Scholars recognize three social categories based on way of life: peasant village farmers, beginning at least as early as the eighth millennium bce, nomadic pastoral herders, who developed in response to the establishment of agricultural villages, probably by the sixth millennium bce, and the inhabitants of urban settlements, starting with the first cities of Sumer, already well founded by the mid-fourth millennium. The boundaries between these categories, however, were permeable.
Village peasant farmers
Ethnographic studies of traditional Arab societies reveal that social values in villages are egalitarian, and dominated by kinship ties and strong attachment to the land. Ancient texts from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Israel reflect the importance of village elders in regulating disputes both within and between villages and in representing their villages before state authority. For example, from around 1800 bce the letters from the city of Mari, now on the Syrian-Iraqi border, show that Amorite farming villages were managed by headmen who were appointed by the palace administration. Women’s informal social networks at both the intra - and inter-village levels likely promoted mutual support among village households as women worked together. They also enhanced inter-village cooperation, since women from other villages were sought as marriage partners; the resulting kinship webs helped to ‘‘maintain peace among contiguous settlements and increase the likelihood that related families would come to each other’s assistance in times of economic or personal troubles’’ (Meyers 2003: 190-2).
Nowadays conflict can erupt when the attachment to the land, water rights, or basic social values such as motherhood, marriage and children, respect for parents and the elderly, and cooperation are threatened (Barakat 1993: 55-6). Disputes tend to be resolved through mediation and reconciliation within the community itself, on the basis of custom and precedent, without resort to outside legal authority.
Social tensions in ancient villages were rarely mentioned in the records produced by the city-based scribes. Evidence of such tensions can be inferred, however, from the records of the administration of rural lands controlled by temple and royal authorities, and lands from which local villagers were required to deliver a cut of the harvest. In regions of rainfall agriculture villages tend to be more isolated and dispersed, and so less susceptible to control by a central authority; they also manage their water resources locally and are more autonomous. But the early historical development of the state depended on its ability to dominate the countryside by controlling farmland and enforcing the delivery of crops by rural villagers. Villagers not only had to produce enough to feed themselves but also had to turn over part of their harvest in taxation, and perform required labor service as well. The palace records from Ebla in western Syria around 2350 bce reveal the extension of palace control into the countryside, as the king, members ofthe royal family, and high officials were assigned lands in outlying villages. One such official, for example, was assigned more than 30,000 units of land that included fields in 21 different locales. Personnel connected with the Ebla palace administration were regularly dispatched to collect the villagers’ crops, and cultivation was an obligation fulfilled by forced laborers. These villagers also had to contribute livestock to the Ebla palace (Archi 1990: 17-19).
Some of our best evidence of the extension of city-based interests into rural villages comes from the town of Nuzi, east of the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia, in a region along the interface of rainfall-based and irrigation-based cultivation. The more than 6,500 cuneiform tablets recovered from Nuzi dating from 1500 to 1350 bce document the activities of the royal elite, but also of a class of major landowners who had suburban residences at Nuzi but also owned land in villages outside the town. We also see a class of smaller landholders living at a subsistence level. Especially striking in these records is how they reveal ‘‘progressive economic polarization’’ and ‘‘general pauperization within the private economy’’ as small landholders, perhaps because of poor harvests or growing indebtedness, were bought out and reduced to tenant farmers or even debt slaves (Maidman 1995: 943-4). This contravened a basic value of peasant village society, kin-based attachment to the land, and associated feelings against alienating that land outside the family. At Nuzi, this fundamental social value was circumvented by the ‘‘adoption’’ of the wealthy buyer into the family of the seller, after which the seller might give the buyer his ‘‘inheritance’’ reciprocated by a ‘‘gift’’ that equaled the purchase price of the land. The seller and his family might continue to work the land and support themselves as tenants of the new owner, but their status had changed from independence to dependence. We see in the Hebrew Bible the importance of the family retaining its ancestral lands. For example, in Numbers 36: 5-9, Moses ordered that the daughters of Zelophehad marry a man from a clan of their father’s tribe on the principle that ‘‘No inheritance shall be transferred from one tribe to another.’’
