Analyzing order, legitimacy, and wealth in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

Accepted for publication, in Chinese translation by Jin Shoufu, in 世界历史评论 / Shijie

lishi pinglun / World Historical Review (Shanghai)

John Baines and Norman Yoffee

This article, of which the first version was written for the book, Order, Legitimacy, and
Wealth in Ancient States (2000),1 recapitulates the main theoretical arguments of our larger
1998 essay, “Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.”2 Here, we
revise and update our 2000 article in order to make it more easily accessible, through
translation and some expansion, to Chinese scholars, including historians and archaeologists,
of whom the latter were our prime original audience.3 We add a few new observations and
some references but do not repeat the examples and detailed discussion in the long version.
We will be especially interested to learn what aspects of our approach specialists will
consider to be applicable to the evolution and nature of early states in China. The 2018 books
of Li Min, Social Memory and State Formation in Early China, 4 and Roderick Campbell,
Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State: The Shang and Their World,5 consider some
of these matters.

Introduction
The earliest civilizations of the late fourth to first millennium BCE generated developments—
in social forms, in their sustaining institutions, and in their values—that set them apart both
from their smaller-scale and less hierarchical forerunners and from their larger-scale
successors, some of which constituted the world’s first supra-regional empires. To study such
civilizations—perhaps any civilizations—requires implicit or explicit comparison between
them. In our 1998 essay we sought a way of making this need explicit, as well as useful for
scholars in related fields, by focusing around the three interpretive concepts of order,
legitimacy, and wealth, while also presenting key features of the civilizations in order to
exemplify our approach. In the present short article, we characterize those concepts which,
we argue, offer insight into the concerns of the rulers and elites of the societies and thence to
the larger social order.
We understand the leading group in the societies we study, which we term the “inner
elite,” as those people who surrounded and included rulers and who directed, sustained, and
transmitted the essential configurations of the civilizations. Much larger groups of sub-elites
mediated between the inner elites and the wider populations. The inner elites, who depended
on those concentric groups for material and administrative support, must have communicated

1
Edited by Janet Richards and Mary Van Buren (New Directions in Archaeology; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). The original version of the present essay, “Order, Legitimacy,
and Wealth: Setting the Terms,” is on pp. 13–17. The book contains valuable short articles on a wide
range of early civilizations that respond to and expand upon our approach.
2
In Gary Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds), Archaic States (Santa Fe: School of American Research
Press, 1998), 199–260. Available online at https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/norman-
yoffee/essays Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth 1998 w-refs 2.pdf.
3
We are very grateful indeed to Jin Shoufu for inviting us to contribute this article and for his
translation into Chinese. We should also like to thank Paul Collins for help with the illustrations.
4
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
5
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

1
their vision across the societies in order to win their participation, but evidence for how that
was done is sparse.
In brief, we reviewed the extraordinarily different institutions in the two ancient
civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia: kingship and government, urbanization,
writing systems and the nature of diverse types of material and visual sources, the economy,
and elites. Given these contrasting institutions, we went on to posit that the elements of
similarity between the two civilizations did not lie in specific socioeconomic formations, on
which most of the social evolutionary literature concentrates, but in the nature of order,
legitimacy, and wealth and the interrelations among these. In doing this we follow a similar
strategy to that of Bruce Trigger, in a short book of 1993 in which he studied a broad range of
civilizations,6 expanding and deepening his approach in a comprehensive work published in
2003.7 Since then, no such wide-ranging book has appeared, at least not one that explicitly
compares ancient civilizations in a non-reductionist way and is well-informed.8
We see the interplay of our three factors as focusing on, and being exemplified by, the
distinctive complex of “high culture.” Through an investigation of the instrumental principles
of hierarchization, of the restriction and display of certain kinds of wealth and the devaluation
of other kinds of symbols, and of constitutive institutions of legitimation that emphasize the
dispersive ties between rulers and ruled, we argue that it is possible to apply a comparative
method. This method, we also strongly insist, must incorporate both humanistic and social-
scientific domains and styles of research and must encompass all available categories of
sources, from material culture to texts (with their material supports). By seeking to
understand the commonalities in ancient states and civilizations we ask what it is that makes
each civilization unique—what makes Egypt Egypt and/or Mesopotamia Mesopotamia, for
example—as well as what makes civilizations comparable. We also want to move social
evolutionary theory from a dominant concern with what states and civilizations are to
research about what they do.
Thus, our problematic lies first in the methods that can be profitably used in comparing
two early civilizations, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, which arose at about the same time
and in more or less the same region of the world, and then in the larger epistemological issues
of how one builds or employs a comparative method in which the evolution of ancient states
and civilizations can be generally investigated. In this essay we define “states” as the
specialized political system of the larger cultural entities that we denominate “civilizations.”
Civilizations may be made up of many states, notably city-states, or of one state.

Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

By around 3100 BC in ancient Western Asia and the northeastern corner of Africa, the two
earliest large states/civilizations in the world are believed to have emerged (see map, Fig. 1).
The civilizational forms that developed around that date set the stage for more than three
millennia of change in the two regions (for periods, see Chronological Table). Although

6
Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1993).
7
Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
8
Recent books include: Yuval Noah Hariri, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York:
HarperCollins, 2015 [original Hebrew 2011]); Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of
Inequality: How our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). A book that focuses on ancient cities and
comparison is Norman Yoffee (ed.), Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE
(Cambridge World History 3; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). A next textbook on the
evolution of ancient states is Jennifer C. Ross and Sharon R. Steadman, Ancient Complex Societies
(Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2017).

2
social forms and institutions changed enormously in both places, there was no fundamental
break until Mesopotamia was absorbed in the Parthian empire of Western Asia in the last
centuries BCE, while Egypt, which was already part of the Roman empire, lost its inherited
cultural identity when it became Christianized from about the third century CE. We focus on
the first parts of these immense periods, but the long duration of both civilizations is a
fundamental element that our approach seeks to understand.
In Mesopotamia, early political development is most clearly evident from archaeological
surveys9 and from excavations at the urban site of Warka (ancient Uruk; plan of central area
Fig. 2), with its massive temple complexes (including a possible palace), monumental art,
cylinder seals (Fig. 3), ration system, presumed central place within its hinterland, surplus
production, and writing system.10 Warka was probably one among a number of such city-
states. The urban implosion, in which city-states carved up the countryside while the settled
population of smaller sites shifted into the new cities (thus creating a depopulated, “ruralized”
countryside), also produced—it has been argued—a short-lived explosion outward.11
Mobilizing unprecedented numbers of dependent personnel, the leaders of these city-states
established far-flung colonies, if such they were (and/or immigrants from the south settled in
northern villages), up the Euphrates into Syria and Anatolia, and onto the Iranian Plain;12 the
“colonies” proved easier to found than to maintain.
In Egypt, the signs of unification and civilization, which are less archaeologically
conventional, encompass the rapid development of large cemeteries with marked social
inequality, followed in late Naqada II and Naqada III (late fourth millennium BCE) by a
standardization of material culture throughout the country.13 In the wake of these changes
came political centralization of the Nile Valley together with the Delta in the north (from the
First Cataract at Aswan to the Mediterranean), polarization of wealth, the decline of regional
centers and emergence of just a few large cities,14 and the development of luxury goods,
characteristic art forms (e.g., Fig. 4), writing, and large-scale mortuary architecture.15 Egypt
was the first state in the world that was regional in scale. The unitary polity reached out

9
See the classic work of Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and
Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
10
E.g., Susan Pollock, “Bureaucrats and Managers, Peasants and Pastoralists, Imperialists and
Traders: Research on the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr Periods in Mesopotamia,” Journal of World
Prehistory 6 (1992): 297–336; Mario Liverani, Uruk, the First City, translated and edited by Zainab
Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop (London: Equinox, 2006); Hans Nissen, “Urbanization and the
Techniques of Communication: The Mesopotamian city of Uruk during the Fourth Millennium BCE,”
in Norman Yoffee (ed.), Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE (2015), 113–30.
11
Norman Yoffee, “Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 24 (1995): 281–311; Geoff Emberling, “Mesopotamian Cities and Urban Process,
3500–1600,” in Norman Yoffee (ed.), Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE
(2015), 253–78.
12
Gregory A. Johnson, “Late Uruk in Greater Mesopotamia: Expansion or Collapse?” Origini:
preistoria e protostoria delle civiltà antiche 14 (1988–89): 595–613; Guillermo Algaze, The Uruk
World-System: The Dynamics of Expansion in Early Mesopotamian Civilization (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993; Augusta McMahon, “Mesopotamia,” in Peter Clark (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 31–48; DOI:
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199589531.013.0002.
13
David Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa,
10,000 to 2650 BC (Cambridge World Archaeology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
14
John Baines, “Ancient Egyptian Cities: Monumentality and Performance,” in Norman Yoffee (ed.),
Early cities in comparative perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE (2015), 27–47.
15
See also Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2nd edition; London; New York:
Routledge, 2006).

