David Wengrow's brilliant observation on how we are so biased by the stories we tell but only this time, we seamlessly tweaked even the reality of how our early civilizations worked.
Read the whole piece here (believe it or not, this changes so much we "believe" about politics and human nature):
Admittedly much local variation can be found within this Trans-caucasian civilisation. Nevertheless, the features shared throughout it are suggestive of societies that may have defined themselves in conscious opposition to nearby states. Intriguingly, this may even be evident in their modes of cuisine. Among the types of material culture found throughout the network, from the Caucasus to the Jordan Valley, are ceramic hearths decorated with human-like faces, on which food was prepared in highly burnished vessels, topped with purpose-made lids. This method of boiling and stewing food in closed containers stands in contrast to the roasting and baking traditions of the urban lowlands, where the ritual preparation of food was conducted in open containers, or on exposed altars, so that the upward release of fumes from a sacrificial meal could attract the attention of the gods down to their human subjects.
Such culinary contrasts may be the stuff on which civilising missions rise or fall, as Catholic missionaries to the New World discovered, when confronted with the native Tupi, whose aversion to the baked substance we call bread proved an obstacle to their acceptance of the Holy Communion, itself a ritual descendant from the wine and cereal-based rituals of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. In the contrasting distributions of methods for food processing and preparation, we can perhaps detect the kind of conscious differentiation between state and non-state societies discussed by Clastres and Scott for more recent situations. But in the case of the Bronze Age, the tables are turned: this was a ‘world of peripheries’, where cities and state-centres rest like small islands amid a great sea of stateless civilisations.
I have said little as yet about why urban and state-like societies ever emerged in the first place. What I will offer by way of conclusion are some very brief and admittedly broad-brush observations. The first concerns utopian visions. It is striking that each of the earliest centres of urban civilisation presents us with a scaled-up and spectacular version of cultural values that extend back, in the same regions, to much earlier periods of prehistory. I am thinking here of the first monumental precincts at the city of Uruk in southern Iraq – designed as vastly expanded versions of a common household form, found in almost every Mesopotamian village during the pre-urban period; but also of the earliest royal monuments in Egypt – ceremonial versions of personal display items, the use of which (as we saw earlier) has deep Neolithic roots in the Nile Valley. We might think in similar terms of the great bathing facilities at the heart of Mohenjo-Daro, on the plains of the Indus.
In each case, time-honoured and familiar concepts of domesticity, wellbeing, or cleanliness were reproduced on a greatly magnified scale. For all their exclusionary qualities, we can hardly doubt that these early centres offered their dependants an image of cosmological perfection. It was in this fragile world of bread and circuses that the best and the worst of human nature conspired to produce what we now recognise as states. Yet the values of civilisation in which such political projects were grounded were both older and more durable than the projects themselves and were never truly encompassed by them, even at the height of ancient empire. By reducing our definition of ‘early civilisation’ to the formation of states, we risk losing sight of these much longer and more spatially extensive trajectories of cultural change, the roots of which must be sought in the development of prehistoric societies that succeeded – for millennia – in maintaining distinct forms of civilisation, while avoiding the emergence of states.
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