COMPLEXITY IN AGRARIAN CIVILISATIONS

COMPLEXITY IN AGRARIAN CIVILISATIONS

10000 years ago, we have farmers in Mesopotamia… one of the earliest regions to adopt agriculture… they’ve been honing their craft for approx. 5000 years and getting more numerous so more people are contributing new ideas that get passed on and accumulated generation after generations… eventually you get so good at agriculture that you get more and more people, more potential innovators that can drive collective learning faster and harder additionally with higher crop yields comes more and more people who aren’t just farming for sustenance i.e. enough food to stay alive… farms produce more than they or their families need… suddenly you have an agrarian surplus.. this surplus can be traded at local hubs, villages, proto-towns and markets… then towns get bigger… now we’re not just talking about villages that house hundreds but places that host thousands of people then tens of thousands… one of the world’s first cities, Uruk, in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago, or 3000 BCE had about 60000 people living within a few square miles

When we talk about complexity, each human brain is a potential innovator, connected in a city with thousands of component parts, thus the better we got at agriculture 5000 years ago, the more potential innovators could be freed up to play different roles than the farmer… suddenly people are becoming more and more diverse in terms of building blocks such was the division of labour enabled by agrarian surplus and with people entering new fields you get new innovation in those fields as well… the web of human knowledge spreads into every nook and cranny

