By grain. Modern history of mankind and state

A bas -relief with the image of a sheaf of wheat. Photo: Deagostini / Getty images

In his new book, Anthropologist James Scott - probably the most influential anthropologist of the modern world - speaks of the origin of the state. What was needed in order for nomadic people who own only fire and stone, could settle on the ground and eat its fruits?

Swamp and city

The first cities arose in marshly soils and flooding meadows of Mesopotamia about six thousand years ago. The sea level was higher, and this flat interfluve was not a desert, like today, but a huge swamp, which crossed the changing channels of large and small rivers, regularly emerging from the coasts. The first peasants were the inhabitants of the swamps, and their first skills were not a plowing and watering, but the drainage of water - the construction of channels, dams and locks. Scott suggests that these swamp residents knew how to predict the investigations and partly direct their move. But they did not have to clear the forests and plow the soil; Regular floods were washed off weeds and delivered silt in which it was possible to sow cereals. Then the selection of cereals and beans began, the domestication of livestock, the construction of dwellings and boats from reeds, the creation of villages. Most likely, they even then learned how to get, dry and burn peat - the most important skill of survival in the swamp, where the forest is far away and not to deliver it to housing. These first farmers lived in natural economy; They did not have excess grain, which means that there was neither population growth nor trade. Although they planted the sections available to them and harvested that could be relatively rich, they did not have a particular desire for private property: most of their food - fish, game, vegetables, wild cereals - they received from a common land mixed with water for them. Most likely, they did not have enemies: the swamps protected these first farmers from the desert nomads.

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