Read Online A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium by Chris Harman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Chris Harman
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had been freed from daily toil in the fields no longer had any interest in furthering humanity’s control over nature. ‘Many of the revolutionary steps in progress—harnessing animals’ motive power, the sail, metal tools—originally appeared as “labour saving devices”. But the new rulers now commanded almost unlimited resources of labour…they saw no need to bother about labour saving inventions’. 84 Rulers who reinforced their power over the masses by encouraging superstition—the Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs claimed god-like powers for themselves—had no interest in encouraging scientific endeavour among society’s small literate minority of priests and full time administrators. These were stuck with the body of knowledge developed early in the urban revolution, treating it with almost religious reverence, copying texts and transmitting established ideas, but no longer attempting new lines of enquiry. Not for the last time in history, science degenerated into scholasticism and scholasticism into magic as the centuries proceeded. 85 The literate elite ended up holding back rather than advancing humanity’s control over nature.
A ruling class that had arisen out of advances in human productive powers now prevented further advances. But without such advances its own rapaciousness was bound to exhaust society’s resources, until the means of livelihood became insufficient to provide for the mass of the population. At that point it only required a slight change in climate for people to starve and society to shake to its core. This happened in Egypt at the end of the ‘Old Kingdom’, when a fall in the level of the Nile floods caused difficulties with irrigation. Willey and Shimkin suggest similar ‘over-exploitation’ by the ruling class brought about the collapse of the ‘classic’ Mayan civilisation of Meso-America about 1,200 years ago:
A growing upper class, together with its various retainers and other members of the incipient ‘middle class’, would have increased economic strain on the total society…Malnutrition and disease burdens increased among the commoner population and further decreased its work capacity…Despite these internal stresses, the Maya of the late classic period apparently made no technological or social adaptive innovations…In fact, the Maya elite persisted in its traditional direction up to the point of collapse. 86
Class struggles in the first civilisations
The impoverishment of the exploited classes responsible for feeding the rest of society necessarily brought a clash of interests between the different classes.
The basic class divide was that between the ruling minority and the mass of dependent peasant cultivators. The growing exactions of the rulers must have caused clashes between the two. But, to be honest, we know little about these. In so far as tomb paintings or temple inscriptions depict the mass of people, it is as people bowing down to and waiting on their ‘superiors’. This is hardly surprising—it has been the preferred way of depicting the masses for ruling classes throughout history.
Nevertheless, a number of archaeologists and historians suggest the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom involved a ‘social revolution’, quoting a later text known as the ‘Admonitions of the Ipuwer’, which imagines a situation in which ‘servant girls can usurp the places of their mistresses, officials are forced to do the bidding of uncouth men, and the children of princes are dashed against the wall’. 87 In a somewhat similar way, the collapse of the Meso-American civilisations of Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the southern Mayas is often ascribed to peasant revolts. 88
But the tensions that arose were not just between the rulers and the exploited peasants. The evidence from all the early civilisations points to growing fissures within the ruling class.
In Mesopotamia and Meso-America the first ruling classes seem to have been the priests of the
A ruling class that had arisen out of advances in human productive powers now prevented further advances. But without such advances its own rapaciousness was bound to exhaust society’s resources, until the means of livelihood became insufficient to provide for the mass of the population. At that point it only required a slight change in climate for people to starve and society to shake to its core. This happened in Egypt at the end of the ‘Old Kingdom’, when a fall in the level of the Nile floods caused difficulties with irrigation. Willey and Shimkin suggest similar ‘over-exploitation’ by the ruling class brought about the collapse of the ‘classic’ Mayan civilisation of Meso-America about 1,200 years ago:
A growing upper class, together with its various retainers and other members of the incipient ‘middle class’, would have increased economic strain on the total society…Malnutrition and disease burdens increased among the commoner population and further decreased its work capacity…Despite these internal stresses, the Maya of the late classic period apparently made no technological or social adaptive innovations…In fact, the Maya elite persisted in its traditional direction up to the point of collapse. 86
Class struggles in the first civilisations
The impoverishment of the exploited classes responsible for feeding the rest of society necessarily brought a clash of interests between the different classes.
The basic class divide was that between the ruling minority and the mass of dependent peasant cultivators. The growing exactions of the rulers must have caused clashes between the two. But, to be honest, we know little about these. In so far as tomb paintings or temple inscriptions depict the mass of people, it is as people bowing down to and waiting on their ‘superiors’. This is hardly surprising—it has been the preferred way of depicting the masses for ruling classes throughout history.
Nevertheless, a number of archaeologists and historians suggest the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom involved a ‘social revolution’, quoting a later text known as the ‘Admonitions of the Ipuwer’, which imagines a situation in which ‘servant girls can usurp the places of their mistresses, officials are forced to do the bidding of uncouth men, and the children of princes are dashed against the wall’. 87 In a somewhat similar way, the collapse of the Meso-American civilisations of Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the southern Mayas is often ascribed to peasant revolts. 88
But the tensions that arose were not just between the rulers and the exploited peasants. The evidence from all the early civilisations points to growing fissures within the ruling class.
In Mesopotamia and Meso-America the first ruling classes seem to have been the priests of the
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