7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks
From The Observatory
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
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- Style Guide for This Book
Editor’s Note
This chapter is a stub that would benefit from Collaborative Research volunteer expansion. Please see this page for notes.
Could you help us expand this chapter to include more of what is teased in the Key Concepts section?
Introduction
As archaic communities grew in size, they subdivided into functional units for local decision-making. The earliest known political assemblies seem to have been composed of the community’s men of fighting age, at least from the time of Uruk’s Gilgamesh in the third millennium BC through classical Greek times. Voting units thus were identical to the fighting units. The Greek term “demos” originally meant the infantry, while the Etruscan Roman “populus” likewise referred to the men under arms.
A common subdivision was into tribes (literally “thirds,” but more often into quarters or 12ths), reflecting the year’s division into seasons or months. These divisions enabled each tribal fraction to take its turn on a rotating basis in administering the community’s leadership center for one season or month each year. Each tribal fraction became a social-unit-in-miniature with its own religious cult, professional guilds, and public corporations.
As the arms race grew more expensive, especially with regard to raising horses for the cavalry, armies subdivided themselves into ranks. These became the basis for social classes divided along economic lines. Each soldier had to provide himself with the arms and leisure time needed to practice the fighting techniques appropriate to his rank. The first connotation of “class” thus was essentially military, albeit with an economic base.
The mounted cavalry represented an oligarchic tendency, especially where it controlled the senate as opposed to the less affluent popular assembly. But the cheapening of iron arms around the seventh century BC bolstered the infantry’s role relative to that of the cavalry, spurring a democratizing of Greek political life. It sometimes was associated with the coming to power of popular “tyrants” who distributed the wealth and power hitherto monopolized by warlord aristocracies.
Only in classical antiquity did clan groupings become hereditarily closed. The leading families took direct control of commercial enterprise and government. This was above all the case in Rome. In the sixth century BC its ruler Servius devised the political stratagem of establishing voting rights in proportion to wealth rather than numbers.Fact CheckCan you verify this point? There is some confusion about the nature of Servius’s reform and how involved Servius was in it. The oligarchy thus secured what it failed to achieve in Athens: political control of society’s government by outweighing the vote of the demos/populus.
Add a SectionSee the General Queries page for Chapter 7 for more about omitted stub text sections (on Etymology and on Math and the Cosmos) in this query.
Add a SectionDo you have a suggestion for a good conclusion to this chapter? More sections may be missing too.
Key Concepts
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keywords: “Tribe” (lit. a “third” [viz. also “tribute”Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?]) and “class,” originally the “first class,” that is, the cavalry in the armed forces (viz. “classification”).Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?
Key image: The amphictyonic center whose administration was delegated on a rotating calendrical basis among its typically three, four, six, or 12 members.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?
Lunar symbols: The communal or tribal hearth (Latin focus) where official meals were served.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?
Solar symbol: The amphictyonic centerKey Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? and its census.
Principle of regularity: Each tribe was an equal fraction of the citizen body. Each was a community in miniature, with its own temple and public buildings, officers, and military or tax assessment.
Periodic renewal ceremony: Rites of passage for admission to the community’s adult membership, capped by the census at which public obligations were apportioned. When some tribes or clans lost or gained members or changed in relative size, families might be shifted around to restore proportionality.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?
Integration with the calendrical kosmos: The number of tribes typically reflected the number of months or seasons in the year. When Cleisthenes changed the number of Athenian tribes from 12 (3 x 4) to 10, he adjusted the public prytany calendar accordingly, from a 12-month to a 10-month basis.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?
Public character: Tribes apportioned the population for public purposes such as serving in the militia, voting, taking local responsibility for neighborhood upkeep, and liability for contributions or taxes at the tribal or deme level. Division into classes likewise ranked individuals in terms of their military and tax liability, usually according to the wealth needed to arm oneself in the appropriate military class (cavalry, armed or light infantry, etc.). A citizen’s first public loyalty was supposed to be to his tribe (and later, under Cleisthenes’s reform, to his deme district),Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? regardless of how this cut across clan lines.
Religious sanctification: Each tribe had its own patron-hero, often designated by the regional cult-center. The eponymous heroes of Cleisthenes’s 10 tribes were selected by the Delphic oracle from a list of 100 names submitted.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Each tribe or fractional division (e.g., the Athenian deme) had its own local cult center.
Ultimate dissolution: Closed aristocratic clans acted in their own narrow interests rather than those of the larger social unit. Disenfranchisement of the demos resulted from the loss of traditional land rights and of periodic freedom from debt.
Bibliography
Verify CitationIf you have additional texts that should be considered for Chapter 7’s Bibliography (now or after revisions expanding this stub chapter), please suggest them.
Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973).
Pavel Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems (1971).Text AccessCan you help us get access to this text? And can you help us check what is attributed to it?
Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore: 1984).
