This book was produced by Human Bridges.
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- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Prologue: What Are the Roots of Civilization?
- Chronology and Maps
- Spring: Establishing Society’s Structural Proportions
- 1. How the Archaic Kosmos Integrated Nature and Society
- 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
- 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
- Summer: Balancing Self-Expression With Group Order
- 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
- 5. Music, Temperament, and Social Concord
- 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
- Autumn: The Division of Labor and Economic Justice
- 7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks
- 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
- 9. The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth
- Winter: The Archaic Order in Motion and Its Collapse
- 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
- 11. Periodicities of Property and Debt
- 12. The Cosmology of War
- Epilogue: Modern Civilization as the Destruction of Archaic Order
- Backmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- Lecture: How Temples and Religion Played a Central Role in Creating the Ancient Economic Order That Has Become Secularized Today
- Help Us Edit and Join This Collaborative Research Project
- Navigate the Query Pages Throughout This Book
- Style Guide for This Book
The agricultural revolution and its food surpluses made possible a specialization of labor and organization of handicraft workshops. Documentation of these processes appears with the innovation of written record-keeping late in the fourth millennium BC, when commercial enterprise was set aside in the Sumerian temples. The first hierarchies of economic authority developed in these public utilities. Merchants and handicraft labor were organized into public guilds.
Standing above the family groupings and tribal memberships, the temples reinvested their revenues in large engineering projects such as monumental public buildings and transport canals. This accumulation of public capital stood in sharp contrast to the normal use of wealth left in private hands, which typically was dissipated in the form of conspicuous consumption.
Classical society became economically polarized, heterogeneous, and “individualistic” to an unprecedented degree. In place of what had been more or less open tribes and other subdivisions arose closed aristocracies. “Race” differences separated victorious from conquered populations.
In place of public institutions set corporately apart to conduct commercial enterprise as a public utility, the classical state emerged alongside private ownership of enterprise and transport. Civic officials in classical times no longer functioned as an autonomous sector, but were members of their community at large. A single body of law was created in place of one set of regulations for the public sector alongside the traditional oral law and “feud justice” that governed the communal groupings at large. This unification of the law left no central authority to oppose wealthy “big-men,” to cancel agrarian debts or free persons who had fallen into debt-slavery or sold themselves into servitude under conditions of economic duress. Property became alienable on an irrevocable basis, as did human freedom.
Autumn Table of Contents
