Ar(hai( States

ldited by Gary M. feinman ond Joy(e Marcos

S(h.1 .f Ilieriul ReSUHb Press • Slota Fe • lew luiu

 1
Order, lelitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Ilypt
and Mesopotallia
JIll BAilES an 10RIAI JOFFEE

y around 3100 Be in ancient Western Asia and the northeastern comer

B of Africa, the two earliest states I civilizations in the world are believed to
have emerged. (In this chapter we define "states" as the specialized po-
litical system of the larger cultural entities that we denominate "civiliza-
tions." We explain and defend this distinction in our conclusion.)
In Mesopotamia (fig. 7.1), early political development is most clearly
evident from archaeological surveys (Adams 1981) and from excavations at
the urban site ofWarka (ancient Uruk), with its massive temple complexes
(including a possible palace), monumental art, cylinder seals, ration system,
presumed central place in its hinterland, surplus production, and writing sys-
tem (Boehmer 1991; Pollock 1992). Warka was probably one among a
number of such city-states. The urban implosion, in which city-states carved
up the countryside while the population of smaller sites shifted into the new
cities (thus creating a depopulated, "ruralized" countryside), also produced-
it has been argued-an explosion outward (Algaze 1989; Schwartz 1988;
Yoffee 1995b). Mobilizing unprecedented numbers of dependent personnel,
the leaders of these city-states established far-flung colonies (and/or immi-
grants from the south settled in northern villages) up the Euphrates into
Syria and Anatolia, and onto the Iranian Plain (Algaze 1989, 1993a, 1993b;
Siirenhagen 1986; cf Johnson 1988-89; Stein 1993; Yoffee 1995b); the
colonies proved easier to found than to maintain.
In Egypt (fig. 7.2), the signs of unification and civilization are less ar-
chaeologically conventional, encompassing the rapid development of large
200 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

CASPIAN
SEA

f
N
I
o 100 200 300
! ! ! ! ! ! 'ian

REO
SEA
Mesopotamia and the Near East

Figure 7.1. Mesopotamia (after Postgate 1992; Edzard, Farber, and Soll-
berger 1977).

cemeteries and standardization of the material culture of the late Naqada II

and Naqada III phases throughout the country toward the end of the fourth
millennium Be. In the wake of these changes came political centralization of
the Nile Valley and Delta (from the First Cataract at Aswan to the Mediter-
ranean), polarization of wealth, the decline of regional centers, and the de-
velopment of mortuary architecture, luxury goods, characteristic art forms,
and writing. The centralized polity reached out briefly to the south to dev-
astate, 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 differen-
tiated and stratified societies (table 7.1). Both societies exhibited specialized
political systems with bureaucratic administrations (or what soon became
such-the earliest evidence does not permit a definite statement) based on
 Ebb
(TaII~'
MITANNI

.~

BybIos
SYRIA
MEDITERRANEAN SEA .o.m-

LIBYA
EGYPT

o 100 200 ""

~ .)o'~ ,t.;an

~--":'I·
SO""
80 trm

Figure 7.2. Egypt and Syria-Palestine. From ({Egypt" (author and map
consultant John Baines) in Encyclopaedia Britannica; reproduced with
permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, © 1988 by En-
cyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
TABLE 7. I. Prehistoric Periods, Historic Periods, and Dynasties: Egypt and Mesopotamia

Egypt Mesopotamia

Merimda (Delta) 5000 (Ubaid 5000-4000

Badari (Nile Valley) 4500
Naqada I (Nile Valley) 4000 Uruk 4000-3100
Ma' adi (Delta) 3800
Naqada II (Nile Valley, later all Egypt) 3500
Naqada III (late predynastic/Dynasty 0) 3100 Jemdet Nasr 3100-2900
Early Dynastic (1st-3rd Dynasty) 2950-2575 Early Dynastic II 2700-2600
Early Dynastic III 2600-2300
Old Kingdom (4th-8th Dynasty) 2575-2150
Akkadian (Dynasty ofSargon of Akkade) , 2350-2150
First Intermediate period (9th-11 th Dynasty) 2150-1980 Third Dynasty ofUr 2100-2000
Middle Kingdom (11th-13th Dynasty) 1980-1630
Old Babylonian period 2000-1600
Second Intermediate period (14th-17th Dynasty) 1630-1520 Old Assyrian period 2000-1750
New Kingdom (18th-20th Dynasty) 1540-1070 Kassite Babylonia -1150
Middle Assyrian period 1400-950
Third Intermediate period (21st-25th Dynasty) 1070-715 Various dynasties in Babylonia 1150-730
Neo-Assyrian period 1000-610
Late Period (25th-30th Dynasty) 715-332 Neo-Babylonian period/Chaldean dynasty 625-539
Persian period 539-330
Macedonian -Ptolemaic period 332-30 Seleucid dynasty 330-164
Roman period 30-AD 395 Parthians and Sasanians 238-AD 651
Byzantine period AD 395-640

Note: All dates before 715 BC are approximate. Dates are BC unless otherwise noted.
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 203

a written recording system, surplus production, and a managed system of

distribution. They also displayed symbols of rulership, specialized elite ritual
fonns (although priests are not clearly visible in Egypt), and the demarca-
tion of a "core-periphery" structure with the external world.
In this essay we compare some aspects of these two ancient civilizations,
proceeding from one or the other according to the topic at hand. Most
striking to Egyptologists and Mesopotamianists are the many salient differ-
ences between these two civilizations, which developed at roughly the same
time in nearby regions, probably with some indirect contact (e.g., Kantor
1992; the mode of contact is still disputed), and with a comparable reliance
on irrigation Ifloodplain agriculture as the subsistence base upon which all
social institutions depended (although the river regimes differed, and the or-
ganization in Egypt was simpler). Yet, so far as we know, there has never
been a comparative examination of the two most ancient states and civiliza-
tions, although particular institutions have been studied (e.g., Engnell1943;
Frankfort 1948). Indeed, the specialized training needed to master the pri-
mary written and archaeological sources for either area virtually precludes
anyone person from attempting such comparisons.
Egyptian or Mesopotamian scholars rarely have attempted any overall
historical and cultural assessment of the character of either civilization (ex-
ceptions include Kemp 1989; Oppenheim 1977; Postgate 1992), because
both civilizations persisted for millennia and underwent major social and
cultural change, while the nature of the nonwritten sources, scripts, and lan-
guages changed as welL Few Egyptologists and Assyriologists have the skills
to assess all the periods in their particular culture, let alone two cultures.
Moreover, few scholars of these civilizations are inclined to be compara-
tivists, and many even regard the principle of comparison as violating the
"conceptual autonomy" (Eigenbegrifflichkeit, a term coined by the Assyri-
ologist Benno Landsberger 1976[1926]; see Yoffee 1992) of their area of
study-its unique developmental trajectory and historical character. All
too often, comparison seems to be sampled principally either to reaffirm
uniqueness or to claim that a particular culture offers the quintessential ex-
ample of some cross-culturally attested phenomenon (for the former, see
Kraus 1973; for the latter, see Assmann 1991).
We therefore present this essay with some diffidence, not because we
suspect the astonishment of some ancient Near East colleagues; we take that
for granted. Rather, we are concerned that a theoretically oriented account
of social and cultural life of the two areas cannot easily be presented in a brief
survey, using nonparochial terms, and navigating through (but not disre-
garding) problems of interpretation. Because the subject matter is so vast, we
fall back to an uncomfortable extent on studies the two of us happen to have
made. We justify the comparison precisely because, by specifying in which
204 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

dimensions and for what reasons institutions-and what may presumptu-

ously be tenned the spirits of both civilizations-differ, we learn more
about their structure and character.
We do not, then, compare the two civilizations to enumerate similar
traits or to establish the core principles of an abstraction, the "archaic state."
Rather, through this controlled comparison in time, place, and historical
contact, we seek to identify major axes of variation and to advance an im-
portant anthropological principle: by knowing what is institutionally and
structurally dissimilar in one society judiciously compared with another, we
can begin fresh investigations of the principles of organization and change
in either society, or in both. Our larger intention is to contribute to the
set of comparisons of archaic states or early civilizations in general, to see
what organizational principles are widely shared, what, if anything, is truly
unique, and what general societal and transactional models can address data
from a wide range of societies (C£ Trigger 1993).