3
briefly to the south to devastate, but not occupy, Lower Nubia, and to the north to assert
hegemony over southern Palestine.
Thus, at around the same date the two regions evolved highly differentiated and stratified
state societies. Both regions exhibited specialized political systems with bureaucratic
administrations (or what soon became such: the earliest evidence does not permit a definite
statement) based on surplus production, a written system of recording, and a managed system
of distribution. They also displayed symbols of rulership, specialized elite ritual forms
(although priests are not a distinct group in earlier Egypt), and the demarcation of a “core–
periphery” structure in relation to their external worlds. Those symbols and ritual forms
characterized their identities as civilizations to their own societies, and they remain
distinctive to this day. We now discuss key factors in the configuration of such enduring
forms in relation to the three terms of the title of this essay.

Order
Order in ancient civilizations necessarily encompasses more than just human beings, and it
includes the gods and the dead; it also crucially includes the king as a special category, as
well as the specialized governmental apparatus that we call the state. The gods and the dead
are real, but their reality is of a different kind from that of the king and humanity. They often
absorb a large proportion of the surplus flowing to the state.
Order in ancient civilizations implies the creation of a new ideology, by which we mean
the ascribed set of meanings about social, political, and economic relations and events, and in
particular about who has power and how it is obtained. The ruling elite, who have access to
the gods and the privileged dead, must present themselves as worthy participants in this
process. The new ideologies assert that there should be a state, centralized leadership,
powerful elites, and their dependents.16 These ideologies must be communicated through
tangible creations that accompany and constitute them. The artifactual embodiments of order,
therefore, from small objects to cities and landscapes, materialize it—in the sense of
Elizabeth DeMarrais and colleagues17—in a form that may have been given from on high,
that is, from the deities who participate in it and inform it, but is made present by human
labor. However massive and durable an embodiment, it cannot be of the scale of the
surrounding physical world, and this discrepancy cannot but draw attention to order’s
fragility and need of support. These embodiments also create a distancing between an ideal
order, mostly one imagined as having existed in the past, and the present. In this way they
display time and draw attention to the problematic of change, while also creating much of the
enduring subject matter of civilization.
The aspects of order just mentioned are mainly ideological. Order is also
instrumentalized. States and civilizations structure the universe more tightly than do less
stratified social forms that precede them and often surround them, and they may bear hard on

16
See Norman Yoffee, “Law Courts and the Mediation of Social Conflict in Early Mesopotamia”, in
Janet E. Richards and Mary Van Buren (eds), Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46–63; Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State:
Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
17
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Timothy Earle, “Ideology, Materialization, and
Power Strategies”, Current Anthropology 37 (1996): 15–31. For Egypt, see John Baines, “Modelling
the Integration of Elite and Other Social Groups in Old Kingdom Egypt,” In Juan Carlos Moreno
García (ed.), Elites et pouvoir en Egypte ancienne (Cahiers de Recherches de l’Institut de
Papyrologie et d’Egyptologie de Lille 28. Lille: Université Charles-De-Gaulle, 2010), 117–44.

4
nonconformity.18 Order is costly, and many people are at the harsh receiving end of its
effects. It does not follow, however, that the order proclaimed at the center is rejected by
those outside. As we discuss below, they may accept it as legitimate, or they may resist
oppression under the rules of order, or they may simply have no alternative to it. Moreover,
order may bring with it a reduction in the level of violence in a civilization and hence overlap
in a straightforward way with the everyday sense of the term, including the “order” imposed
by totalitarian regimes. Order often involves exchanging violence for repression and for
violent actions, or ideological claims of action, that are directed against societies on the
periphery.
Order in civilizations is characterized by a variety of kin-based structures, non-kin-based
structures, ethnic groups, economic groups, and/or a variety of social orientations which
are—however much they may be differentially constituted—overarched in such a way that all
are encompassed within one societal umbrella. Order emphatically does not require any
particular form of basic social organization.
It is this definition of order, in a differentiated and stratified society with a specialized
governmental center, or more commonly many centers in a city-state configuration, that
makes a civilization. Order circumscribes a dominant way of meaning and becomes
axiomatic in the socialization of members of society, especially of its elites. It may weaken or
may change subtly, and it may be abrogated and subsequently reaffirmed. For early
civilizations, perhaps unlike more recent ones, the disappearance or replacement of a
recognized style of order betokens their end. The vision of continuity across often
fundamental political change, such as the creation or withering of regional states, is crucial
for the maintenance of an idea of order.

