interested in historians, philosophers, and economists. A prize of her collection was a series of letters connecting David Hume, William Richardson, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon. She wrote about the contents of the letters with charm and intelligence: “I shall never forget taking a document signed by Coleridge to the great literary man whom I have ventured to call my friend. He gave one glance at it and said ‘Ah, this was written at a very dark period of his life, you know’ — but that is just what I did not, and I felt as I always do when in reading Macaulay I meet with his heart-breaking schoolboy. This branch of erudition with regard to an autograph collection is naturally the hardest and slowest to come by and of course the rarest.” Macaulay, the author with which my little exploration began, makes several appearances. She refers to him as “warm and passionate, but often unfair” on the evidence of his letters. She reveals that her hobby began when, as a child, she was crippled by a carriage accident and confined to a couch for three years. This must have happened just after Millais’ portrait, just at the time when the Macaulay volume was presented to her. Her interests are relentlessly humanistic, and she seems attracted to the rebels and shit-disturbers. How could I not see a kindred spirit in this lady?
My little quest, starting in a Toronto bookshop, has folded upon itself in an intriguing way. In both science and the art of fiction, we strive to avoid introducing coincidences, but in real life they play a considerable role. This is one of the reasons that the study of history will never be well served by the rote application of formulaic theories and grand schemes of destiny.
Such schemes, in fact, are more likely to impede than to aid the application of historical imagination. Imagination, such as I exercised in the first part of this entry, remains a key element in exploring the past. The evidence we have of events in the past is always fragmentary, ambiguous, and itself the end result of many accidents.
A common failing of historians is to mistake the surviving evidence for the whole of the past, and to imagine that times and places which have left abundant documentation were by their nature richer, fuller and more important than times and places that have not. Accident has preserved for us more of the archives of Assyria than of Urartu and Elam, so shelves of books convey the impression of Assyria’s importance, while a few slim volumes belie the fact that Urartu and Elam were substantial places with substantial power and substantial influence. Specialists concerned with these areas will try to draw attention to this distortion, but usually to no avail. Celebrity cultures, like celebrity actors, will always fill up our minds disproportionately.
Because Athens is one of only a few ancient cities that left us a detailed record of its internal politics, a myth has gradually consolidated that it was absolutely unique in its political development. We must not dare guess that the thousands of cities we know existed across the ancient world might have had similar internal conflicts between proto-democratic and aristocratic methods of rule. For almost all of these cities, we have absolutely no record of their internal governance. But historians have been remarkably reluctant to propose that they might as easily have experience Athenian-style events as not. If ancient proto-democracy has not been assumed to be uniquely Athenian, it has been asserted to be uniquely Greek. That such events should be confined to a single linguistic group, when that group existed in intense economic, social, political and artistic interaction with a maze of physically similar small cities across the Mediterranean and Western Asia, is a rather peculiar assumption.[2] But it has been generally regarded as the “base line” assumption from which any other possibility must be argued uphill, so to speak. Even when forced to acknowledge that Ancient India also had republics, and their known history reveals precisely the same conflicts and outcomes, there is an ingrained resistance to the notion that similar processes might have shaped the internal politics of many of the thousands of cities that lay between them. It is as if future archaeologists found traffic court records from only Halifax and Vancouver, and concluded that the inhabitants of Toronto probably didn’t possess cars. As a matter of fact, as new records turn up, or old ones are interpreted with less blinkered approaches, hints of proto-democratic elements keep appearing in precisely the places that were assumed to be “naturally” monarchical and despotic. The records of Mari, a state in the upper Euphrates, reveal a long and intricate history of collective governance competing and sometimes integrated with centralized monarchical institutions, and, most significantly, they do not follow any cliché progression from “primitive” councils to “sophisticated” kingship.[3]
It has often been said that “history is written by the winners,” and a correlate of the accident of surviving evidence is the accident of sequence. In medieval Russia, two states vied for preeminence among the many Slavic principalities: Moscow and Novgorod. Eventually, Moscow won out over Novgorod. Moscow was a centralized monarchy, and since powerful monarchies, and then a monarchical dictatorship subsequently ruled over the land, it was taken as self-evident by many scholars that Russia was somehow preordained to be ruled by tyrants. But for centuries, the chief economic power, and most vibrant cultural center of Russia was Novgorod, which was a functioning republic of a unique sort. It even went so far as to develop a version of the Orthodox Church which popularly elected its bishops. This republic encompassed a vast territory and lasted for four centuries ― considerably longer than the United States has existed, or than Britain or France maintained any substantial national democratic institutions. But because of subsequent events, and not because of any balanced assessment of its scale and importance, Novgorod is conventionally dismissed as a mere curiosity, a tiny bit of irrelevant historical trivia. Historians will often blandly assume that its system of elected veche was “probably” a mere epiphenomenon of a rigid oligarchy, and that its democratic component was negligible or illusory. They will make this assumption without any effort to find out if this was the case. In fact, Novgorod’s republican institutions underwent as complex a story as those of Athens or Venice. The influence of the veche was deep. Its accomplishments, including large scale public works, were very impressive for any community in the middle ages.[4] Novgorod was able to fend off the Teutonic Knights and the Mongols, but in the end succumbed to Ivan the Terrible. This does not make its centuries of proto-democratic experiment unimportant, or its lessons irrelevant. Today, Novgorod is probably the most economically successful and liberal of the Post-Soviet Russian regions, though it was among the least-favoured at the time of the Soviet collapse. It seems that it’s local leadership chose to identify symbolically with the Medieval republic, and used that symbolism to “sell” liberal reforms, as well as to fuel their own confidence and determination.[5] The “destiny” card was played in reverse: Look what submission to Moscow cost us in the long run, it was argued, when we had the right idea in the beginning. Some post-Soviet Russians have decided that Novgorod represents the “real” Russian heritage, and not Romanov-Soviet autocracy. Of course, neither is any more or less real than the other. In the long run, all humans will see that they can draw on a heritage of reason and democracy, because it is all “ours”, wherever we happen to live.
