Myths of the Archaic State

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee challenges prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship that the earliest states were large and despotically controlled and their evolution can be adequately modeled by ethnographic analogies. By illuminating the creation and changes in social roles – not simply of male leaders but also of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen – Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centered on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia as well as from Egypt, South Asia, China, Mesoamerica, and South America, the author explores the changes in human societies that created the world we live in. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.

NORMAN YOFFEE is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His various publications include Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? (co-editor with Andrew Sherratt, Cambridge University Press, 1993) and The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (co-editor with George L. Cowgill, University of Arizona Press, 1988). He is editor of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and Cambridge World Archaeology.

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MYTHS OF THE ARCHAIC STATE

Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

NORMAN YOFFEE

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PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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http://www.cambridge.org

© Norman Yoffee 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Minion 10.5/14.5 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Yoffee, Norman.
Myths of the archaic state : evolution of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations / Norman Yoffee.
   p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 81837 0 – ISBN 0 521 52156 4 (pbk.)
1. State, The. 2. Cities and towns, Ancient. 3. Civilization, Ancient. I. Title.
JC51.Y64   2004
320.1′09′01 – dc22   2004052683

ISBN 0 521 81837 0 hardback
ISBN 0 521 52156 4 paperback

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For Barbara

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CONTENTS

		List of figures	page x
		List of tables	xiii
		INTRODUCTION	1
1		THE EVOLUTION OF A FACTOID	4
		An introduction to social evolutionary mythology	5
		Types, rules, and factoids	6
		Neo-evolutionism evolving	8
		States and civilizations: beyond heuristics	15
2		DIMENSIONS OF POWER IN THE EARLIEST STATES	22
		The pursuit of the wily chiefdom	22
		Neo-evolutionism and new social evolutionary theory: back to the future	31
		The evolution of power and its distribution in the earliest states	33
		Dimensions of power in social evolutionary theory	34
		States as states of mind	38
		What neo-evolutionism cannot explain	41
3		THE MEANING OF CITIES IN THE EARLIEST STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS	42
		City-states and chimeras	44
		Cities and states	45
		Mesopotamian city-states and Mesopotamian civilization	53
		Cities and city-states in social evolutionary perspective	59
4		WHEN COMPLEXITY WAS SIMPLIFIED	91
		Simplifying the path to power in early Chinese states	94
		Law and order in ancient Mesopotamia	100
		The context of Mesopotamian law	102
		The context and function of the code of Hammurabi	104
		The complexities of legal simplification: decision-making in Mesopotamia	109
5		IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN EARLY STATES: CASE STUDIES	113
		A peculiar institution in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia	116
		Imagining sex in an early state	121
		Conclusion: Encounters with women in early states	128
6		THE COLLAPSE OF ANCIENT STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS	131
		Theorizing collapse	132
		Neo-evolutionism and collapse	134
		Collapse as the drastic restructuring of social institutions	138
		The collapse of ancient Mesopotamian states and civilization	140
		The Old Akkadian state	142
		The Third Dynasty of Ur	144
		The Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian states	147
		The end of the cycle?	151
		Collapse as the mutation of social identity and suffocation of cultural memory	153
		The collapse of Mesopotamian civilization and its regeneration	159
7		SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORIES	161
		Evolutionary history of the Chaco “rituality”	162
		Non-normative thinking in social evolutionary theory	171
		Southwest and Southeast	173
		Towards a history of social evolutionary trajectories	177
8		NEW RULES OF THE GAME	180
		The game of archaeological neologisms	181
		The engineering of archaeological theory: mining and bridging	182
		How archaeologists lost their innocence	183
		Levels of archaeological theory	185
		Sources of analogy in archaeological theory	188
		Analogy and the comparative method	192
9		ALTERED STATES: THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY	196
		An essay on the evolution of Mesopotamian states and civilization	198
		Initial conditions and emergent properties	200
		Interaction and identity	204
		The formation of Mesopotamian civilization and Mesopotamian city-states	209
		Evolutionary histories of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations	228
		Acknowledgments	233
		References	236
		Index	268