Legitimacy
In the case of a regional state such as Egypt—or as developed on an altogether larger scale in
China in the late third century BCE—whatever combination of elements legitimized its
original formation could in theory have endured to do the same for its continuation. In
practice the transformations embodied in new social and symbolic forms hardly allow such a
possibility, and hence there are systematic reformulations and commentaries throughout the
existence of the state, all taking as given that the state is distinct from what lies temporally or
spatially outside.19 But the complex nature of legitimation is much more evident in “galactic”
civilizations like Mesopotamia or the Maya, whose definition applies across a range of
polities that are hardly ever politically unified.20 Legitimacy is vested in shared perceptions
that transcend the individual polities. A polity that claims a single definition of legitimacy, as
was the case in Egypt, is very much the exception, but in Egypt too the ideal of legitimacy
survived both periods of fragmentation into several polities and absorption into larger
empires.
In essence legitimacy is the institutionalization of people’s acceptance of, involvement in,
and contribution toward order. The two cannot be imagined without each other. Order,
however, could not survive the frequent shocks it suffers if people were not able to make play
with legitimacy and illegitimacy. Legitimacy frequently invokes the past as something

18
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
19
John Baines, “Kingship, Definition of Culture, and Legitimation,” in David O’Connor and David P.
Silverman (eds), Ancient Egyptian Kingship (Probleme der Ägyptologie 9; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995),
3–47.
20
See e.g., Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering
the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (revised edition; London: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

5
absolute that acts as a point of reference for the present, in many cases by claiming to
transmute the past into some aspect of the present.
What is distinctive for early civilizations is the complexity of the cultural vehicles
through which legitimacy is projected. These civilizations incorporate legitimacy into the
normal constitutive relations between people, and on a larger scale they inscribe legitimacy in
the landscape. Through specialization and unprecedented forms of inequality, ruling elites
acquire the capacity to embody their legitimacy in elaborate artifacts and practices and to
alter the environment to a far greater degree than societies of other types, even though many
of the latter created large-scale monuments, in places on several continents and in the Pacific.
These embodiments of legitimacy relate both to elites and to the wider society. Order and
legitimacy are the concern of elites, and only they are seen as fully comprehending them.
Legitimacy is thus an internal matter for the elite. Yet at the same time it encompasses the
society as a whole, as well as offering to the elite themselves a rationale for inequality that
goes beyond simple privilege. But that is not the chief power of legitimacy. Rather, the entire
society must accept, however variably and with whatever degree of coercion, that its order is
the only one and the right one, and must work to maintain that order or to contest and
discipline those who are delinquent in, or incapable of, preserving it.

Wealth
Wealth is an essential feature of early—of any—civilization. A crucial feature is the extent to
which most early civilizations multiplied the productive potential of their predecessor
societies, both demographically and in the creation and institutionalization of surpluses.
Surpluses might be in labor or in goods—each in any case implies the other—and might be
applied to a vast range of purposes. An emblem of several early civilizations, from the Inka21
to Egypt, is the architectural provision of enormous or hugely extravagant storage spaces,
both for this world and for the next. For example, in Egypt of the early second millennium
BCE a chain of fortresses along the extended frontier of Lower Nubia expressed such a
conception through its vast storage areas, imposing an integrated image of order, claimed
legitimacy, and wealth that was also expressed verbally through inscriptions.22 Another
emblem that is evident more or less everywhere is the creation, display, and consumption of
vastly expensive and generally rarefied artifacts dedicated to the gods, the dead, the ruler, and
the elite.
All this amassing, retention, and harnessing of wealth was achieved without great
technological advance—as against differences in scale and refinement—from predecessor
societies, and much continuity in basic material culture is visible across the transformations
of civilization. The amassing and exchange of wealth also involved elaborate sustaining
institutions, of which long-distance entrepreneurial trading networks such as that between
Assur and Kanesh in Anatolia in the early second millennium BCE provide a well-documented
example.23 If we look to comprehend wealth, we should therefore see it as a social and
civilizational phenomenon rather than a technological or simply economic one.

21
See Terence A. D’Altroy and Christine Hastorf (eds), Empire and Domestic Economy
(Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology; New York; London: Springer, 2011); R. Alan
Covey, “The Inca Empire,” in Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell (eds), Handbook of South
American Archaeology (New York; London: Springer, 2008), 818–19, with illustration.
22
See e.g., Bruce Williams, “Second Cataract Forts,” in Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima
Ikram, and Sue D’Auria (eds), Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile (Cairo; New York: AUC
Press, 2012), 340–47.
23
Mogens Trolle Larsen, Ancient Kanesh: A Merchant Colony in Bronze Age Anatolia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); Norman Yoffee and Gojko Barjamovic, “Old Assyrian Trade and
Economic History,” in Susanne Paulus, Kristin Kleber, and Georg Neumann (eds),