SOME PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN

ANCIENT EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA
We review differences between Egypt and Mesopotamia in terms of the re-
lation between political and cultural systems, kingship, and urbanization.
Egypt exhibits nearly total convergence of polity and culture. The establish-
ment of the unified and centralized polity was characterized far more by ter-
ritorial extent than by urbanization, although settlement sites, which might
round out the picture, are ahnost inaccessible. From ancient Egyptian civi-
lization into modem times, there has been a clear definition of the extent of
the country. The principal change has been that, whereas in antiquity the
Nile Valley and Nile Delta made up the area ruled, lines have recendy been
drawn on a map and used to justify a geographical claim to rule adjacent
deserts with their transit routes, as well as resources of a few oases, a very
small number of nomads, and significant mineral deposits. In antiquity, these
regions (except for the nearer oases), although exploited, were treated as be-
ing "abroad." In some periods Egypt conquered large sectors of the Middle
Nile and of Palestine and Syria, but these were never held permanendy. At-
tempts to integrate the southern domains into a larger conception of
"Egypt" did not succeed in the very long term.
This congruence of country and region also was cultural: Egyptian civi-
lization extended to its southern border at the First Cataract of the Nile. At
times, Egypt had great influence farther south, but generally less in Syria-
Palestine.
The most apparent of all differences between Mesopotamia and Egypt is
that there never was any enduring political unification in Mesopotamia
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 20S

until the Persian conquest in the mid-first millennium Be; if there must be
a political definition of the state, then there was no "Mesopotamian" state.
In a wider comparative perspective, however, it is Egypt that is exceptional
in displaying convergence between a polity and a more abstract civilizational
boundary. Mesopotamia consisted politically of a congeries of city-states and
culturally of an overarching cultural tradition.
In later periods, after 1600 Be, there were trends toward the formation
of Assyrian and Babylonian regions, which in the south were especially loose
fitting. Although Assyria did conquer Babylonia in the seventh century Be,
absorbing it into its "empire," that unification diverted military authority
and resources from other imperial ventures. Ultimately, Assyrian rule over
Babylonia was successfully resisted, and this led to, or was combined with,
other missions toward independence by former Assyrian subjects. These
struggles were followed in rapid order by military defeat and the demise of
Assyria (Dalley 1993; Postgate 1993; Yoffee 1988b).

Kingship and Other Forms of Rule

Among fonns of political structure, kingship can be defined, rather inexactly,
as rulership by a single individual holding a supreme office in a lifelong
tenure, most often succeeding on a hereditary principle and wielding- or
not, as the case may be-great personal power. As such, it may be the single
most frequent form of state government, but it is by no means the only one.
It occurs typically both in states and in nons tate entities such as chiefdoms:
there is no easy distinction between "chief" and "king." Conversely, city-
states (Yoffee 1997), while belonging firmly with state fonns in which ad-
ministration is at least partly disembedded from kinship rules, generally
display a range of types of government and often do not focus on kingship
(compare speculations on the nature of rule at Teotihuacan [Cowgill 1992b]
and at Mohenjo-daro [Kenoyer 1991; Possehl, this volume]). These con-
trasting options are exemplified by the ancient Near East. Egypt offers a type
case of the kingship-dominated non-city state; in the more diverse city-
state fonns of Mesopotamia, kings were at their most salient during periods
of centralization, and then during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian
empires of the mid-first millennium.
A form of leadership whose symbols developed directly into those of
kingship can be identified in Egypt by the early fourth millennium Be, be-
fore social complexity had developed to a significant extent. Kingship
emerged before unification, and, probably through internal assimilation and
conquest in the formative period of the late fourth millennium, kings cre-
ated the unified polity whose ideology set the trajectory for all later times
(Baines 1995a). During Dynasties 0 - 3 (c. 3100 - 2600 Be) the king acquired
a complex titulary that proclaimed he manifested aspects of various deities
206 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN JOFFEE

on earth. Official fonus displaying his qualities related him to the gods, but
he was not the same order of being as they-more central and salient for
human society, but of lesser status and potential.
The two basic terms for "king," njswt and bjtj, related to hierarchically
ranked aspects of kingship and, in dynastic times, were connected with Up-
per and Lower Egypt (roughly equivalent to the Nile Valley and the Nile
Delta). This characteristically Egyptian dualism held that only entities
formed from dualities were meaningful (e.g., Hornung 1982:240); by im-
plication, the unity of the country-typically known as the "Two Lands"
and long lacking an overall proper name-was vested in king and kingship.
Neither the country of Egypt nor full rulers hip could be imagined without
kingship, because the king was the sole formal intermediary with the gods.
Only around 750 Be, toward the end of several centuries of the Third In-
termediate period, did significant numbers of regional leaders emerge who
did not claim the tide of king.
The king's role in relation to and in combination with the gods perpet-
uated the fragile order of the cosmos, offering a central legitimation that
overrode the "moral economies" of smaller social organizations (Baines
1995b). This principal ritual requirement remained in force into Roman
times, when the emperor, who could have known litde of what he was sub-
scribing to, was represented in temples in forms that conveyed essentially the
same message as the key originating works of the late Predynastic period
(Derchain 1962).
The ritual and cosmological aspects of kingship are embodied in much
of the country's vast monumental legacy, but also in royal action and in for-
eign relations. Missions abroad were undertaken to bring back materials
needed for king, cult, and the dead. Conquest was an "extension of the
boundaries" that built upon the idea of maintaining the cosmos. The basis
of kingship was not, however, strongly military, and for much of the third
millennium the country seems to have lacked a standing army.
Within Egypt, royal authority was underpinned by the king's theoreti-
cally absolute ownership of the land and rights over his subjects. Even in
Greco-Roman times, streets running past private houses were termed "the
street of Pharaoh" (e.g., Smith 1972:711). Kings appear to have asserted
these rights in early periods by redefining landholding patterns on principles
defined at the center and by constructing many new settlements, imprint-
ing their requirements on the fabric of the land (HeIck 1974:49-53;
Janssen's reservations [1978: 226] seem excessive-such phenomena are
known elsewhere).
The king's most powerful influence was probably on the elite. Their sta-
tus and wealth depended on him-often on his personal favor and caprice.
The palace was the central institution that mobilized the country's resources,

I
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 207

although in most periods there also were significant "secular" and temple
adminjstrations. The term "pharaoh," regularly used for kings of Egypt by
foreigners at least since the first millennium Be and by Egyptians from
around the time of Akhenaten (c. 1350 Be), derives from the ancient "Great
Estate (pr- 3)" that focused on the institutional and economic aspects of
C