Kinship ties and attachment to the land were similarly important social values in the irrigation-based farming villages of the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain and the Nile. However, because in Lower Mesopotamia cultivation was linked to the irrigation water from the rivers and canal systems, villages tended to be clustered near waterways and were less dispersed. This made them more susceptible to control by city-based managers and landlords, especially during periods of strong political authority such as the Akkad, Ur III, and Old Babylonian dynasties (2334-1595 bce). These kings’ inscriptions celebrated their construction and maintenance of extensive canal systems that provided water for the cultivating of thousands of acres and facilitated the transport of the harvest to temple and royal granaries. Study of earliest Mesopotamian civilization has often focused on the roles of‘‘Great Institutions,’’ the temple and the palace. While the evidence shows an important component of private land ownership in the Old Babylonian period (2000-1595 bce ) alongside lands controlled by the palace, the records of the mid - and late third millennium bce are most informative about the temple - and palace-based administration of huge cultivated acreages. Records from the Sumerian city of Girsu dating to the mid-third millennium bce reveal highly organized central planning by city-based bureaucrats who organized planting and harvesting, as well as year-round water management that was carried out by residents of the countryside, from whom the urban authority required labor service. After the harvest, the city-based managers extracted from individuals a grain tax that was then transported to city granaries (Powell 1990b). The records of Girsu’s scribes showed no concern for the personal interests of the villagers and workers whose lives they were organizing.
In Egypt most of the administrative records were written on perishable and thus long-disappeared materials, or they lie buried in ancient towns whose remains lie beneath their modern successors. Our reconstruction of Egyptian rural village life must therefore be based on monumental or official texts often designed to extol the virtues of the pharaoh’s rule or on literary compositions that were intended more to edify other Egyptians then than to inform us now.
What emerges is an image of a seemingly tranquil countryside, where city-based elites set themselves up in villas to escape squalid urban existence. The villages come off as peaceful but crowded, their inhabitants contented with life within their immediate families but also respectful of their obligations within the larger community. Tomb paintings commissioned to portray an idyllic situation depicted people working together in the epitome of communal harmony and solidarity.
The reality was quite different. The image perpetuated by royal documents, of an all-powerful king with monolithic control over the country’s resources, has not stood up well to scholarly analysis. The management of irrigation, in fact, seems largely to have been left in local hands. Nonetheless, especially during periods of effectively centralized authority (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms), the royal administration strove to ensure constant revenues to support itself and its monumental construction projects, ‘‘collecting, storing, and disbursing revenue in grains, animals and animal products, raw materials, and finished items’’ (O’Connor 1995: 320-1).
The official version of all this effort promoted an image of stability and contentment, but the intrusion of government agents empowered to help organize cultivation, ensure the collection of grain taxes, and compel men to leave their families and villages for months at forced labor caused stress within village societies, fostering a sense of shared identity among villagers who felt hard pressed by the state’s demands. Abuse of a peasant by a state official was the theme of the Middle Kingdom composition The Eloquent Peasant, in which a simple farmer was robbed and beaten by the subordinate of a high steward. The Satire of the Trades similarly suggested that peasant farmers were subject to ridicule and abuse by the elite servants of the state, although we cannot be certain if this text simply employed exaggeration for the purpose of satire. The farmer
Wails more than the guinea fowl, his voice is louder than a raven’s; his fingers are swollen and stink to excess. He is weary.. .A peasant is not called a man, beware of it.. .See, there’s no profession without a boss, except for the scribe; he is the boss. Hence if you know writing, it will do better for you than those professions I’ve set before you, each more wretched than the other. (Hallo and Younger 1997: 122-5)
The literary composition known as the Instruction of Amenemope from around 1000 BCE enjoined the royal ‘‘overseer of grains’’ to be fair in his dealings, and listed several reprehensible acts the scribe should not commit - thereby suggesting how rural farmers were all too often victimized:
Do not cheat a man through pen on scroll, the god abhors it;... do not assess a man who has nothing, and thus falsify your pen. If you find a large debt against a poor man, make it into three parts; forgive two, let one stand. . . Beware of disguising the measure, so as to falsify its fractions. . . Measure according to its true size. . . Do not accept a farmer’s dues and then assess him so as to injure him. (Hallo and Younger 1997: 119-20)
Pastoral nomads
Modern studies of traditional nomadic groups indicate that fundamental to their social values and organization is the framework of blood and kinship ties, within which are embedded values of tribal solidarity, egalitarianism, communal ownership, and consensus-based decision-making. Nomadic groups tend to resist control by city authority, and during periods of weak central power they assert their autonomy in the countryside. Nomads tend to disdain village farmers as weak and submissive and their attachment to the land as humiliating; they similarly regard city dwellers as corrupted, soft, and cowardly. In return, farm villagers see the nomads as parasites, ‘‘irresponsible, uprooted vagabonds bent on raids and thievery’’ (Barakat 1993: 54-5).