6
 This is not the place for detailed economic analysis, although it is clear that in economic
and related legal terms early civilizations showed a marked complexity and stratification. The
absence of “money” was no significant impediment to the functioning of their societies;
exchange and storage of value were done in other ways. Nevertheless, the scale of productive
institutions, the extent to which labor would be deployed, and the level of specialized training
and expertise have profound implications for a civilization’s character and need for
legitimation. Wealth makes a reversion to what went before almost unthinkable.
What is particularly important is the focus of wealth. The public and archaeologists, too,
tend to place great weight on the wealth generated in early civilizations—as well as in
societies on their periphery such as those of the Asian steppe of the first millennium BCE—its
display, and the competition for resources. Models of this sort, however, may depend on
unexamined assumptions. Just as wealth is important, it is equally clear that its exploitation
and display are often subject to strong controls, and its most extravagant forms may be
realized in contexts where such control is—at least in theory—easiest, such as the tomb.
Wealth should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather as an essential enabling factor whose
potential is released, but also harnessed and contained, by societies and civilizations.
But wealth cannot be fully contained. It tends to expose weaknesses in the configuration
of societies, while also imparting the potential to change. The obvious example of wealth’s
disruptive character is in its extravagant discarding—in a material perspective but not in that
of the actors—in burial. The world’s second oldest profession may be tomb robbery, a
practice that exists on the periphery of order and allows wealth to be recycled and perhaps
indirectly to sustain the unequal social order.24 Tomb robbery, as a continuing practice within
a society, has obvious parallels in the looting of temple treasures and other actions that are
carried out mainly against enemies in neighboring polities. What tomb robbery in particular
exposes somewhat disruptively, by revealing that people may be interested in the material
goods rather than their significance in context, is order’s fragility. Ideologies and
legitimations are not completely persuasive or coercive. Potentially they leave both central
symbols and the material forms in which they are embodied open to reincorporation in other
forms.
A final aspect of wealth relates strongly to order and legitimacy. Wealth helps to
celebrate and reenact an order that may not be fully itself without such celebration.25 In
joyfully reaffirming order and legitimacy, the actors use wealth to counter fragility, often
addressing celebration beyond their own group and involving much of the wider society. If
celebration is absent, order may be threatened; with it, everyone may internalize its
significance.

High culture
In order to take the implications of our key terms further and to situate their application
within the ancient societies, we must ask how the ruling elites organize and structure their
lives by exploiting wealth in the service of a legitimacy that sustains the order of a society,
and ultimately a civilization, in which they are the principal beneficiaries, together with the

Grenzüberschreitungen: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des Alten Orients, Festschrift für Hans
Neumann anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstages am 9. Mai 2018 (Münster: Zaphon, 2018), 815–24.
24
John Baines and Peter Lacovara, “Burial and the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Society: Respect,
Formalism, Neglect,” Journal of Social Archaeology 2 (2002): 5–36.
25
John Baines, “Public Ceremonial Performance in Ancient Egypt: Exclusion and Integration,” in
Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence Coben (eds), Archaeology of Performance: Theaters of Power,
Community, and Politics (Archaeology in Society; Lanham MD: AltaMira, 2006), 261–302; Baines,
High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (Studies in Egyptology and Ancient Near East;
Sheffield: Equinox, 2013).

7
gods. It is this intersection of order, legitimacy, and wealth that we term “high culture.” This
high culture is enacted and celebrated, and it sets early civilizations off from the culture of
their forerunners.
Our notion of the high cultures of the earliest civilizations sets them off from diverse
successor empires and civilizations of the “axial age,” a term, proposed by Karl Jaspers and
explored by Shmuel Eisenstadt and colleagues,26 that continues to be an object of discussion
and controversy.27 As summarized by Peter Machinist, these axial-age civilizations—which
include Han China, ancient Greece, ancient Israel, Brahman India, and later developments in
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—

are the source and origin of new kinds ideologies … which strive to present a comprehensive
view of the world, not merely of any particular group, and argue that the main task is to
remake present reality, corrupt and imperfect as it is, in accordance with the dictates of a
higher moral order. Socially, Axial civilizations come to be pervaded by new kinds of groups,
labelled by Eisenstadt “autonomous elites,” because their existence, recruitment, and
legitimacy do not depend finally on the political establishment, nor on traditional kinship ties,
but on individual qualifications, especially intellectual ability. It is the raison d’être of these
groups, in turn, to create, promulgate, and refine the new ideologies.