kingship.
Mesopotamian kingship contrasts strongly with that of Egypt. Without
an overarching political state, its forms of kingship were markedly different.
Kingship acquired its character in the endemic struggle among the Sumerian
city-states in the time before Sargon of Akkade (c. 2350 Be; Cooper 1983).
It seems that kings were at first elite landowners, perhaps important figures
in community assemblies, who progressively assumed more power as war
leaders and who bought land from corporate landholding groups (Diakonoff
1969; Gelb 1979; Jacobsen 1957). In pre-Sargonic land-sale documents
(Gelb, Steinkeller, and Whiting 1991), the buyer of the land is often a ruler
or high official; the seller is denoted both in the body of the document and
by the list ofhis relatives who are recorded as the witnesses and who receive
gifts. While the texts do not indicate what happened to these newly landless
people, it is assumed that they did not actually move from their land, but ac-
knowledged its new owner and paid him both taxes and obligations of ser-
vice (Yoffee 1995b). These documents show the strong difference from
Egypt in how early Mesopotamian kings were able to gain power, labor, and
resources. The Mesopotamian king was a local lord whose acquisition of
power was internal and unrelated to conquest outside his own state.
Rulers of pre-Sargonic city-states were variously called en, ensf, or lugal.
Although these tides have different etymological meanings, and some have
tried to see a progression from priestly to secular kingship as reflected in
their evolution, they can all be translated as "ruler" for pre-Sargonic times.
With the conquest of Sargon, however, lugal (Akkadian sarrum) became the
accepted title for "king" and ensf was reserved for the governors of city-states
(and en, originally "lord," became a title of the priesthood). In the Old
Babylonian period ensf became further devalued, meaning "manager of an
agricultural field."
Early Mesopotamian city-states were arenas for a normative and con-
stant struggle between the burgeoning royal authority and the power of the
temple estate. The so-called reforms ofUrukagina ofLagash (c. 2400 Be) in
southern Mesopotamia indicate that there the temple was able to stage a
coup d'etat against the kings who were seizing its land and privileges, but
that the coup was only a minor interruption in the trend toward increasingly
centralized power vested in the royal government (Nissen 1982).
In the succeeding Akkadian period, Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin
reorganized administration, founded a new site as capital of a regional state,
208 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN TOFFEE

and established new titles in order to imply that the House of Akkade was
not just another powerful dynasty: it was the legitimate political center rul-
ing over all Mesopotamia (see Liverani, ed. 1993). Naram-Sin himself be-
came deified, thus reinforcing his imperial status over the Mesopotamian
city-states (Glassner 1986). When the Akkadian dynasty fell, city-states
reemerged, as they did also after the short-lived regional state of the Third
Dynasty ofUr. The kings of these newly independent city-states once again
began the struggle with their neighbors, just as had their predecessors in the
days before Akkade.
In sum, while Mesopotamian kings were powerful leaders in war and in
civil administration, they never achieved the same position as the foci ofide-
ology, economy, and social life as the kings of Egypt did. In some periods
the Mesopotamian king shared power with temple estates and local assem-
blies. Furthermore, the palace often contracted with, and sometimes de-
pended upon, private entrepreneurs to supply its local subsistence needs,
as well as its desire for distant luxury goods (see section on "Economy";
Yoffee 1995b).

Urbanization
Mesopotamia and Egypt contrast strongly in the vital area of urbanization.
City-states were the major arenas for the interplay of characteristic
Mesopotamian institutions. This statement can be defended, even against
the charge that written sources and archaeological investigations are utterly
biased toward urban places (a bias that intensive field surveys seek to correct,
e.g., Adams 1981). It is not that villages, nomadic, seminomadic, or crypto-
nomadic pastoralists, and de-urbanized bandits were not integral to the
Mesopotamian scene. However, it is in the comparison with Egypt that one
can see the significance of city wards (Gelb 1968; Yoffee 1992), local assem-
blies, resistance to urban rulers, a temple-versus-palace struggle, an urban
prejudice against the countryside, and the superior ability of nonurban
people to use their extensive ties to seize political power (Kamp and Yoffee
1980). All of these features of Mesopotamian civilization are conspicuous by
their absence in Egypt, or are extremely attenuated in the context of the
central symbols of Egyptian civilization.
The urban implosion of late-fourth- and early-third-millennium Meso-
potamia resulted in a massive population shift into large sites (Nissen 1988).
These new city-states, consisting of one or more large sites, such as La-
gash and Girsu of the city-state ofLagash, Uruk and Kullaba ofUruk, Kish
and H~rsagkalama of Kish, and attendant towns and villages (for third-
millennium Lagash, see Gregoire 1962), set the pattern for Mesopotamia as
"the heartland of cities" (Adams 1981). For as long as Mesopotamian civi-
lization remained independent, with multiple polities, it retained not only
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 209

the configuration of city-states and countryside, but also the ideology of the
city-state (postgate 1992). Rulers were mainly defined in connection with
the city-state from which they ruled; even those associated with extensive
conquests focused their domains on a core city (e.g., Hammurabi of Baby-
lon, 1792-1750). Major reorganizations of empire, however, from Sargon
of Akkade and notably including Tukulti-Ninurta of Assyria (fourteenth
century) and various Nee-Assyrian rulers in the first millennium BC, were
often accompanied by the establishment of new capitals. These new cities
served to dislocate and disenfranchise old elites and bureaucratic networks,
and they also were monumentally emblematic of changes in administrative
power and purpose. From the end of the Uruk period to the conquest of
Cyrus the Great of Persia (539 BC), city-states were an irreducibly essential
quality of Mesopotamian civilization. In the Sumerian King List, a histo-
riographic text relating the birth of Mesopotamian political systems (Micha-
lowski 1983), kinship descended from heaven to dties: without autonomous
cities, a Mesopotamian way of life was unthinkable.
For Egypt, central places were important on a number oflevels; the idea
of a walled, nucleated settlement goes back into prehistory. Certain crucial
towns, such as Buto in the Nile Delta, Hierakonpolis in the south, and Ele-
phantine at the First Cataract, played key roles in defining the extent of
Egypt during the period of state formation. Nonetheless, only scholars who
appear to feel that urbanism is a sine qua non of civilization (e.g., Kemp
1977) are prone to maintain that the city was a primary motor of develop-
ment or strongly characteristic of Egypt. In early times the Egyptians seem
to have been almost more interested in their frontiers than in their center
(e.g., Seidlmayer 1996); government policy toward regions and settlement
patterns appears to have disfavored cities in certain respects, notably by
using an estate-based system of redistribution. The elite's ideology had a
rural tinge-rather like that of the English country gentleman-despite the
pattern of land tenure, which was theoretically insecure because rights to
land were based upon holding administrative office.
These biases changed in periods of insecurity and decentralization, and
more profoundly in the New Kingdom (c. 1520-1070 BC) and later, when
the ideal of the city was well established along with the notion of city as cos-
mos (Kozloff, Bryan, and Berman 1992: 103-4; O'Connor 1998). From
early Islamic times to the present day, the country's common name, Misr,
has been the same as that of the capital city; this congruence also can be ob-
served for the first millennium BC. The city was the country.
Moreover, when the Assyrian king Assurbanipal described Egypt around
660 Be, he did so in terms of cities and their rulers, most of whom he des-
ignated with the Akkadian word for "king" (sarrumllugal). This was a period
when the Delta in particular had moved toward something like city-state
210 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

forms, but one wonders whether his approach owed more to his background
and that ofhis recording officials in a city-state civilization than to what was
observed on the ground.

Nature of the Sources

Cuneiform tablets, the main source for our understanding ofMesopotamian
history and culture, preserve decently in general and wonderfully well after
a good sacking and burning; they record not only myths and epics but also
private letters, bureaucratic notes, private contracts, records of smuggling,
and so on. It is important to take into account the systematic bias of the
documents from the various periods. For example, it is not easy to recon-
struct anything like a comprehensive history of a period or place from
archives, however rich, that deal mainly with long-distance trade (e.g.,
Larsen 1976). Consider the following characterization of the major tablet
finds in early Mesopotamia: for pre-Sargonic Lagash, the archives come
mainly from temple estates (Dialeonoff 1969; Maekawa 1987); for the Ur III
period, they are almost entirely from the royal bureaucracy (Civil 1987;
Steinkeller 1989); for the Old Babylonian period, although there are temple
and palace archives, many tablets come from private houses and record busi-
ness transactions, family law, and private correspondence (see Kohler et al.
1904-23; Kraus 1964). This distribution could depend on chances of
recovery, but most scholars believe that it reflects the cultural and orga-
nizational emphases of distinct periods and important differences between
them.
For one example, we can rightly infer that the absence of textual docu-
mentation in the time after the collapse of the Old Babylonian and Old As-
syrian states in the middle of the second millennium Be reflects the absence
of centralized states and the written products of bureaucracies. In another
case, for the last days of Mesopotamian civilization, most literary and eco-
nomic documents come from temple precincts, since temples clung to the
vestiges of Mesopotamian belief systems and also maintained control of
dwindling land and resources.
Inscribed texts are part of the archaeological record and need to be ap-
praised alongside settlement patterns, architecture, and artifactual finds. It is
only in recent years, however, that texts and other materials have regularly
been utilized together (Charpin 1986; Postgate 1992; Stone 1981, 1987; van
de Mieroop 1992). Most studies ofMesopotamian art and artifacts have been
concerned with styles as chronological markers or as powerful statements of
royal actions. In contrast to these few studies (but see Winter 1981, 1983,
1991,1992,1995; M. Marcus 1995), the understanding of Egyptian culture
is enriched by much work on visual media.
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 211

