2. Analyse the social structures in Bronze Age societies.
Archaeologists classify the periods following the Ice Age into three categories: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. The Bronze Age was the period that followed the Stone Age, and the beginning of the Bronze Age was characterized by the introduction of metal and metal implements into human society. The unorganized settlements of humans that were characteristic of the Stone Age developed into highly evolved civilizations. The Bronze Age saw the earliest written script and witnessed much evolution in society and life. In parts of the world such as Mesopotamia, the Bronze Age commenced around 4500 BC, in China and Japan around 3000 BC and in Britain around 1900 BC.
It is time we attempted a definition of the kind of social structure peculiar to the Bronze Age. This reconstruction shall depend mainly on the Mesopotamian evidence. It is for this region that thousands of written tablets of the third millennium BC are available to the historian, which give enormously detailed information. A large segment of an archive (dozens of clay tablets) for instance, document the month-by-month work of an official in charge of grain disbursements in one small centre. Moreover, there is a wealth of archaeological and settlement pattern data, because the Euphrates and its branches have shifted to the west since the third millennium, so that the area under intense cultivation today has not damaged BronzeAge sites.
In Unit 7 we had seen that the situation in Egypt was totally different. The Indus and the Huang Ho are in their turn huge rivers with speedy currents, that regularly flood their banks, so that the probability of ancient sites being preserved in their valleys is very low. However, the Hakra tributary of the Indus (perhaps the lowest stretch of the Sarasvati of the Rgveda) became dry soon after the Harappan period, so that many mounds have survived until today along its lower stretch in Pakistan
Concerning Mesopotamia, as far back as 1972 the Russian cuneiform scholar, I. Diakonoff, had concluded that its economy after 3000 BC had two separate “sectors”, the “communal-andprivate” sector, and the sector managed by the state. The first was peopled by rural communities, still structured on descent, and tribal in the sense that private property in agricultural land had not come into existence. As far as the written evidence goes, only a few members of the elite actually purchased land and became private owners. A few third-millennium legal texts attest to the sale of large tracts of land by multiple sellers, (As the names of the sellers’ fathers, grandfathers, and other ancestors
are often given, we can make out that they were all related in the male line) to individuals who were either the rulers themselves, or high functionaries (Food grains, cloth, fish, oil, and occasionally copper were some of the items given in exchange). These were the only “contracts” that were inscribed on stone (not on ordinary clay tablets), and they make references to certain rituals being performed after the transfer, like the pouring of oil and the driving of nails into walls and feasting the entire group of sellers. All this indicates that the transfer of communally owned lands into private hands was a highly unusual deed. References in royal inscriptions indicate that people could be summoned by clan or lineage to labour in the city or on temples or their estates. Nowhere in the Bronze Age are there references to land registration, or to the state keeping records of land holdings.
The state sector comprised the economies of the temple and palace, the property of gods/kings/sacral rulers. The Mesopotamian temple owned large tracts of land (originally the land of the tribal community) and herds of livestock. The palace of the king also owned land, occasionally that bought from rural communities. Agriculture on such land was performed by the populace under one or other form of allocation, for a few months in the year, or, in the case of prisoners of war and clients and warriors of the king, through the year. The produce of the land and animal herding was also processed. Temples and palaces organized the grinding of flour, the baking of bread, and the production of woolen cloth from sheep’s wool, together with a number of crafts utilizing metal, stone, and shell from afar. (see Unit 7, sections on technology and trade).
There is absolutely no evidence that the rural people had to pay a tax in grain on their harvests. It was periodic labour that they owed to their king and gods. Sometimes temple offerings would have been obligatory, and in this period of very early state formation, when there would have been no standing armies, young men would have been called up for war as and when the need arose. (It is at that stage that metal weapons would be cast on a mass scale.)
There is absolutely no evidence that the rural people had to pay a tax in grain on their harvests. It was periodic labour that they owed to their king and gods. Sometimes temple offerings would have been obligatory, and in this period of very early state formation, when there would have been no standing armies, young men would have been called up for war as and when the need arose. (It is at that stage that metal weapons would be cast on a mass scale.)
The state sector was of large proportions. An entire palace archive available from excavations at the city-state of Mari (1800 – 1750 BC) has been studied, and it appears that the palace itself occupied 3 hectares, with 260 rooms and multiple courtyards. The king allotted parcels of land around the town or further afield, to his men. Allotments of 50 to 80 hectares were worked by 10 to 15 men. People were recruited from the respective localities when labour needs were high, e.g. at harvest time. Texts indicate that palace workshops organized the crafting of textiles, weaponry, leather, bronze tools, etc. The palace provided the raw materials and supplied food and clothes as rations to as many as 400 individuals at any one time. The produce was stored in palace magazines. (Palace and temple workshops were also located outside the enclosed precincts of these institutions.) Merchants went abroad on behalf of the king, and his personal seal was often rolled on packages.
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Payments made for labour in the state sector were rations rather than wages. They took the form of flour, bread, wool, fish, etc. They were paid monthly . Detailed lists of payments were drawn up, naming each recipient. Because they
were made to the aged and to infants, and because the amounts were standardized according to age and gender, (In Sumer in the later third millennium, adult men usually got 48 litres of flour a month and adult women, 24) these payments cannot be termed wages. They were rations. The major workforce in the state sector comprised the ration workers.
The king and his extended family and military officials not only laid claim to the palace lands, they were also de facto owners of the temple’s estates, herds, fisheries and workshops. They are not mentioned ever as performing any kind of labour, but instead often had huge amounts of wealth expended on their burial, as we shall see below. So we conclude that class formation was present but inchoate—it was not yet based on the ownership of basic resources such as land. We could suggest that in any Bronze Age situation it was one kin group that had acquired the permanent power to impose its will on society. This meant that the various tribes and descent groups in the land lost the right to declare war on each other, or resort to blood vengeance. As an elite came to assert its authority with the backing of force, it was the king and his officers who alone could decide who was right or wrong, and the punishments for misdeeds, according to declared laws of the land.
There is evidence that in broad outline society in Bronze-Age Egypt was similarly structured. You may recall that on the Narmer Palette, ahead of the Pharaoh in the red crown of Lower Egypt, walk four standard bearers, with bird or animal emblems, of which each probably represented a tribe or a clan. So here too, as in Mesopotamia, recruitment to warfare may have been by descent group or clan. We have referred in Unit 8 to the wooden tokens given out to soldiers and workmen for their food rations. Expeditions consisting of over a thousand men were on occasion equipped to settle for several months in the eastern desert, to quarry stones or mine metal. Elsewhere, the remains of barrack-like housing testify to an expedition force that built a new city. Records were maintained of tools handed out or given for repair, of attendance, and of ration payments. Attached smiths repaired the tools, scribes kept the records. Once the required quantities of stone or metal were ready, or the new city built, the expedition would close.
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