Many ideas and developments comparable with those of the Axial Age can be found at an
earlier date in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where they are embedded within the inner elite, not
the property of a distinct elite group. In Western Asia a transition can be seen between the
hegemonic Assyrian empire which fell in 612 BCE, on the one hand, and its more diverse
Neo-Babylonian and especially Persian successors, on the other hand. The autonomous elites
in the generally larger-scale Persian and later societies that are addressed by the concept of
the axial age inherited elements of their thinking from more ancient forerunners. In a slightly
different pattern, intellectual developments in a city like Hellenistic Alexandria (4th–1st
centuries BCE) emerged in interaction with the indigenous Egyptian high culture.28
These later “autonomous elites” are different from the ruling groups of the earliest
civilizations, which as noted we term the “inner elite”. An inner elite consists of a very small
percentage of people, certainly less than one percent, and constitutes both the cultural and the
executive and administrative core of a society. The inner elite is deeply involved in cultural
matters, whether or not its members have the technical training or roles to be executants in
artistic or ritual productions. Dependent on the inner elite is a larger “sub-elite” of qualified
people such as scribes, administrators, artists, and artisans. Nevertheless, the inner elite is the

26
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.) 1986. The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (SUNY
Series in Near Eastern Studies; [Albany]: State University of New York Press, 1986); see especially
Peter Machinist, “On Self-consciousness in Mesopotamia,” pp. 193–202, 511–18 (quotation from p.
183).
27
See e.g., Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (eds), Axial Civilizations
and World History (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 4; Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), with
Jan Assmann, “Axial ‘Breakthroughs’ and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel,” pp.
133–56, and Piotr Michalowski, “Mesopotamian Vistas on Axial Transformations,” pp. 157–81;
Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds), The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA;
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), with for Egypt Jan Assmann, “Cultural
Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age,” pp. 366–407; Daniel Austin Mullins, Daniel Hoyer,
Christina Collins, Thomas Currie, Kevin Feeney, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, Harvey
Whitehouse, and Peter Turchin, “A Systematic Assessment of ‘Axial Age’ Proposals Using Global
Comparative Historical Evidence,” American Sociological Review 83 (3, 2018): 596–626.
28
See e.g., essays in William V. Harris and Giovanni Ruffini (eds), Ancient Alexandria between Egypt
and Greece (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 26; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004).

8
group that carries and transmits the central meanings of the civilization in most or all spheres,
being involved in religious as well as other institutions. Only in later stages of the societies
do priests emerge as a separate group.
A crucial and uncomfortable question is that of who was addressed by the communication
of order and legitimacy. This issue is often presented in modernist terms of propaganda for
the masses. That idea is problematic because of the content of many high-cultural products,
which require deep immersion in their genres to be comprehended, as well as their very
scarce distribution within a society. Furthermore, many such products could not have been
seen at all once they had been created, or they had the most restricted possible audiences. The
conclusion seems inescapable that the principal focus of high culture was the very elites
themselves, at whose behest it was created and for whom it was sustained, also in the name of
the great gods. The inner elites made themselves into the core and repository of civilizational
meanings in such a way that the rest of society was very largely excluded from the
development and maintenance of those meanings. There must have been a delicate balance
between elite participation in core concerns and communication with broader groups. Central
symbols may have implicitly or explicitly addressed all of society, and intermediate groups
may have mediated those symbols more widely, but the gulf between the inner elite and the
rest remained profound. The elite’s small size was accepted as being natural in the order of
things, as well as being tempered a little by their dependence on large numbers of
subordinates, as in any premodern complex society.
High culture does not consist in any one phenomenon but varies from civilization to
civilization, as well as varying its repertory within single civilizations. A striking aspect of
high culture is that in many cases it coincides well with categories and objects of humanistic
study that have built up in Western and other scholarship, from architecture and visual arts,
through music, dance, and performing arts, to domains such as textiles and body
ornamentation, as well as oral and written literature. Many of these are hard to see from the
archaeological record, because they include perishable domains of material culture as well as
non-material verbal arts and music. Moreover, relatively few archaeologists specialize in the
analysis of such phenomena or, as natural materialists, they may be suspicious of the
symbolic power, and therefore power to yield insights through analysis, of such
manifestations of high culture.
The life conducted within the bounds of high culture crucially includes that of the gods.
Rituals performed for the gods include the most costly objects and elaborate performances
and are located in the most significant and highly formed spaces. Religious rituals also
present the gods to people outside, although often invisibly since the deity may remain
enclosed in a shrine. In the inclusiveness of some festival celebrations some rituals may span
all social groups. Many festivals, however, are enacted within the elite realm; others reach
out to connect and communicate in an exceptional and marginal moment.
A central component of high culture is cosmological. The ruling elite together sustains the
cosmos, the demanding divine and human members of which require—and glory in—vast
investments, from the dedication of precious objects and the construction of large temples to
the sacrifice of victims of war. In detail, moreover, high-cultural artifacts of many types
mimic and celebrate the cosmos. Such cosmological and cosmographic material is powerfully
incorporated into visual media. Verbal arts exercise persuasion on behalf of the order
celebrated in visual forms while elaborating celebration with complexities for which those
forms offer different potential. Written literature in particular, like high culture in general in
the earliest states, was the preserve of the elite. In its complexity literature was part of their
legitimacy, a mechanism through which they addressed, tempered, and extended their moral
position, in approaches comparable to those of the Axial Age elites mentioned above.