Comparison of this skeletal list of Mesopotamian source categories with

material from Egypt throws into relief the fact that many aspects of life are
represented little or not at all in Egyptian written and pictorial evidence,
which is mainly monumental and centered on the ruling group, on religion,
and on the symbols of Egypt as a single polity-much of it filtered through
the characteristic requirement of tomb building. This focus reflects, above
all, the disappearance of administrative records, which were written on pa-
pyrus and other perishable media that were used in the floodplain and not
the desert (it also reflects earlier excavators' interest in the "treasures" to be
found in tombs). Nonetheless, the role of the centralized Egyptian state, the
relation of royal government to the temples and the civil administration, and
the character of private (nonroyal, nontemple) activities appears different
from that in Mesopotamia-for example, in most periods there was less
mercantile activity and less opportunity for political struggle. What it does
not reflect is a reticence in using writing in state administration. In his clas-
sic work, Adolf Erman righdy wrote of a "mania for writing" (Schreibwut;
Erman 1923: 125) as pervading documents of state administration from the
Ramessid period (thirteenth century Be).
This contrast with Mesopotamia should not be overdrawn. Thus, we
find evidence of Egyptian trade and foreign expeditions in reliefS and in-
scriptions ofkings and nonroyal officials; the archaeological record indicates
that trade was substantial already in Predynastic times-even though such
products as gold, linen, papyrus, and cereals, which are likely to have been
important Egyptian exports, are more or less untraceable archaeologically.
Despite these indications of substantial movement of goods and associated
foreign contacts, the relative absence in Egypt of individual or local enter-
prises that conducted exchange reveals a significant difference with Meso-
potamia. In pursuing such questions, it would be desirable to examine the
nature of trade in the two areas and their respective degrees of dependence
on imports and exports, as well as differences in the organization of foreign
contacts; such investigations are beyond the scope of this essay.
On another level, Egyptian sources, many of them iconographic rather
than written, may take us closer to understanding ideals of daily life than we
can get in Mesopotamia, even if the ideals were those of a small fraction of
the population who mosdy prettified the life of the rest in the depictions
they commissioned.
Despite this reservation, Egyptian art gives forceful impressions of the
nature of labor, as do observations and calculations in relation to large mon-
uments; in Mesopotamia the analogous evidence is mainly in large lists of la-
borers and their rations. But in Mesopotamia the many documents from
"upper-middle-class" land sales, contracts, family law, and litigation provide
212 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

glimpses of activity only rarely attested in Egypt, principally for the Ramessid
and Greco-Roman periods (c. 1300-1075 BC; third century BC-AD fourth
century).

Terms of Comparison: Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth

Differences in the sources for Mesopotamia and Egypt tend to focus research
along distinct paths in the two regions-toward somewhat more material is-
sues for Mesopotamia and more ideological ones for Egypt. Whether or not
this bias reflects genuine differences, the material from both regions amply
supports the view that a balanced and fruitful comparison must integrate the
material and the ideological, the pragmatic and the spiritual. Scholars of the
ancient Near East have long argued against the "Oriental Despotism" pic-
ture of their societies' evolution that would reduce much interpretation to
ecological determinism; environmental factors are now mosdy seen as en-
abling rather that dictating social forms. But within this more sociocentric
perspective there is little consensus over the vital stimuli in the trajectory to-
ward civilizations, or over the critical foci of civilizations once they fonned.
Here we comment briefly on the terms and foci we have chosen to chart
through the material; we hope this terminological discussion is also useful to
others.
In a temporal comparison with preceding epochs, what stands out about
early civilizations is their rapidity of formation and relative instability. In
view of the much greater instability of later societies and civilizations, this
assessment may seem perverse, especially when applied to an Egypt that was
characterized by Plato (LAws, 656) as seeing no change for "literally" ten
thousand years. But here we fall too easily victims to an overly synoptic vi-
sion of our regions as single entities. The different, archaeologically distinc-
tive periods of historic Egypt and Mesopotamia succeeded one another far
more rapidly than the major subperiods of the Neolithic. The evolutionary
course seems to be one of gradual change in the Neolithic, followed by an
explosive period of political, economic, and architectural restructuring.
In this context of instability, and perhaps especially of the rapid process
of state formation and consolidation, the issue of order is fundamental. Or-
der is an insistent preoccupation of Mesopotamian literature and is con-
sistendy expressed in so-called law codes and (self-survivingly) in royal
inscriptions. In Egypt this focus is still more evident, both in the largely vi-
sual complex we discuss in the section on "high culture" and particularly in
the central concept of maCat, a notion that is so fundamental to Egyptian ide-
ology that a wide-ranging study of it was long lacking (Assmann 1990). In
both cases, this centripetal "rage for order" (to quote Wallace Stevens's poem
"The Idea of Order at Key West") stands against a pessimistic background
that was overt in the Mesopotamian case and largely dissimulated in the
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 213

Egyptian. The terms of order, the negotiation of order, and its appropria-
tion by elites are defining activities of civilizations. Order cannot be taken
for granted.
The elite appropriation of order is one of many legitimations of in-
equality, which was perhaps most extreme in Egypt. It was far from natural
or necessarily easy for ancient elites to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of oth-
ers and of themselves. Elites sustain their self-image and transmit it down the
generations both through their pragmatic actions in maintaining inequality
and through their understanding of their own position and mission. These
legitimizing activities and attitudes encompass the mission, one that the elite
take upon themselves, to achieve and maintain order in their societies. Le-
gitimacy, however, is most strongly expressed in the "dialogue" between the
ruler and his superiors or peers, the gods. Ancient Near Eastern rulers or
elites did not have exclusive access to religious life, but they did have access
to more grandiose varieties of it and to more of its profound meanings,
while others were excluded from some of its domains. A major thrust of
religion, on which so much of society's resources were expended, was
legitimation.
In complex societies, wealth, especially conservable wealth, is a vital fea-
ture that sets elites apart from others. The division and administration of
society enhance enormously the potential of wealth to be produced, differen-
tiated, stored, and negotiated, while the organizational capacities of the new
social forms allow great distances to be exploited in order to move goods and
people so as to generate and mobilize wealth. All this is administered by the
elite or their employees; so far as our sources allow us to gauge, these activi-
ties seem principally to benefit the elite. Yet wealth is probably not the
prime motive force in the development and maintenance of complex social
forms; rather, it is an enabling factor, one that has an extraordinarily pow-
erful communicative and persuasive potential. Wealth and legitimacy are
almost inextricably linked. Wealth, controlled and channeled, can sustain
order. Destitution of wealth spells disorder or a reversal of order.
Thus, the three interrelated aspects-order, legitimacy, and wealth--cover
much ground in the study and comparison of features distinctive of early
(and other) civilizations, of their emergence, persistence, and eventual col-
lapse. Below we survey the evidence according to more traditional subject
divisions instead of these rather abstract ones, but in singling them out we
emphasize the active role of the elite in constituting and, especially, trans-
mitting the characteristics of a civilization. Our longest case study, of high
culture, addresses most direcdy the nexus between these factors.
Finally, these three terms have the advantage of bridging analysts' and ac-
tors' categories. Although such terms and topics as politics and economics
have no counterparts in the ancient evidence (which is not to say that they
214 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

are invalid as fields and methods of study), order is a central ancient idea,
wealth is much mentioned in the texts and displayed in the record, and the
theme of legitimacy has manifold and close correspondences in verbal and
iconographic sources.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATES

Mesopotamia
We begin a brief consideration of state development in Mesopotamia with
the (Ubaid (c. fifth millennium BC; Oates 1983, 1987), since this is the pe-
riod to which significant elements in the character oflater state development
in Mesopotamia can be traced. It was once thought that the south of
Mesopotamia was unoccupied in early prehistoric (Neolithic) times (e.g.,
Redman 1978, 1991), the land itself being the product of alluviation and
progradation into the Persian Gulf (Sanlaville 1989). However, the site of
(Oueili near the ancient city ofLarsa, which antedates the (Ubaid, shows that
southern Mesopotamia was occupied before the (Ubaid (Adams 1981; Cal-
vet 1987). Presumably, small sites in the south are alluviated and/or deflated.
If there has been progradation into the Gulf, the amount of new land cre-
ated in this way does not justify the traditional "unoccupied-niche" model
of development.
The (Ubaid has long been characterized as a "unified" culture (e.g.,
Perkins 1949; Porada 1965), mainly on the basis of similarities in temple
plans, distinctive pottery, and certain artifacts that are found at the northern
type site of Gawra and the southern one of Eridu (see also Henrickson and
Thuesen 1989). After the (Ubaid, and continuously into historic periods,
the northern and southern regions of Mesopotamia (that is, Assyria and Baby-
lonia) differ in aspects of their material cultures, form independent arenas of
political struggle, and develop distinctive belief systems-in particular the
"national" religion of the god Assur, which had no counterpart in the south.
Nevertheless, overarching the two regions was a larger cultural sphere that
one calls "Mesopotamia" (see section below on high culture); it is this re-
gional Mesopotamian culture that can be traced back to the cUbaid (Stein
1991, 1994b; Yoffee 1993a).
In the fourth millennium BC, the Uruk period is marked at the begin-
ning with a change in pottery from the (Ubaid (Oates 1960) and ends (con-
ventionally) in the decades after written tablets appeared. While the cUbaid,
which is characterized by few and relatively small sites and by modest de-
grees of social and economic differentiation, represents a gradual develop-
ment of Neolithic trends, the later Uruk period, known best from the
city-state of Warka, constitutes a major "punctuated" change. The enor-
mous size of the city-state at the end of the Uruk period and the appearance
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 21S

of such features as cylinder seals, monumental art and architecture, and writ-
ing are hardly prefigured by the (Ubaid.
The origins of writing are a good case in point for the dazzling innova-
tions that accompanied the rise of the Uruk (and other) city-state(s). Al-
though Schmandt-Besserat (e.g., 1992) has assiduously shown that a system
of "tokens" preceded writing by millennia, many have criticized her argu-
ment that the tokens evolved directly into writing (Friberg 1994; Le Bmn
and Vallat 1978; Lieberman 1980; Michalowski 1990, 1993b; Zimansky
1993). The shapes of most tokens bear no relation to later cuneifonn signs;
the tokens are distributed over a much wider area than that in which writ-
ing later developed. In Elam, where some of the tokens and bullae enclos-
ing them were found, the form of the writing and language were not the
same as in Mesopotamia. And at Tell (Abada, one of the few archaeological
contexts from which we have tokens, the small clay objects were found in
children's graves, not a likely locus for trade and business records, which
Schmandt-Besserat has argued was their primary function.
Michalowski (1990, 1993b, 1994) has emphasized that the earliest pre-
served written signs are extremely complex and abstract, bearing little re-
semblance to the tokens. Tokens are part of a long process of signification
that includes glyptic arts, pottery decoration, and potters' marks, but they
cannot explain the nature or form of the writing system. Indeed, writing
seems to have originated through invention (see Boltz 1986 and 1994 for
similar views on the ancient Chinese script), perhaps the product of a single
individual's work (powell 1981 :419-24). In Warka, the reasons (or at least
the context) for the appearance of writing are reasonably clear. Upon the
formation of a city-state with a central core of around 300 ha and a sug-
gested population of more than 20,000 (Nissen 1988)-Warka was only one
of a number of city-states in southern Mesopotamia-the ability to manage
a burgeoning economy was greatly facilitated by a new system of record
keeping and communication that could name names, specify obligations,
and count resources. While most early tablets consist of such economic ac-
counts, a significant percentage (c. 15%) are lists of professions and other
matters that were aids for teaching the new scribal arts; these demonstrate
the institutionalization and cultural import of this new technology. Writing
is, however, only one of a series of rapid and dramatic innovations that oc-
curred at the end of the Umk period.
As noted, the nucleation of settlements at this time represents a demo-
graphic implosion in which the countryside was progressively depopulated
over about 500 years while large urban sites grew. This process of implosion
also led to a significant explosion, since, it is argued, the southern city-states
sent forth expeditions to establish colonies up the Euphrates into Syria and
Turkey, and also into Iran (see Yoffee 1995b). Although these colonies,
216 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

whose purpose was to serve as access and transshipment points, were easy to
found in a countryside of relatively low political centralization or organized
resistance, they were impossible to maintain in the medium term, and many
disappeared within 50 years or less.
Since no political unity was present in southern Mesopotamia and neigh-
boring Khuzestan, Algaze (1993a:115-18) suggests that each independent
city-state established its own colonies, as in the case of early Greek colonial
expansion (Schwartz 1988). We know little about other city-states in the
Late Uruk period. Furthermore, according to some (e.g., Stein et al. 1996),
"Uruk colonies" may date to the Middle Uruk period. Stylistic criteria have
been inferred to show that sealing motifS from these colonies resemble those
from Susa as well as, or rather than, those from Uruk (pittman in Stein et al.
1996). Although it ~ hard at present to test the hypothesis that individual
city-states in middle- and late-fourth-millennium Mesopotamia and Khuzes-
tan established distant colonies, it is clear that, aside from ephemeral con-
quests and alliances, no political unity existed in Mesopotamia before the
imperial successes ofSargon (c. 2350 Be), despite the region's self-image as
belonging to a single civilization. If third-millennium city-states, thus, are
the logical outcomes of rapid social evolutionary trends at the end of the
fourth millennium, their destiny was to compete unceasingly for the best
agricultural lands and for access to trade routes. Although political unifi-
cation was a likely result of such endemic conflict among city-states, it was
equally improbable that the independent traditions of city-states could be
overcome and that they could be easily integrated into a regional polity.

Egypt
A quite different evolutionary story can be seen in Egypt. Around 4000 Be,
the material culture and social forms of sedentary groups in different regions
of Egypt and the Middle Nile was of a fairly unifonn Neolithic/Chalcoli-
thic character (Wetterstrom 1993); few signs of social complexity are to be
found (Midant-Reynes 1992). Nonetheless, some material and ideological
elements of inequality typical of later periods can be seen in the southern
Nile Valley, in the Naqada I culture (e.g., Bard 1994:68-75). Notable
among them is the emphasis on elaborate burials and the realm of the dead.
While the apparent prominence of this sphere owes much to the siting of
cemeteries in the desert, where they could be excavated, the expenditure of
resources is striking. Moreover, the crucial site of Hierakonpolis contains a
small group ofNaqada I tombs that are distinctively larger than anything else
of that date, suggesting the prominence of a single leader and providing a
topographical marker that was significant for the later, Naqada II inhabitants
of the area (Hoffinan et al. 1982:38-60).
The Naqada II culture (from c. 3500 Be), which originated in Upper
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 217

Egypt, is a more important watershed (c£ Baines 1995a; Kaiser 1990).

