Sumer and Shang - a question

[dewrad]

I'm currently reading Bruce Trigger's Understanding Early Civilizations, and he classifies "early civlisations" into either "city states" (Mayans and Aztecs, Mesopotamians and Yoruba) or "territorial states" (Egypt, the Inca and the Shang). For the Egyptians and the Inca, I can see how their respective geographies fostered the growth of territorial states (centralised, covering a wide area etc), but I'm left puzzled as to why the civilisation around the Yellow River developed into a centralised territorial state, but the civilisation around the Tigris and Euphrates developed into a politically fragmented city-state civilisation when the initial "starting conditions" between the two were so similar.

So my question is this: why the difference?

[Pedant]

My personal guess is that the civilizations around the Tigris and Euphrates not only had to deal with the issue of geography, but also of weather. Humid subtropical weather seems to have good bouts of rain and sun in relatively predictable patterns, meaning more fertile land, meaning that one can expand farmland between and beyond rivers without too much issue. (More rivers, too.) On the other hand, the Tigris and Euphrates are two rivers running through semi-arid to arid climate zones, with much potential for drought or flood, and with little arable land the further you got away from the rivers.
I could be wrong, of course, but that’s what comes to mind.

[zompist]

Excellent quarantine reading: long and dull, though full of solid info.

As Pedant notes, Northwest China has a very large territory with no internal barriers. In Shang times you didn't need a lot of water management. (Control didn't extend to the coast, or to the semitropical south. The Qin famously built a canal around Xi'an, but that was later.)

Sumer requires extensive water management, and that's best done locally. Also— and it's not easy to say what's cause and effect here— Sumerian dynasties tended to fizzle out quickly. One of the best known, Ur III, lasted just a century. This might be because this whole kingship thing was new, but it also seems to be the case that Mesopotamia punishes over-success, by salinization if nothing else.

Egypt, by contrast, got a deposit of fresh silt every year; it didn't have to worry about salinization at all, and not too much about irrigation.

But who knows, there may also be social factors we don't know, or bits of chaos in the inputs. Egypt was unified very early, and royal power reached its height almost immediately. So maybe a strong kingdom was or became a bedrock assumption for Egyptians and not for Mesopotamians. I also wonder about the bicultural nature of Sumer— Akkadians lived there from the start. Maybe this helped the city-states see each other as foreign? Gods were also mostly local in the earliest stages, in both areas. The Egyptians managed to get to a syncretisic union much earlier; again, cause and effect are unclear.

[Linguoboy]

I was trying to remember the name of the work I read ages ago when doing some African-inspired conworlding on kingship in Africa. I think the central thesis was that the Egyptian living-god model was adopted and maintained by cultures throughout the Sahel. In any case, I believe that's where I first encountred the explanation that differences in Mesopotamian and Egyptian theology owe a lot to hydrology.

The Nile is fed by monsoon rains. The monsoon is a regular annual event and the water travels far before reaching the population centres of Upper and Lower Egypt. The result is a predictable annual flood suggesting the existence of an ordered universe firmly under the control of a central authority, represented on Earth the Pharoah.

The Tigris and Euphrates, on the other hand, are fed by winter storms in in the Armenian Highlands and the eastern Taurus Mountains. The distance traveled is less (from Ur to the edge of the Highlands is only about 800 km) and, as a consequence, catastrophic floods were frequent. This leads to a rather different conception of the universe as a chaotic place contested by various factions, each led by its own warlord.

The Yellow River, if memory serves, is mostly fed by snowmelt from the Tibetan Plateau. As a result, though floods could be catastrophic depending on the amount of snowfall and the duration of the thaw in a given year, they were still fairly predictable. Recurring problems were generally the result of silt buildup causing the river to suddenly change its course. So, on the whole, more like Egypt than Sumer, which would lead us to predict an ordered cosmos under the authority of a single divine ruler--which is, in fact, what we have.

Whether the scheme really holds water on a global scale, I always found it Good Enough for Conworlding™. I don't know if it's been elabourated at book length or anything.

[Moose-tache]

As Zompist and Linguoboy have said, it is easier to draw conclusions about this than to prove causation. If we had only one ancient civilization, that worshiped geese and lives on a river, we would be tempted to conclude that living on a river necessitates goose-cults. We have a limited sample of cradles of civilization (three to six, depending on how you count), each with their own idiosyncrasies and contingent events, allowing for many conclusions and little rigor. A classic just-so story of many anthropologists was the “hydraulic empire” theory, which in its strongest form holds that state-scale irrigation makes authoritarian regimes unavoidable. But of course unirrigated lands gave rise to plenty of dictatorships, and not every land in the so-called “despotic East” relied on government canals. We could play party games all day about how the Old Kingdom had few large cities because north-flowing rivers cause Coriolis erosion on the left bank, or whatever. But without a larger sample size we're stuck ending the hypothesis with “Well, that would make sense if it's true, right?”