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 An essential feature of high culture is the requirements that artefacts and performances
generated within it impose of commitment, expertise, and expense, requirementsthat are
typically related to maintaining a tradition and hence to the negotiation of the past.29 As often
uneasy protagonists of modern high culture, many archaeologists and other scholars should
be able to identify with these preoccupations, even while retaining some detachment from
their objects of study. High culture was desperately important for key ancient actors. Here the
modern public that is excited by “treasures” of ancient civilizations may be nearer to the
ancient carriers of these civilizations—and indeed to ancient people outside the elites—than
are archaeologists who rightly seek a broader view of the constituent societies.

An extreme illustration: cross-cultural institutions of the later second millennium BCE

Thus, in addressing fundamental aspects of early civilizations in both their comparability and
their particularity, our prime concern is not the political and socioeconomic terms of the
examples. Of course, the material bases of these civilizations were necessary preconditions
for their existence, and this is for the most part what archaeologists have successfully defined
in social evolutionary studies. Our focus on order, legitimacy, and wealth, however, takes us
to different questions about the self-identity of civilizations. In many studies, extremes of
inequality are noted (and occasionally deplored) and are often analyzed as “political
economy”; we consider additionally what it is that elites take to be their own raison d'être
and how non-elites accept, negotiate, or struggle against these terms. By focusing as far as
possible on the actors’ perspectives, we can see what it is that lies within a civilization, over
against what lies outside.
Certain points, including boundaries between civilizations, can be illustrated in a rather
specialized example; we do not have space here for more analysis. For most of their history,
our two civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia interacted relatively little, but the
distance between them was not vast, and in some periods they engaged strongly in regional
interactions. Among these periods, international correspondence, gift exchange, and
diplomatic marriage happen to be well documented between Egypt and Mesopotamia—as
well as other parts of the ancient Near East—in the middle third of the second millennium
BCE.30
The gifts had material economic significance in the sending and receiving countries,
which belonged to different civilizations. Insofar as one side did not cheat the other, the items
exchanged were culturally central, since they consisted of prize products of their countries,
ones that incorporated the meanings they valued most. All this was as true for the recipient as
for the donor. But the recipient might burn a gold-inlaid throne to recover its gold: he wanted
the product of the work of his own civilization, not something from outside. Yet the exchange

29
See Zainab Bahrani, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity
(London: Reaktion 2014); John Baines, Henriette van der Blom, Yi Samuel Chen, and Tim Rood
(eds), Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World (Sheffield: Equinox, in
press), including Paul Collins, “‘He Who Saw the Deep’: History as Ritual in the Material World of
Mesopotamia”; John Baines, “History and Historiography in the Material World: Ancient Egyptian
perspectives.”
30
The fundamental study is Mario Liverani, Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near
East ca. 1600–1100 B.C. (History of the Ancient Near East, Studies 1; Padua: Sargon, 1990); Marian
H. Feldman, Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an “International Style” in the Ancient Near
East, 1400–1200 BCE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). see also John Baines, “On
Egyptian Elite and Royal Attitudes to Other Cultures, Primarily in the Late Bronze Age,” in Gilda
Bartoloni and Maria Giovanna Biga (eds), Not Only History: Proceedings of the Conference in Honor
of Mario Liverani Held in Sapienza-Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità, 20–
21 April 2009 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 121–46.