Naqada II was culturally distinct from the A-Group of Lower Nubia, as well
as being no doubt politically separate, while the Ma cadi culture, which cov-
ered the region north from the Fayyum, disappeared in the middle of the
period. Ma cadi had strong links with Palestine, which may have been a fo-
cus of southern interest in expanding northward. In a process whose politi-
cal ramifications cannot yet be charted, Naqada II material culture, which
probably encompassed several polities in Upper Egypt, spread throughout
the northern part of the country, and all of Egypt had a single material
culture by the final subphase of Naqada II or the beginning of Naqada III
(c. 3200 Be). Around the same time there was significant contact with
Mesopotamia, attested most tangibly at Buto in the Nile Delta and prob-
ably routed through the Uruk colonies in Syria. It is a moot question how
crucial this contact was for Egypt. Since the chief stimulus to political and
cultural development came from the south, which was farthest from Meso-
potamian influence, it is not likely to have been decisive.
On the low desert bordering the Nile Valley, the sites of Hierakonpolis
(in the far south), Naqada, and Abydos show the greatest expansion and dif-
ferentiation. All have small separate cemeteries of rich tombs; Hierakonpo-
lis Tomb 100 (mid-Naqada II) has wall paintings with royal content. At the
end ofNaqada II, an outlier of the culture appeared in the northeastern delta
at Minshat Abu Omar (Kaiser 1987; Kroeper and Wildung 1994). Sometime
around this date, the whole country probably was united under a single king
buried at Abydos in central Upper Egypt, while the previously largest site
ofNaqada was in sharp decline (some scholars argue for Hierakonpolis as the
unifying polity and others for a slower pace of unification).
Tomb U-j in the elite cemetery at Abydos shows a range of royal sym-
bols, as well as the earliest use of writing in a secure context, on small ivory
tags that the excavator suggests were attached to bales of cloth among the
grave goods (Dreyer 1993; Kaiser 1990). This royal tomb is some generations
earlier than those nearby in Cemetery B, which form a rough sequence,
generally termed Dynasty 0, ending with the well-known Narmer. The
phases before and after Tomb U-j could have lasted up to 250 years. Sym-
bols of kingship from Dynasty 0 are found all over Egypt, and their motifS
supply the principal evidence of a developing centralizing ideology. The ar-
chaeological phase Naqada III corresponds to this time and the early First
Dynasty.
In this development, the strongest evidence of social complexity dates to
the time after the country's material culture had become uniform, and much
of it after the territorial polity had formed; but since the amount of evidence
increases sharply with unification, this appearance may be rather misleading.
There are indications of walled settlements and elaborate brick architecture.
218 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

Much else is beyond recovery; settlement sites are virtually inaccessible be-
neath the floodplain silt, whereas cemeteries were sited for preference on
the low desert. Cemeteries evince massive consumption of luxury goods,
involving the mounting of expeditions into the deserts for minerals; long-
distance transport of goods, including many Palestinian imports and prob-
ably delivery of basic foodstuffi; and the presence of specialized artists and
craftsmen alongside the nascent scribal group. The inner elite was integrated
into a small group of administrative officeholders near the king. These
people, who were almost certainly literate, were bound to the king both by
office and perhaps by membership in a distinct group (the pC t ) that would
have consisted of notional or real kin and who were qualified for the high-
est office. Even if this group once existed as a distinct entity, it quickly be-
came a retrospective fiction (Baines 1995a: 133).
Elite and other cemeteries became numerous in the Memphite/Cairo
region-which has been the focus of population ever since-and also are
scattered through the country. These cemeteries demonstrate that in Dy-
nasties 0 - 2 resources were by no means so narrowly concentrated on the
king and inner elite as in the following period, and they probably attest to a
gradual erosion of elite privileges that existed before and during unification
and centralization. They set the stage for the foundation of the city of Mem-
phis at the start of the First Dynasty, when administration and the requisite
people were focused there, while royal burials and perhaps the ceremonial
center remained at Abydos. In this period, burial and the realm of the dead
consolidated their position as a principal mode of display and signification,
as well as a consumer of resources. Burial sites were basic to Egyptian soci-
ety, and especially to the elite who could aspire to a privileged afterlife de-
nied to those who had no proper burial.
The Egyptian state's characteristic territoriality is evident at the frontiers.
The First Cataract region was annexed during Naqada II and was henceforth
the southern boundary. In the north, Egypt asserted a brief hegemony in
southern Palestine, probably founding some small colonies there, but with-
drew during a recession or consolidation in the mid-First Dynasty. In Lower
Nubia, the royal cemetery of an A-Group polity around Qustul that imitated
the style and iconography of Egypt was thoroughly vandalized (Williams
[1986) sees Nubia as the source rather than the recipient of these styles), and
the A-Group itself disappeared, leaving an archaeological vacuum-but
probably not a complete habitation blank-spanning more than 500 years.
It seems that Egypt wished either to incorporate and exploit a politically
weaker culture in the surrounding area or to set up a cordon sanitaire,
within which its unitary civilization long stood in isolation (for a Nubian-
centered view, see W. Y. Adams 1977; O'Connor 1993). These features
contrast strongly with Mesopotamia's treatment of its neighboring cultures.
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY. AND WEALTH I 219

The Pace of State Evolution

Although the Neolithic progression from the first sedentary agricultural vil-
lages in which sites and social institutions became progressively differenti-
ated and stratified was protracted, political centralization emerged rapidly in
both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Apparendy, the various aspects of rivaling and
cooperating groups, both occupationally specialized and socially distinct; the
complex routes of circulation of goods, services, and information from both
local and long-distance ventures; and conflict with neighboring cities and
regions all built up a head of sociopolitical and ideological steam manifested
in the emergence of new leaders, new forms and symbols of centralized au-
thority, and new demographic shifts. In detail these processes look very dif-
ferent in the two areas, and their phasing was complex. In Egypt, a cultural
and political development with the elaborate forms of state and kingship
emerged toward the end of the process; in Mesopotamia, forms of social and
political struggle were never quite resolved by kings, and regional states were
atypical and unstable.

POLITICS AND ECONOMY

The earliest political system in third-millennium Mesopotamia was the net-
work of city-states that endemically vied for arable land and access to trade
routes. Before the unification of Sargon of Akkade (c. 2350 Be) some
ephemeral hegemonies were achieved by successful city-state rulers. Thus,
it is not in Sargon's conquest but in his administrative and ideological inno-
vations that a territorial Mesopotamian state was created (see below in the
section on high culture as a vehicle for political and cultural change). The
early Mesopotamian city-states, however, were also later the normative
products of imperial breakdown and were the loci of political struggle, es-
pecially between the royal and temple estates (see earlier section on "king-
ship and other forms of rule"). In this section we delineate the contrast
between the politics of early Mesopotamian city-states and the Egyptian
tendency toward territorial centralization. Apart from temple and royal
estates, community assemblies are prominent integrative institutions in
Mesopotamia. Furthermore, the diversity of ethnic groups in Mesopotamia
profoundly affected the modalities of social organizations and social and po-
litical struggle.
The centralized Egyptian state left much less evidence of how its po-
liticallife and its regions were organized than can be gleaned for many pe-
riods in Mesopotamia. Internal conflict and disorder were largely suppressed
from the record of all but decentralized periods, and signs of dissent that can
be identified relate most often to personal antagonisms among the elite and
to the disgrace kings inflicted on people or on their memories. But the
220 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

monumental record is very uneven. Given the favorable conditions for

preservation of the chosen style of display in tombs, its variations must at-
test, even ifindirecciy, to fluctuations in royal power. The play of central and
regional forces and the tendency of the country to divide in periods of
weakness exemplify the fact that strong centralization, while more easily
achieved in Egypt than in many countries, exacted a price from all but the
inner elite. The way in which this price was claimed from most people in
the form of production and the curtailment of freedom can be modeled to
some extent. What is striking is the relatively small proportion of history
during which the country was not united and centralized.

