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Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations
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TLDR
Yoffee as discussed by the authors argues that early states were not uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities, but had slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen.Abstract:
In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of 'godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities. Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.read more
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The reaction against analogy
TL;DR: This chapter describes a series of arguments and counterarguments through which the ambivalence about analogy noted by recent commentators took definite shape.
Book
The Archaeology of China: From The Late Paleolithic To The Early Bronze Age
Li Liu,Xingcan Chen +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the past, present, and future of Chinese archaeology are discussed, with a focus on early complex societies and the rise and fall of Chinese civilization in comparative perspective.
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Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity
TL;DR: The authors examined trajectories of socio-cultural and environmental change in six key regions in which complex societies emerged during the Middle Holocene: the central Sahara (focusing on the Libyan Fezzan), Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia (Indus-Sarasvati region), northern China and coastal Peru.
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Ancient Mesopotamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization
TL;DR: Oppenheim as mentioned in this paper used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago, and after his death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun.
Book
The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece
TL;DR: Ants around a pond: An Ecology of City-States as mentioned in this paper, a theory of decentralized cooperation between humans and political animals in a city-state, is a classic example.
References
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Book
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
TL;DR: In this paper, Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time.
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Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Francis Fukuyama,James C. Scott +1 more
Book
The sources of social power
TL;DR: The sources of social power trace their interrelations throughout human history as discussed by the authors, from neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilizations, the classical Mediterranean age and medieval Europe up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England.