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retained its value through and beyond the destruction and recycling of the goods: its purpose
was ultimately communication rather than any specific enactment, a communication that was
maintained whatever the destiny of the gift. Like so much in high culture, the communication
was primarily among inner elites, who in this case belonged to different civilizations. During
this period, civilizations of the Late Bronze Age Near East formed a larger configuration at
this level, as has been explored in particular by Marc Van De Mieroop in his
programmatically titled The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of Ramesses II.31 From Iran
across Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the Aegean, as well as south to Egypt and Nubia,
correspondence documents common concerns of elites, concerns that are also evident in
material culture. Van De Mieroop remarks that in some respects the inner elites may have
identified with one another across the region more than they did with the lower strata of their
own societies.
Whereas the gifts were in principle reciprocal, in the late thirteenth century BCE the
Egyptians sent grain in time of famine to the Hittites, with whom they were allied by treaty.
The system of diplomatic exchange, which was the apex of interconnections, lasted some
centuries, but the famine aid came at its end. 32 The famine was part of a breakdown in
normal conditions; any economic aid there may have been received little emphasis in times of
prosperity, while help for the poorest was a normal obligation of local elites within societies.
The high-cultural world of which this exchange was an international crowning element was
both a product of and a factor in prosperity, but it was fragile and required constant nurturing.
That point applies just as strongly to the individual orders of ancient states and
civilizations. Order is threatened and fragile, as we can see in the collapse of political systems
and the often successive abandonment of early cities, as in late third millennium and second
millennium China (e.g., Liangzhu, Taosi, Erlitou, Zhengzhou and neighboring cities, Yinxu)
and in the Classic Maya collapse of the 8th–9th centuries CE.33 The fragility of order is
typical of early states, although in no way confined to them.34 The carriers of a civilization,
principally its elite, both define order and are engrossed in the task of maintaining it.
Although our focus here is on order, our approach also offers diagnostic pointers for periods
of formation or collapse, since it is the establishment of a new order and its failure that can
further define these phenomena. Understanding the nature of order, legitimacy, and wealth
makes it possible to investigate how and whether a civilization can survive as recognizably
the same entity through periods of political and economic collapse and of wholesale takeover
from outside. These considerations are particularly important in understanding the great
duration of civilization in China through many political changes and variations in regional
focus.

31
Oxford; Malden MA: Blackwell, 2007.
32
Van De Mieroop, The Eastern Mediterranean, pp. 138, 247.
33
China: see e.g., Li Min, Social Memory and State Formation in Early China; Classic Maya: Patricia
A. McAnany, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire, and Gyles Iannone, “Leaving
Classic Maya Cities: Agent-based Modeling and the Dynamics of Diaspora,” in Geoff Emberling
(ed.), Social Theory in Archaeology and Ancient History: The Present and Future of
Counternarratives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 259–90. See also n. <30>.
34
See Norman Yoffee, “The Evolution of Fragility: The Resistible Rise and Irresistible Fall of Early
States,” in Rainer Kessler, Walter Sommerfeld, and Leslie Tramontini (eds), State Formation and
State Decline in the Near and Middle East (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), 5–13; Norman Yoffee
(ed.), The Evolution of Fragility: The Conference (McDonald Institute of Archaeology Monographs:
Conversations; Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeology, forthcoming). For a primarily
ecological perspective, see James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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Conclusion
To end this brief essay, we reiterate that high culture can often endure through political and
economic collapse into subsequent periods of revival.35 The high-cultural frame that includes
independent states or groups of city-states is also crucial in showing the insufficiency of
political and economic analysis alone in understanding the formation and nature of early
civilizations. People—the elite and in this case no doubt also the rest of society—know what
it is to be Egyptian, Maya, or members of another civilization, and commitment to that
civilization is a presupposition for their lives. The elite express “what it is” in complex, high-
cultural terms.
Apart from their ability to revive, civilizations, and with them high culture, can survive
political conquest and absorption into larger empires or other overarching polities. Their final
disappearance is as often marked by the eclipse of high culture and attendant loss of
legitimacy as by the suppression of leaders. Into the place of one order comes another. At this
point, analysis in the terms we have set up has to end, because the successor civilizations,
which were generally of a much larger scale, differ from their predecessors in many ways,
especially in the nature of elites, as we have noted briefly in relation to the concept of axial-
age civilizations. Even if the later civilizations can be seen in terms of order, legitimacy, and
wealth, the meanings of those aspects have changed, and they may no longer have the same
centrality or consistency across a civilization’s regions.

35
See e.g., Norman Yoffee, “The Collapse of Mesopotamian States and Civilization,” in Norman
Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (eds), The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1988), 44–68; Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee (eds),
Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Guy D. Middleton, Understanding Collapse:
Ancient History and Modern Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Middleton, “The
Show Must Go On: Collapse, Resilience, and Transformation in 21st-century Archaeology,” Reviews
in Anthropology 46 (2–3, 2017): 78–105.

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