Local Power
Mesopotamia has produced important but controversial evidence for the or-
ganization oflocal power, in terms of controlling both institutions and so-
cial groups. In one of the classic articles on early Mesopotamian history,
Jacobsen (1957) considered that secular kingship arose not from sacral aus-
pices, but from community assemblies. His argument was that incessant war-
fare in the earlier third millennium, as documented especially from the
Lagash archives, required the election or appointment of a war leader. Other
sources used for his argument were epic compositions (especially the tale of
"Gilgamesh and Akka" [Katz 1993; for further notes on Enmebaragesi of
Kish, see Katz 1995; Shaffer 1983]) and myths (especially Enuma elis, the
"Epic of Creation"; Foster 1993), in which assemblies (or councils) are men-
tioned. Critics (e.g., Evans 1958) rejoined that these poetic works composed
in the second and first millennia were too late to refer specifically to third-
millennium events, and furthermore, that it was naive to think that what
happened in heaven reflected what was happening on earth. In the "Epic of
Creation," moreover, it is at a banquet assembly of the gods that Marduk
performs the magic trick of making a constellation vanish and then reappear,
thereby convincing the drunken deities to choose him as their war leader.
Whereas Jacobsen (1943) viewed Mesopotamian assemblies as a form of
"primitive democracy," others thought that they were residual institutions
of tribal, nomadic groups that were being progressively assimilated in urban
Mesopotamia.
Jacobsen's argument received support from those studying land-sale doc-
uments (see earlier section on "kingship and other forms of rule"), in which
the sellers of property were thought, especially by Diakonoff (1969), to be
the "elders" of inferred third-millennium assemblies (see also Westenholz
1984, who discusses ab-ba UTU, "elders of the city"). In Late Uruk and Early
Dynastic lexical texts, the term "leader of the assembly" appears, and the
sign for "assembly" occurs in economic texts from Uruk, Jamdat Nasr, and
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 221

Ur (Englund, Nissen, and Damerow 1993; Green and Nissen 1987. Ac-
cording to Englund, however, the sign conventionally assumed to be "as-
sembly" is no more than the representation of a pot!).
Although references to assemblies are otherwise rare in third-millennium
texts (Wilcke 1973), which mainly come from temple and palace archives,
a term in the Ebla vocabulary texts has been interpreted as referring to an
assembly (Durand 1989). In the early second millennium, from which there
are many private documents, references in the texts to assemblies, elders,
mayors, and judges are legion. Local authorities decide cases of family law
and other matters not requiring royal intervention; headmen notarize the
hiring of community laborers on palace estates; and it has been suggested
(Yoffee 1988b) that the babtum, interpreted as a "city ward" by the Chicago
Assyrian Dictionary (University of Chicago 1992), might be a patrilineage. In
a brief essay on the iearnm, Kraus (1982), like others before him (Walther
1917), noted that the term was not simply a collectivity of merchants, as it
was in the Old Assyrian texts, but functioned as a judicial assembly. In the
Old Assyrian texts, it is clear that there were "assemblies / councils of big
men and small men" and a "city hall" in the city-state of Assur (Larsen 1976),
and that the council shared power with the king, at least until the time of
Shamshi-Adad's seizure of the kingship in the eighteenth century Be.
In sum, we may infer that political integration in Mesopotamia was not
solely encompassed by the formation of centralized governmental institu-
tions. Indeed, the evolution of the state government in Mesopotamia, which
came to hold ultimate jurisdiction in matters of dispute among existing cor-
porate groups, did not mean that the political functions of these groups
ceased to exist. Such local organs of power typically represented both op-
portunities for the centralized state to channel local resources to its own ad-
vantage as well as arenas of resistance to the goals of the state-and thus
were an essential locus of political struggle.
In Mesopotamia, the role of ethnic groups and their ability to mobilize
personnel across the boundaries of city-states was one of the most important
factors promoting political change (Kamp and Yoffee 1980). Thus, after Sar-
gods coup in Kish and his foundation of the new city-state of Akkade as his
capital of a united Mesopotamia, the Akkadian language was employed in
place of Sumerian as the primary language of administration. This linguistic
switch, formerly interpreted as evidence of a new group of people-Akka-
dian speakers-entering Mesopotamia, is now seen as a mechanism to priv-
ilege scribes who could write in Akkadian and who were trained in the new
royal court. Akkadian had been spoken in Mesopotamia for hundreds of
years before Sargon's conquests, as is seen, for example, in the Akkadian
names of scribes who copied Sumerian texts (Biggs 1967). In the Ur III
222 I JOHN BAINES AND HORMAN YOFFEE

period, when the imperial bureaucracy was swollen to unprecedented num-

bers, scribes conversely were trained in Sumerian and owed their positions
to the new royal system in Ur (Michalowski 1987).
In the second millennium, with the political ascendancy of various
AnlOrite groups in Mesopotamian cities, the inference is again no longer that
there was an Amorite invasion: "Akkadeians" were in "Sumer" well before
Sargon, and Amorites were in Mesopotamia before 2000 Be, interacting in
a multilingual, multi ethnic population. Amorites made alliances with-and
against- other Amorites, mobilizing kinsmen across the countryside in the
struggle for power within various city-states (Whiting 1987). Down to the
middle of the second millennium, civil order in Mesopotamia was fragile,
and it was n.egotiated both within city-states and among them. During pe-
riods of extreme political decentralization, "solidarity" within ethnic groups
could be the decisive force in the struggle for regional power. In this in-
stance, language change did not accompany dynastic political change: no
document was ever written in Amorite, and Amorite rulers were careful to
present themselves as reproducing venerable Mesopotamian cultural tradi-
tions in order to legitimize their rule.
In Egypt, the center aimed to control local offices in a way that was
hardly attempted in Mesopotamia. During most periods down to the Greco-
Roman, the goal of government administration in Egypt was generally to
take as much power and as many resources as desired for the personnel and
projects of the center. But the long, thin form of the country, with
significant concentrations of specific resources scattered over its length, re-
quired much transport of goods, as well as organizational structures that
could handle both local and central affairs (Fischer 1977; HeIck 1974, 1977).
How far the concerns of the provinces or of provincials mattered to the cen-
ter no doubt varied, but the lack of a developed urban ideology at the cen-
ter in earlier periods may have militated against extremes of neglect of the
countryside and its inhabitants. The frequent presence of a southern national
center at Abydos or Thebes, in addition to the political and economic cen-
ter in the Memphite area, may have had a similar effect. Suggestive of the
opposite possibility (neglect of the provinces) is that in Egypt today-a
country whose basic orientation is toward the north (in antiquity it was to-
ward the south)-few venture away from the dominant direction and travel
south of Cairo.
A local administrative structure of nomes (provinces), of which there
were nearly 40, was set up in the first few dynasties. This system appears to
have respected traditional settlement patterns and loyalties to some extent,
but it was a centralizing creation. Most nomes were similar to one another
in size, arable extent, or population, and in many periods they were not
favored as major administrative or political units, except for the densely
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 113

