Myths of the Archaic State

	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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Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

Norman Yoffee

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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