THE COMPLEXITY OF CITY-STATES

With the rise of new cities and the division of labour, these new people tended to become organs of the municipal organism… you had builders, artisans and architects making houses, public buildings, monuments and city walls… you had soldiers providing security and enforcing laws, you had bureaucrats designing and applying those laws, you had ancient priests trying to make sense of the world and offering up rituals, portents and a variety of mumbo jumbo… you had doctors who did their very best not to kill their patients with their treatments… you had city planners and administrators trying to keep the whole fragile organism from breaking down, you had merchants and tradesman keeping the flow of goods going, supplying energy flows that created, sustained and increased complexity and you had rulers, an intensified version of the village chiefs who had lived so long ago, perhaps even on the spot where the city now stands… perhaps by now their rule is entirely hereditary and sanctioned and bolstered by the teachings of an official religion… the first cities of Mesopotamia, the rulers of those cities eventually became theocratic priest kings, a mixture of the sacred and the royal whose rule was not only enforced by foot soldiers, it was ordained by the gods above… you still had farmers outside the city walls who formed on average 90% of the population and would continue to do so throughout the agrarian civilisations… for them the basics of life would only change gradually from the world before States, but they had to interact with that other 10%… finally you had slaves… almost immediately with the rise of States and maybe earlier rulers had enough coercive power to deliver their fellow humans into forced labour… the vast majority of the Americas to Africa to Europe to the Middle East to Asia practiced a form of slavery to some degree and it afflicted an equally diverse group of people… no matter who you are, no matter your class or ethnicity, if you go far enough back the odds are that somewhere in your family tree is a large number of slaves… when abolition was practiced by the British in the early 19thC, it was very much an anomaly while for the majority of conventional history, slavery was the rule.. in the first ancient city-states of Uruk, Gursu, Eridu and Ur that were springing up between 5500 and 5000 years ago, slaves were people who were abducted from surrounding areas to work jobs that would cost more if you had to employ a wage labourer… agrarian civilisations tried to justify slavery on either tribal or ethnic grounds or rounds or against people who did not practice the same religion or against people defeated in war or against your own people as a punishment for their debts or the crimes they committed… ultimately the energy exerted by free and unfree human labour, animal domestication and photosynthesizing plants channelled the energy flows of the Sun into these city-state hubs… more and more power was being concentrated in a smaller area and into the hands of an even smaller number of people… while brutal and autocratic it took humanity even further away from the thermodynamic equilibrium and the destruction of all complexity… with your mind’s eye you can almost follow the trail of energy from the centre of the Sun where atoms fuse and released bursts of power, through the dense fireball over millions of years and then beaming out eight minutes and finally hitting earth… then it is captured in the leaves of a plant that grows over the course of a season… it is harvested and winds up inside someone’s tangled digestive system… it is exerted by that person’s labour… the energy is used up as they act as a Farmer, a priest or a soldier in the service of the state… the energy takes the form of trade and powers the Treasury and makes war and expands territory as the ruler uses the money from that Treasury, or it is used to build monuments like the towering Ziggurat of Ur or to maintain and enforce a system of law… a beam of energy filters through the Sun to the earth through digestive tracts of humans and through the bizarre weave of social hierarchy until it is spent in the service of creating sustaining or increasing the human complexity of ancient States… it’s not pretty and it’s certainly not moral but like many cruel forms of complexity to which the universe is indifferent, it kept the ultimate form of death at bay long enough for you and me to be born… meanwhile complexity continued to rise… a far greater importance to complexity than the mere concentration of energy flows in agriculture is the fact that the rise of agrarian states gave humanity writing… this gave humanity a major boost in maintaining or increasing its own complexity… as revolutionary as the evolution of the human brain… maybe the ability to capture information in writing was going to push cultural evolution to astounding new speeds… new innovations no longer had to be spread by oral tradition from generation to generation but they could be literally set in stone or parchment or papyrus, making it less likely the information would be forgotten… the first thing to develop were symbols for numbers  – almost immediately after cities began appearing in Mesopotamia approximately 5,000 years ago… when you have a larger agrarian society you need to be able to keep track of everything, so you get ancient lists of numbers checking stock of grain and usually livestock… essentially numbers to keep track of all the growing complexity of a populous kingdom… after a couple of centuries of collective learning the city-states of Mesopotamia developed symbols for human words… this quickly spread to ancient Egypt or, since the writing is very different from Mesopotamian writing, perhaps the Egyptians came up with their own script on their own around the same time… now that words could be immortalized in writing, Egypt and Mesopotamia were able to communicate laws, histories and new ideas and their collective learning accelerated…accordingly the cities of the Indus Valley followed suit about 4,500 years ago, writing in mysterious symbols that nobody has yet been able to decipher… by 3,300 years ago writing had also been independently developed by the Chinese and on the other side of the world cut off from Afro-Eurasia… the oldest scripts emerged in Mesoamerica around 2500 years ago though there is some research that pushes that date even further… so long as the script survived the knowledge survived even if the writing lay forgotten for centuries… with writing also came the ability to communicate more abstract ideas which is pretty handy for all sorts of complex innovations from philosophy to architecture and all of this writing could be transmitted between potential innovators across entire regions and across generations, potentially leading to a spark of genius and the birth of their own ideas… however it is well not to overstate the benefits of writing prematurely… for the longest time writing remained the luxury of a privileged few, those who could afford to be educated, those who could afford the exorbitant cost of scrolls and books… literacy remained a very small segment of human societies on average right up to modern times… gradually the techniques of writing grew more and more refined, moving from pictographic symbols to phonetic alphabets where letters could work in different arrangements to form different sounding words… with the proliferation of writing came the development of new words to describe new concepts constantly being added to… there was a cascade of collective learning enabling humans to think in new ways… once more the pace of human innovations sped up and a fraction of those ideas allowed human technology to progress and a fraction of that technology built even larger and more complex human webs all of which were created sustained and increased by flows of energy… the first city-states to emerge were in the agricultural lands of Mesopotamia… cities like Uruk, Gursu, Eridu and Ur that gives signs of their existence 5500 years ago and a few centuries later had all the trappings of agrarian civilization: writing, city walls, monuments, bureaucrats, hierarchies, armies and organized religion… to the west Egypt had clustered its population in the Nile Valley… the land became more arid and the desert encroached… settlements clustered and had grown into cities and kingdoms culminating in the unification of the upper and lower Egyptian kingdoms around 5,000 years ago… by this time mining and smelting techniques had advanced so remarkably that tin was being extracted from the earth and used to produce the Bronze Age… this revolution allowed for the creation of many new technologies from weaponry to farming equipment… for our purposes better farming equipment is a huge deal because if you can shift away from stone to bronze tools you can raise the carrying capacity of a region, allowing for more innovators more ideas and more complexity… bronze was such a revolutionary idea that it took off like wildfire across the Near East, across Iran and down into India in only a few centuries… it also spread into Europe around the same time… even in places were no proto civilizations yet existed and people either subsisted in agriculture or even foraged… as bronze reached the Indus River Valley we begin to see the signs of their states emerging 4,500 years ago… we have rapidly growing infrastructure and populations in Peru, in the Americas the civilization of Norte Chico had grown up with a small city forming as early as 5000 years ago… but as an expensive and populous state it really began to pick up around 4,000 to 4,500 years ago in East Asia… archeology has confirmed that China formed its first expansive state under what we call the legendary Xia dynasty around 4,000 years ago… meanwhile in the Near East city states had given way to large territorial empires – Egypt, Assyria and Babylon around 4,500 years ago…. as impressive as it was for a ruler to control all the resources, manpower and energy flows of a city-state and its surrounding countryside there was always pressure to acquire more… why? –  agrarian civilizations did not practice population control like foraging ones… people would have perhaps four or five children, perhaps more… what this meant was a greater danger of population levels outstripping the agricultural resources of a region, not to mention weighing down estates infrastructure with an increasingly impoverished and unruly population… it was in the interests of a state to expand its borders and to control more resources aka energy flows… the animals of the state had to eat more… by doing so it prevented the collapse of the social organism and the end of that ancient civilization… by their own conquests the agrarian rulers of the ancient world held off the conquest of the second law of thermodynamics and the collapse of their own complexity why else did the empires of the Near East continue to grow because they could… the topography of the region became ideal for invasion, war and conquest and it is entirely within the realm of human instincts to be territorial with agriculture… territory does not just hold a primal fascination for us – fields mean food which means life which means people which means power and so on…  for the first time in history large-scale war was born and it would not cease any time soon… the population boomed from all this activity… by 2,000 years ago the world had grown from 50 million to 250 million potential innovators the avalanche of collective learning continued to fall