But in the meantime, our ability to imagine the past (We will always be imagining it, not recreating, reconstructing, or “knowing” it, because these are impossible) remains fettered and crippled by an over-reliance on unexamined formulas. The most persistent of these is the false analogy of social evolution. Historians, archeologists and economists often profoundly misunderstand the biological evolution that they think they are reproducing in the concept of “cultural evolution.” They draw their ideas of “evolution” from a cartoon version of biology that was never, in fact, employed by biologists. In biological evolution, there is no fixed sequence of “stages” (in fact, there are no “stages” at all). Consequently, the notion of fixed “evolutionary” stages for cultures, civilizations, and other nebulous collectivities, is also a cartoon. In that sad cartoon, democracy is always assigned a “primitive” status. Most archaeologists and historians automatically repeat a litany in which “primitive” egalitarian institutions give way in a fixed “evolutionary” sequence to “complex” monarchy and caste divisions. Cities are routinely defined by “division and specialization of labour” and “hierarchies of wealth and status”, as well as “monumental building” — temples and palaces felt to be the product of such ranking.
The trouble is, neither the historical and archaeological record, nor modern anthropology support this cartoon. While European archaeologists take any constructed object larger than a pillow to be proof of direction from an aristocracy or powerful chieftains (they are always telling us how many man-hours had to be administered by these high-mucky-mucks), North American anthropologists have no trouble pointing to identically complex projects which we know were routinely accomplished with conciliar direction and task-specific managers who held no generalized political power. The notion that non-urban societies do not have craft specialization is nonsense. Let’s look at an assortment of native societies on the Great Plains of North America, for example. Nobody would accuse the Lakota, Blackfoot, or Plains Cree of being “urban”, or of being ruled by monarchs. But in Plains societies, almost all crafts were the product of specialists, often entrepreneurs who undertook production to enrich themselves by supplying everyone else, often organized into guilds with entrance fees and regulations, and often producing not only for internal trade, but for export. Most aspects of the “evolutionary” cartoon have been exploded over and over again, but it still remains a powerful force constraining our ability to imagine the past.
I’ll give you a particularly annoying example of this constraint. I recently read, with great pleasure, a work on the origins of the Indo-European language family, focusing on the prehistory of the Ukraine. The book is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, by David W. Anthony.[6] Don’t get me wrong. I have a bone to pick, but it is not about the main issues of the book, which is a brilliant bringing together of current evidence on the origins of Indo-European speech. It succeeded in changing my mind dramatically. For decades, a debate has gone on between the position identified with Marija Gimbutas, who saw the Indo-European languages as originating among horse-back warriors of the Ukraine, who spread as conquerors in all directions during the Bronze Age, and the position of Colin Renfrew, who saw the I‑E family as originating in Anatolia and spreading at a much earlier time with neolithic agriculture. Anthony disposes of much of the superstructure of ideas that Gimbutas pasted onto her original thesis, but comes to the conclusion that its core was correct. He marshals the linguistic and archaeological evidence (to which much has been added in recent years) systematically and persuasively. I was inclined to lean towards Renfrew’s thesis, but now I’m totally converted. So I don’t wish to belittle David Anthony. My annoyance refers only to a small side-issue within this masterful work. It demonstrates how a brilliant mind and a careful scholar can still be misled by the “evolutionary” cartoon.
The early, presumably Proto-IndoEuropean speaking horsemen of the Ukraine interacted with an agricultural society, the Cucuteni-Tripolye, which built numerous villages along the Bug and Dniester rivers. After 4000 BCE, these villages began to expand dramatically in both size and number. There was significant technical innovation and production of flint tools and pottery, including whole towns engaged in mass production. Between 3700 and 3400 BCE, settlements that Anthony labels “super towns” appeared. The three largest covered 450, 250, and 250 hectares, respectively. Geomagnetic scans revealed more than 1,500 structures in the second largest site, alone. These seem to have been large, often two-storied houses, built close to one another in concentric oval rings, around a central plaza. It appears that these three “super towns” each housed twice the population of the “first cities” of Mesopotamia, such as Uruk, with which they were contemporary.