We must also bear in mind that, for most of early antiquity, we are not dealing with camel-herding Bedouin, who do not appear on the Middle Eastern social landscape until after 900 bce, but with sheep and goat nomads. Because their flocks as well as the donkeys upon which these groups moved needed regular access to water and pasturage, these nomads did not venture as far into the desert. Their lifestyle was more tied to the peasant villagers, and sometimes they farmed part-time to supplement their food supply.
New archaeological techniques to detect the remains of nomad camps promise to further our understanding of ancient nomadic societies. Otherwise, our knowledge of the social organization, values, and tensions within Ancient Near Eastern nomadic groups is meager. Their tribal organization was evident in the Mari letters, with their many references to Amorite pastoralists and villagers who were grouped under a number of tribal divisions and subdivisions (Fleming 2004). The Mari texts also revealed that the government’s relations with Amorite groups were volatile, but could include cooperation or co-optation, as exemplified in the use of Amorite leaders to assemble tribesmen for labor and military service. Farther east, the ruler of the city of Eshnunna married the daughter of a local Amorite chieftain in the hope of managing tensions with local tribesmen (Whiting 1987: 48-9). A less carnal symbiosis was celebrated in the Sumerian composition The Herdsman and the Farmer, which highlighted the complementary activities and products of the two disputants (Averbeck 2003: 52).
What looms large is the nomads’ propensity to prey upon villages, and thereby undercut the central political authority. The nomads’ aggression against villages and cities might have stemmed from periodically heightened need for agricultural commodities, perhaps after an environmentally caused breakdown of village farming societies, response to military harassment, or simply the allure of wealth and opportunity (Schwartz 1995: 254-5). The Akkad dynasty’s fall was traditionally ascribed to the Gutians, non-sedentary mountaineers from the Zagros region. The history of late third and early second millennium bce Mesopotamia was dominated by the encroachment of Amorite tribes and their gradual assumption of political control. The towns of the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia, even its great capital city Hattusha, were under constant threat of raids by the non-sedentary peoples known as the Kashka, who inhabited the region along the southern Black Sea coast.
Ancient sources reflected the scorn and apprehension with which the city-based intelligentsia regarded nomads. Mesopotamian literature often ridiculed Amorite manners and customs. Egyptian literature projected a similarly dim view of pastoral nomads, the ‘‘Asiatic’’ desert dwellers who infiltrated the eastern Nile Delta to weather the summer months. The Middle Kingdom Prophecies of Neferti reflected wariness of them: ‘‘The land is burdened with misfortune because of those looking for food, Asiatics roaming the land’’ (Hallo and Younger 1997: 108). Finally, a New Kingdom letter described them as thieves who hid in the bushes, who stood more than seven feet tall and had wild faces, and whose ‘‘thoughts are not pretty’’ (Hallo and Younger 2002: 13).
City dwellers
Cities were the pre-eminent centers of political authority and hubs for the economic activities and administration of the villages around them, and this is also why they are our chief source of documentation concerning societal values, organization, and conflict in general. Their populations were large, dense, diverse, and internally differentiated into socioeconomic classes. They were places where internal social tensions festered. Cities and their inhabitants were resented from the outside, by villagers and nomads alike, as intruders who demanded the products of their labors or tried to control their movements. At the same time, though, the wealth and opportunities that cities represented had a strong attraction for people of the countryside.
Old, traditional urban centers of the modern Middle East comprise a mosaic of quarters and sub-quarters differentiated by ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic characteristics and relatively self-sufficient, even insular. We ought not simply to conclude that similar conditions typified ancient cities of the region. The internal structure of ancient Egyptian cities is extremely poorly known because those cities long ago disappeared under later occupation. A similar dearth of physical evidence holds true for most of the rest of the Near East, although the evidence from some regions is more substantial, such as the residential areas at Ur and Eshnunna, and at the site of Mashkan-shapir. The waterways within these cities determined internal geography, along with streets that paralleled or ran into them. At both Eshnunna and Mashkan-shapir, the blocks demarcated by these streets encompassed about 1 hectare (about 2.5 acres), which, as it so happens, is ‘‘both the average size of small Mesopotamian village sites and the size of residential neighborhoods - the face-to-face communities that served as the building blocks of those pre-industrial cities outside Mesopotamia that have been studied’’ (Stone 1995a: 240). Rich and poor lived next to each other, at close quarters, in houses along intricate networks ofnarrow, winding lanes, similar to what one finds today in the older quarters of Middle Eastern cities.
Mesopotamian sources suggest that one’s residence in a local neighborhood or quarter was an important determinant of social and legal identity, and that one’s more immediate family ties mattered more to city dwellers than did tribal or clan allegiance. Local quarters were monitored by officials empowered to issue warnings or convene hearings about matters of public concern, such as houses in dangerous disrepair or
Domestic animals that might cause harm. Local residents could also ‘‘be called upon...to investigate the conduct and chastity of a woman who repudiated her husband’’ or be enjoined to watch out for strangers (Greengus 1995: 469).
