The Creation of Order
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Source: Human Bridges Project
Archaic Organization of Time, Measurement and Laws, Music, Tribes, and Cities
Note to reader:
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
Editor’s Note
Michael Hudson started researching and drafting The Creation of Order as a book manuscript in the early 1980s, and his research efforts to understand the systems and structures of archaic societies have continued into the present. Realizing the scale of research necessary to complete the ambitions of the book, Hudson shared the text with the Observatory, in the hopes that future editors would help sift through texts from the past and update and fill in the missing pieces.
We are proud that Hudson’s The Creation of Order is the first Mainframe research project published on the Observatory using our Collaborative Research publishing tool. Invited researchers develop Mainframes, contribute research, engage in peer review, and publish their deliberations in an open-ended and transparent format accessible to interested audiences, all while deciding which information to make public.
We invite you to explore and contribute to this ongoing Collaborative Research and editing project by navigating the table of contents of this book’s chapters’ query pages and have shared this book’s style guide for researchers.
—Jenny Pierson and Jan Ritch-Frel, Observatory Co-FoundersNote to reader:
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
This book was produced by Human Bridges.
“The Creation of Order” by Michael Hudson is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.
Table of Contents
- 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