In many areas around the Mediterranean Sea, those who worked the fields lived with their families in villages or small towns, not in isolated farmsteads. The reason may have been the scarcity of water sources, which forced groups of people to share what available water there was. In any case, such “agricultural towns” and their surrounding territories formed strong economic units, the inhabitants of the town living off the land outside that they owned and either worked themselves or had worked for them by renters or serfs. This was the pattern in Greece, in large parts of Italy, and also in Syria, Palestine, and in other regions of the Near East. Beyond the grain fields of the community, there was a zone of uncultivated countryside left for sheep and goats to graze in and where sometimes hunting could take place. There one would find undisturbed nature, in contrast to the cultivated areas, always inhospitable and potentially dangerous, the abode of herdsmen, robbers, tramps, and all sorts of “weird” people, those literally on the margins of society. In Greece, it was only small groups or even individuals who were thus characterized, but in the Near East and North Africa complete tribes with their livestock moved around in the border zones between the agricultural areas and the deserts. Barter, robbery, raids, and pillage usually made up what contacts they had with the sedentary populations. They were the outsiders in societies dominated by the inhabitants of villages or agricultural towns.
In that agrarian world, society was divided along several lines. There was, first, the division between men and women: only men had a voice in the affairs of the community, and only they could vote in an assembly wherever there was such an institution. In the past, it was sometimes thought that in antiquity or in prehistory there had been societies ruled by women or where women at least would have played a dominant role, but any evidence for that is lacking—even the custom of some peoples of giving their children the family names of the mothers or letting inheritances pass along the female line are not the “relics” of such a supposed “matriarchal” society. A second division was between members of the group and all outsiders, to which belonged not only the marginalized people mentioned in the preceding text, but also foreigners from another town or city, and slaves. The foreigner on a visit could normally expect temporary hospitality but would only very seldom be permanently accepted into the community. Slaves would remain outsiders too, at least in Greece.
World History