By way of an example: Modern Egypt relies on irrigation because it increases yields (walk through the farms that flank the river as I have, and you'll see countless small canals connecting farming plots). This was also the main motivation of Sumerian irrigation: increasing yields, not allowing the possibility of agriculture at all. Sumerian records make it very clear that they weren't digging canals because it was the only way to reliably grow barley. They were digging them because it was the only way to reliably switch from barley fields to date plantations, which have a higher caloric yield and are a more prestigious food. What stopped the ancient Egyptians from doing the same thing, the way modern Egyptians do, often with hardly any more technology? Were the Pharaohs unconcerned with improving yield? Is the lack of irrigation in early Egyptian times a cause of centralized urbanization in a capital “primate city,” or did centralized urban power preclude irrigation, or do the two have little to do with one another, with some other hidden cause, possibly one unique to Egypt, explaining the difference? We can't asnwer this question with simple answers about the nature of the basic environment.

I guess that's a long-winded way of saying I agree. But for conlangers, there is still useful information here. You just can't expect an easy formula. Maybe your conpeople also have a long, silty river, but city-states instead of a single primate city. Examining each of these real world cultures in detail yields useful data about proximate causes and specific events, which can be used to build a conworld totally unlike any of those found in real life.

As a side note, I would caution against trying to clasffiy civilizations into simplistic categories, or to treat ancient ones as somehow special. There is no such thing as an "early civilization" in the sense that earliness is not an inherent property, but a matter of chronological happenstance, just as "early languages" is not a useful linguistic distinction in most situations.

[zompist]

As a side note, I would caution against trying to clasffiy civilizations into simplistic categories, or to treat ancient ones as somehow special. There is no such thing as an "early civilization" in the sense that earliness is not an inherent property, but a matter of chronological happenstance, just as "early languages" is not a useful linguistic distinction in most situations.

I'm not sure about this. One of Trigger's points is that all the early civilizations he looks at are monarchies, and there are other commonalities, such as polytheism and sexism. A conworlder is not limited by this, but saying that your first civilization is (say) a progressive monotheist republic probably requires an explanation.

The really interesting question, to me, is how people passed from the egalitarian nature of hunter/gatherer societies, to the hierarchies and monarchies of early civs. Why would anyone sign up to be Pharaoh's serf? Unfortunately, people were not literate at this stage and can't tell us directly. My view (following Marvin Harris) is that there had to be an intervening Big Man stage. That's a stage where an individual boosts tribe production without actually having ruling authority, usually culminating in a huge feast.

[dhok]

There's also the James C. Scott thesis, from Against the Grain (good book review, much quicker to read than the actual book, here). Scott believes grain-farming civilizations followed, rather than preceded, the concentration of enough state power to tax them: grain is easy to measure and keeps well for a long time. Thus, if you're the head of an armed gang that's conquered a plot of land within, say, a five-kilometer radius, you can force everybody living there (previously free hunter-gatherers, perhaps with part-time garden plots) to grow barley and tax them every harvest by walking around with your hired thugs and demanding a set amount. By contrast, tubers like cassava are much easier to hide (you can bury them) and are much harder to measure (you would have to go around digging up the entire plot looking for hidden roots). Free hunter-gatherers wouldn't waste all that time growing barley, but serfs can be made to by force, either directly (we'll beat you up) or indirectly (probably as in Egypt--you have no other way to earn a living, and we'll divert your irrigation if we think you're evading taxes).

This is not a particularly sustainable long-term arrangement if your serfs have any other option at all, which they did in Mesopotamia but didn't in Egypt, which is probably part of why Mesopotamia was so politically unstable compared to Egypt. I'm a little skeptical of the Scott thesis because we see grain agriculture pretty early on in places like the Baltic that didn't clearly have states (so why would prehistoric Balts and Finns be growing barley and rye?), but it's at least worth considering.

[zompist]

I like Scott's book a lot. Dhok's summary is good but misleading on a couple of points. He doesn't argue that states preceded grain cultivation. Quite the opposite: in the Middle East we have a few thousand years of sedentism, then a couple thousand years of agriculture, then (cue the Imperial March) the state. So the king's thugs were not dealing with hunter-gatherers (who would just walk away), but people already dependent on grain.

He does make a good case that states love grain cultivation, as it's easiest to tax. Trigger is a good supplement to this, as he covers civs like the Inkas and the Yorubas where grain tax was not in fact a big thing.

[Linguoboy]

I think what we learn from all this is that it’s a fine, fine line between Sumer and Shang.