Some prayers to the sun god suggest that, for the Mesopotamian city dweller, peril was almost omnipresent, and inescapable without divine assistance. One prayer beseeched the god ‘‘because of the evil of unfavorable signs and portents which are present in my house, which have stymied me. . . On account of the evil omen of a snake which I saw come right into my house for its prey, I am afraid, anxious, frightened... On account of this dog that has urinated on me, I am afraid, anxious, frightened... ’’ (Foster 1996: 633-4). Another prayer asked for deliverance from anything ‘‘unlucky for mankind,’’ ‘‘whether, as I walked through a street, an accursed man touched me, or, when I crossed a square, I stepped in a puddle of wash water, or, I walked over nail pairings, shavings from an armpit, a worn-out shoe, a broken belt, a leather sack (holding things) for black magic, a leper’s scales...’’ (Foster 1996: 653).
Nor did life in Egyptian towns seem any less frightening, in view of the many magical devices their residents employed to ward off dangers. Expressive evidence of this was discovered at Deir el-Medina, a New Kingdom settlement for the craftsmen who built and decorated tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Hence it cannot be regarded as entirely typical of larger Egyptian towns. The stone doorways of houses bore inscriptions pleading for divine protection, and the houses themselves often contained altars and niches for statuettes. Bed footboards and wooden headrests sometimes bore carvings of protective deities. Throughout Egypt, people wore amulets to ward off dangers, real and imagined; some of them listed as life’s main hazards ‘‘fevers, childbirth, snake and scorpion bites, accidents on pilgrimages, journeys by water, and the collapse of houses’’ (Pinch 1995: 364-5). A modern observer might consign much of this to the realm of magic and superstition, but surely it testifies to an underlying tension and strongly felt need for protection against the perils of daily living.
Deir el-Medina is famous for its many inscribed potsherds upon which the tomb workers and their overseers, living for days at a time in huts near their actual work site, dispatched messages back to the settlement. Vividly human, they dealt with a wide range of concerns, from making sure laundry was done to letting a colleague know that his wife was cheating on him, to workers arranging to have items prepared for their own tombs. The buffeting and strains of personal relationships in a tightly knit, interdependent community emerge starkly. In one example, a worker vented his frustration with his overseer:
What’s the meaning of your getting into such a bad mood as you are in that nobody’s speech can enter your ears as a consequence of your inflated ego? You are not a man since you are unable to make your wives pregnant like your fellowmen... You abound in being exceedingly stingy. You give no one anything. (Wente 1990: 149)
Such tensions could erupt into conflict, even violence. To resolve grievances internally, and avoid subjecting them to royal interference, the community resorted to peer pressure and to the convening of a local tribunal. These methods likely served to reinforce communal solidarity and responsibility (Lorton 1995: 359).
Evidence from Deir el-Medina as well as from larger ancient towns and cities all across the Near East documented a more polar relationship ofpower and status: that between master and slave. Slavery in the Ancient Near East was never as extensive or as fundamental to basic economic systems as it was in the Roman Empire or the American South before the Civil War. Nonetheless, slaves appeared in very early documents, frequently as captives of military expeditions (mostly female at first; males were apparently maimed or slain). Slaves often provided the urban temples and palaces important menial labor; often they were set to weaving. One’s slave status might be marked by a haircut, branding, tattooing, or even mutilation. Some slaves worked as craftsmen and might accumulate personal wealth and purchase their freedom, although this was seldom feasible. We also find evidence of debt slavery. A debtor who was unable to repay a loan with interest rates on loans of barley as high as 33 or even 50 percent placed his family and even himself into servitude to a creditor.
Whether resulting from indebtedness or captivity, enslavement fueled resentment and class consciousness. Letters, legal texts including the Laws of Hammurabi as well as the Hittite Laws, and treaties referred to the capture and return of runaway slaves, whose flight seems to have been a persistent and serious problem. Disdain for slaves as untrustworthy, as well as whiny, complaining, and lazy was clear in proverbs, as in ‘‘The dirt was not apparent to the slave girl. To her lady it kept increasing.’’ And the lustful slave owner was warned of future problems as the proverb advised, ‘‘Do not have sexual intercourse with your slave girl, she will call you ‘Traitor!’ ’’ and another noted, ‘‘Your slave girl who has been brought down from the mountains, she brings pleasure, but she also brings danger.’’ The proverbs knew too that the slave resented the status (Snell 2003: 16).
World History