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LIST OF FIGURES

1.1		Neo-evolutionist step-ladder model of stages	page 18
1.2		Myth of “our contemporary ancestors”	19
2.1		“Real” stratification	30
2.2		Hypothetical potential stratification	30
3.1		Earliest states and civilizations	63
3.2		Egypt	63
3.3		Hierakonpolis	64
3.4		Memphis (Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom)	65
3.5		Thebes	66
3.6		Amarna	66
3.7		Amarna – workmen’s village	67
3.8		Mesoamerica	68
3.9		Teotihuacan	68
3.10		Teotihuacan, urban growth	69
3.11		North China	70
3.12		Erlitou	70
3.13		Zhengzhou	71
3.14		Anyang	71
3.15		Indus Valley/Harappan sites	72
3.16		Mohenjo-Daro	73
3.17		Mohenjo-Daro – DK-G area	74
3.18		Harappa	74
3.19		North coast of Peru and Central Andes	75
3.20		Moche	76
3.21		Tiwanaku	76
3.22a		Wari	77
3.22b		Wari, aerial view	77
3.23		Wari, urban growth	78
3.24		Maya region	79
3.25		El Mirador	79
3.26a		Tikal, greater city	80
3.26b		Tikal, urban core	81
3.27		Copán	81
3.28		Selected Mesopotamian cities	82
3.29		Mesopotamian settlement pattern in the late Uruk period	82
3.30		Mesopotamian settlement pattern in the Early Dynastic Ⅱ and Ⅲ periods	83
3.31		Uruk	84
3.32		Nagar/Tell Brak	85
3.33		Kish	85
3.34		Lagash city-state	86
3.35		Comparison of some ancient cities	87
3.36		Comparison of some modern urban places on the scale of the earliest cities	88
		a. Amsterdam, 1936
		b. Leiden, 1936
		c. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003
		d. University of Michigan, Central Campus, Ann Arbor
		e. Hong Kong Island
		f. New Orleans (Métropole de La Nouvelle Orléans, 1765)
4.1		Chinese potters’ marks	95
4.2		Mesopotamian tokens	95
4.3		Shang period bronze	97
4.4		Shang period oracle bone	99
4.5		Code of Hammurabi	105
7.1		Northern Southwest	163
7.2		Chaco, outliers, roads	164
7.3		Great house sites of Chaco Canyon	165
7.4		Shapes of great houses	166
7.5		Pueblo Bonito	166
7.6		Mississippian sites	175
7.7		Cahokia	176
7.8		Examples of some evolutionary trajectories discussed in the text	178
8.1		Structure of archaeological theory	187
8.2		Valley of Oaxaca	190
8.3		Monte Albán	191
9.1		Selected Mesopotamian sites from various periods	215
9.2		Selected early Holocene and Neolithic sites	215
9.3		Selected Hassuna and Samarra sites	216
9.4		Yarim Tepe I	216
9.5		Hassuna ceramics	217
9.6		Samarra ceramics	218
9.7		Tell es-Sawwan, levels Ⅲ and Ⅳ	219
9.8		Selected Halaf sites	220
9.9		Halaf ceramics	220
9.10		Tell Arpachiyah burnt house	221
9.11		Eridu, temple Ⅶ	221
9.12		Tepe Gawra, acropolis, level ⅩⅢ	222
9.13		Tell Madhhur house	222
9.14		Tell Abada village	223
9.15		Eanna precinct, Uruk	224
9.16		White temple, Anu ziggurat, Uruk	225
9.17		Beveled-rim bowls	225
9.18		Archaic tablet scribal exercises	226
9.19		Archaic tablet list of professions with later copies	226
9.20		Uruk expansion sites	227
9.21		Some southern Mesopotamian city-states in the early third millennium BC	227

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LIST OF TABLES

3.1		Area and population size estimates of the earliest cities mentioned in the text	page 43
9.1		Chronological table of selected periods in Mesopotamia	199