You would think that the discovery of communities twice the size of Uruk in Europe at this period would have been trumpeted to every horizon, and the accepted narrative of urban prehistory subjected to a much-needed overhaul.
Yet few people, outside of the handful of specialists in Anthony’s field, have even heard of these astonishing discoveries. More important, to my way of thinking, is this question: why does Anthony call them “super towns” and not “cities”?
Well, because they have no palaces or temples. In the cartoon of cultural evolution, you are supposed to have temples and/or palaces to be a city. Now this conventional view persists because it persists, justifying itself by its self-justification. Because it has been pounded into him in every text he has read in his life that cities emerge when “egalitarian” societies “evolve” into monarchies that build palaces, or priest-ruled temple states, then something which common sense tells you is a city has to be redefined as something else. Hence, “Super Towns”.
Here is Anthony dealing as best he can with the tension between orthodoxy and evidence:
Videiko and Shmagli suggested a political organization based on clan segments. They documented the presence of one larger house for each five to ten smaller houses. The larger houses usually contained more female figurines (rare in small houses) , more fine painted pots, and sometimes facilities such as warp-weighted looms. Each large house could have been a community center for a segment of five to ten houses, perhaps an extended family (or “super-family collective,” in Videiko’s words). If the super-towns were organized in this way, a council of 150–300 segment leaders would have made decisions for the entire town. Such an unwieldly system of political management could have contributed to its own collapse.
My instinct, confronted with this archaeological evidence, is not to conclude that something twice the size of Uruk, obviously engaged in large scale trade and manufacturing, is not a city, but that the conventional definition of a city must be wrong. By this absurd convention, neither Amsterdam nor New York are cities (Neither has ever been dominated by a palace or a temple). Instead, I would conclude that monarchy and temple priesthoods are not essential to the appearance and flourishing of cities, at any “stage” or era. Such institutions characterized Mesopotamian cities. Fine. But city life clearly emerged elsewhere without them.
Notice the assumptions built into Anthony’s last sentence. Elsewhere in the book, he conveys the impression that the Tripolye “super towns” were ephemeral. They only lasted several centuries (i.e., longer than the United States has). But Uruk and the other Mesopotamian “first cities” only lasted a few centuries before being reduced to dust. They were not replaced, at least not in the same location. Subsequent Near Eastern urban centers appeared elsewhere, further up the Tigris and Euphrates. The acknowledged “first cities” were no more durable than these unacknowledged ones. The idea that a consular system, if that was indeed how they were governed, was disastrously “unwieldly” is mere cartoon imagery, based on the assumption that monarchy or dictatorship are inherently more efficient than democracy. This is a belief that should be very doubtful to anyone who has payed attention to the events of the last century.
These urban communities, in what is now Moldavia and Western Ukraine, have every bit as good a claim to being the “first cities” as Uruk and Eridu have. True, they do not fulfill the unexamined conventional image of cities as the passive side-effect of aristocracy. Boo hoo. They do fulfill a rational definition of a city, as a settlement in which large numbers of people, far more than characterize a farming village, engage in technical innovation, internal as well as external trade, and the process of replacing imports with domestic production. As for their eventual demise and disappearance, a far more plausible explanation than the supposed shortcomings of consular government presents itself. Settlements of such size would inevitably have exposed themselves to those infectious diseases which thrive in high population density, and for which this pioneering population would have had no previous experience or immunity. It is especially significant that it took place in a region that was coming into close interaction with a new domestic animal, the horse. Domestic animals are the usual vectors of new plagues. The horse-herding and riding cultures of the adjacent steppes would have long acquired resistance to these diseases, giving them a strategic advantage over little cities precariously exposed in this location. This, and the climate change which subsequently parched the region, can easily account for the fact that these early cities declined and were not subsequently replaced. Blaming proto-democratic organization for it is lazy thinking.
Whether one is merely intrigued by a signature in an old book, or investigating the remotest antiquity, the exercise of the historical imagination is the most fun when it is freed from unquestioned orthodoxy, and has an openness to being surprised.
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[1] My thanks to Skye Sepp, for bringing it to me quickly.
[2] There’s a reluctance to impute polis institutions even for cities within walking distance of Greek ones, such as the cities of Lycia, even though the surviving epigraphic evidence strongly suggests it. The trump card of “probable” later Hellenistic influence is invariably played. See Bryce, Tevor R. — The Lycians in Literary and Epigraphic Sources [vol.1 of The Lycians: A Study of Lycian History and Civilisation to the Conquest of Alexander the Great] — Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen — 1986.
[3] Brilliantly presented in Fleming, Daniel E. — Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance — Cambridge U P — 2004
[4] Dejevsky, Nikolai J. — Novgorod in the Early Middle Ages: The Rise and Growth of an Urban Community — British Archaeological Reports; International Series 1642 — 2007
[5] Petro, Nicolai N. — Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod has Coped with Rapid social Change — Cornell University Press — 2004, describes these developments in detail. Petro makes the point that how interpretations of the past are used symbolically is relevant to a place’s future.
[6] Anthony, David W. — The Horse, the Wheel, and Language ― How Bronze-Age Riders from the Steppes shaped the Modern World — Princeton U P — 2007.
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