Image Source: Goran tek-en – CC BY-SA 4.0

Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of land planning. This inherent logic of handicraft production and its related organization of trade and market exchange, especially with the palace and temple institutions, led to new forms of social interaction, with the state and its laws and religion consolidating the new managerial hierarchies.

I met Buccellati in 1994 at the first of what would become a decade-long series of Harvard-based colloquia to compile an economic history of the Bronze Age Near Eastern origins of money and interest, land tenure, and its public obligations. Since these innovations were shaped largely by relations with the temples and palaces, our group started by focusing on just what it meant to be public or private.

It was fairly clear what “privatization” meant, but calling the palace or temples “public” was problematic. Royal price schedules for grain, silver, and other key commodities applied only to transactions with these large institutions, which were corporately distinct from the rest of the economy where prices were free to vary. Hammurabi’s laws focused on the relations between the palatial sector and the family-based economy on the land, which followed its own common law tradition for wergild-like personal offenses and other legal problems not involving the palace. How far beyond the palace did the state extend?

Buccellati’s paper focused on a broader philosophical idea of “public” as referring to the overall system of social and economic organization: “The dichotomy between public and private is coterminous with the origin of the city.”1 As he points out in At the Origins of Politics: “The increased size of the settlements created a critical mass, whereby face-to-face association no longer was possible among each member of the social group.” The relationship was political. “On the etymological level, the terms ‘urbanism’ and ‘politics’ are equivalent, given that they both derive from the word for ‘city’ in Latin and Greek respectively.” His term “state-city” emphasizes the overall political and administrative context.

He views industrialization as the economic dimension of the urban revolution that occurred in the late fourth millennium BC. The scale and social complexity of mining (or trading for metal) and metallurgy, beer-making, and weaving involved increasingly impersonal relationships as industrial organizations created products beyond the ability of individuals to make by themselves. The evolution was from direct personal contact to being part of a long, specialized chain.

Describing this takeoff as the first Axial Age, Buccellati explains how economic and social relations had been transformed over the 50,000-year evolution from small Paleolithic groups to urban industrial production, trade, and property relations. The technology and administration of production transformed the character of labor and what Buccellati calls para-perceptual thought. The moral principles of mutual aid, group solidarity, protection of the needy, and basic rights to means of self-support were retained from pre-urban practice but were administered on the state level.

“The state was never able to eliminate or even ignore the people… political ideology became a way for the leadership to justify itself in front of the base,” bolstered by religious attitudes to popularize an “Ideology of Control… the ideology of command, of leadership not necessarily based on coercive means.” Even in the face of “ever-increasing gaps in prestige and economic ability,” the rhetoric of kingship promoted “a sense of solidarity that transcends the limit of reciprocal face-to-face recognition.”

For the king, the aim was to make “submission not just tolerable but actually desirable.” That enabled Mesopotamian rule to be personal and indeed dynastic. “The king was not just the most powerful private individual; he embodied a distinct organism.” Kings were described as serving heaven, as reflected in Hammurapi’s stele depicting him presenting his laws to the god of justice, Shamash (or in some interpretations, receiving them from Shamash).

“The private model was thus superimposed from scratch on the public one,” merging the state and religion as every new king pointed to his ancestors as if this meant continuity of the law. The principle of kings being hereditary was accepted “without ever being formulated in theoretical terms.”

From Living in a State of Nature to a Stratified Managerial Order

Buccellati describes production as evolving from interpersonal and small scale to institutional and large scale. He describes how Paleolithic hunters and gatherers met their needs by using what they found in nature. They napped flints to make spear points and cutting tools, and wove plant fibers to make clothing,........

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