populated Greco-Roman period. Some nomes therefore acquired signifi-

cant roles while others are like ciphers. In several periods nome organiza-
tion seems to have been passed over in favor of larger, more centralized
groupmgs.
Two tendencies could disturb the efficacy of a centralizing administra-
tion: regional dissolution of the country, as in the First Intermediate period,
and an overproliferation of central bureaucracy that stifled activity, as in the
late Middle Kingdom. These two factors came together at times, but also
could be distinct.
The state's essential strategy in creating the economic basis for adminis-
tration was to found estates that were attached to central institutions or
offices but geographically scattered (Jacquet-Gordon 1962). This pattern
had the advantage, perceived by medieval centralizing rulers, of avoiding a
concentration of landholdings controlled by a single beneficiary in a single
place. It also probably brought economic and ecological benefits by expos-
ing only small holdings to local risks of failure and diversifying forms of ex-
ploitation across regions. Important offices in the central administration
(Strudwick 1985) were concerned with gathering and redistributing har-
vests and controlling animal wealth (less significant economically than in
Mesopotamia). High officials held large numbers of titles, all of them pro-
viding sources of income or, as "ranking titles," marking positions in the
elite hierarchy that were no doubt at least as important in the eyes of some
holders as were substantive offices.
In addition to functions concerned with products of the land or ofwork-
shops and specialized production, important central officials had purely ad-
ministrative duties, for example, running royal bureaus. There was much
ceremonial and some seeming caprice, as during the mid-Fifth Dynasty,
when a whole hierarchy of titles of "palace manicurists" briefly became
prominent (Moussa and Altenmiiller 1977: 25 - 30). These functions or cere-
monies centered on the· person of the king and fostered contacts and net-
works that he may have exploited to shortcut elaborate administrative
structures. In the later Old Kingdom there were frequent rearrangements of
the hierarchy of rank (Baer 1960); the introduction of these no doubt helped
the king maintain his dominance.
During the earlier Old Kingdom (c. 2600-2350 Be), this central, redis-
tributive administration, one of whose principal concerns was to organize
enormous building projects, was supported by a provincial administration
(Martin-Pardey 1976), but the principal officials seem to have resided, when
possible, near the capital-or at least built their tombs there. Little survives
from the nomes themselves. This changed around the end of the Fifth Dy-
nasty, when some officials began to be buried near nome capitals; toward the
end of the Old Kingdom they increasingly displayed local loyalties. Unified
n4 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

rule cellapsed areund 2150 Be. Altheugh the semblance ef a single kingship
was maintained, regienal centers cempeted until rival dynasties (the
Ninth / Tenth and Eleventh) were set up at Memphis (deriving frem Herak-
leepelis) and Thebes; this develO'pment is knewn as the First Intennediate
peried.
The censequences ef late Old Kingdem decentralizatien seem clear in
retrespect, but the precesses leading to' it are disputed. Earlier writers argued
that there was a pesitive weakening and lO'SS O'f cO'ntrO'l, whereas seme recent
schelars have seen the innevatiens as a deliberate central respense to' chang-
ing cenditiens (e.g., Kanawati 1980). These approaches have cO'ntrasting
weaknesses, the O'lder ene in werking largely frem hunch and the newer O'ne
in keeping clese to' the inscriptiO'ns and prebably taking teO' much at face
value their assertiO'n that all was well. It is uncertain whether the nascent re-
giO'nalism O'f the late Old Kingdem derived frO'm a politically metivated
identificatiO'n by members ef the central elite with Ie cal areas, O'r whether
the leaders genuinely eriginated frO'm the areas they came to' champiO'n and
use as pewer bases. TwO' su€h strategies ceuld have ceexisted.
Altheugh the disselutiO'n ef the Old KingdO'm must be ascribed to' seme
extent to' regienalism, that ef the Middle Kingdem (c. 1980-1640 Be)
seems to' relate mere to' bureaucratic preliferatiO'n and stasis at the center.
The Twelfth Dynasty kings gradually suppressed neme erganizatiO'n and
nemarchs in favO'r ef a divisien O'f the CO'untry intO' fO'ur large units. Mid-
ranking administrative effices began to' multiply vasdy, and a few leading
O'fficials acquired great pewer. Under the Thirteenth Dynasty, abO'ut 60 kings
ruled fer an average ef areund twO' years each, while O'fficials held O'ffice fer
much lenger. Prosperity was maintained initially, but there fO'llO'wed a PO'-
litical decline that led finally to' the divisiO'n ef the ceuntry between ethnic
Asiatics (the Hykses) in the nerth and a IO'cal dynasty (the Seventeenth)
based in Thebes.
These intermediate perieds exemplify lecal regiO'nalism and the break-
dO'wn ef the ceuntry intO' twO' units (c£ Franke 1990). Later periO'ds shO'W
ether patterns ef struggle fer pewer mO're clearly. In the New KingdO'm
(c. 1520-1070 Be), the priestheO'd and the military emerged as distinct
fO'rces. The military acquired their pesitiO'n thrO'ugh imperial cO'nquest, and
subsequently threugh a respense to' invasien and inunigratiO'n that ulti-
mately breught ethnic Libyan greups to' PO'litical preminence (Baines 1996;
Leahy 1985). The priestheed derived their influence frem enO'nnO'us reyal
dedicatiens to' the temples ef the fruits ef cO'nquest in the ferm O'f sacred
buildings, geeds, and land fer endowment.
These mere recent feci ef PO'wer acquired a deminant rO'le in the first
millennium Be, when peliticallife was mere fragmented than that O'f earlier
times. By the late eighth century the ceuntry was divided intO' numerO'us
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I US

domains, only some of them ruled by kings. Yet Late Period (664-332 Be)
and Greco-Roman (332 Be-AD 395) rulers were able to revive centraliza-
tion and the nome structures, the latter perhaps through study of old records
rather than through experience on the ground. Here, the maintenance of
high-cultural and "scientific" traditions may have aided pragmatic govern-
ment. The history of Greco-Roman Egypt, although known principally
from the rural provinces of the Nile Valley and Fayyum., illustrates most
strongly the ability of the center to dominate the country in its own inter-
est (Bagna111993; Bowman 1996); in Roman times that center was Rome
rather than Alexandria.

Economy
In the earlier Mesopotamian states (until c. 1600 Be, roughly the end of the
Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian periods), the major economic units were
palace estates and temple estates. For all periods, however, there is evidence
of "community" and/or "private" organizations and families that owned
land, the chief form of enduring wealth; mercantile associations and entre-
preneurial traders contracted with temples and palaces to supply distant
goods and to manage facets of their economies. The economic history of
Mesopotamia must be written in terms of the dynamic forces of struggle
among these economic sectors, and of degrees of intersection and coopera-
tion among them.
Both the palace estates and the temple estates were, in essence, house-
holds. They consisted of large tracts of land, numbers of laborers and man-
agers of labor, residential and ceremonial structures, and facilities for the
storage and manufacture of goods. Older interpretations held that the early
third-millennium temple estate was the primary focus of economic, social,
and political activity-the so-called Tempelstadt theory (Falkenstein 1974
(originally published in 1951, refuted by Diakonoff1969; Gelb 1969)-and
gave way to totalitarian control of the economy by the state under the Third
Dynasty ofUr; recent studies find the nature of economic activity to be far
more complex.
In the early third millennium, for example, the physical structures of
palaces and temples were separate, as were the units of land and personnel
managed by them; there also were endemic antagonisms over the wealth of
these estates. The trend through the third millennium was the familiar en-
croachment by the royal sector on sacral property (an opposite tendency to
that observed in New Kingdom and later Egypt). This struggle, however,
was a subde one: kings required ideological support from the clergy and were
important players in religious ceremonies (although the evidence for this
comes from much later documents, such as the New Year ceremony texts
preserved from the later first millennium Be [Black 1981; Thureau-Dangin
226 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

1921]). Kings recorded their dutiful activities in building and refurbishing

temples; Early Dynastic kings were nurtured by goddesses and, in the Akka-
dian period (beginning with Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon) and Vr III,
were themselves deified. A temple to the deified Shu-Sin (fourth king of the
Third Dynasty ofUr), which was constructed in Eshnunna by the local gov-
ernor during that king's reign, shows that worship of the royal figures must
be taken seriously.
There is an ecological reason for the development of the great estates of
temples and palaces in southern Mesopotamia, a trend that is thought to run
counter to the general evolutionary logic of the breakup of estates owned
corporately by lineages into nuclear family units (Netting 1990). With the
need to leave irrigated and potentially saline land fallow every other year
whenever possible, ownership oflarge amounts ofland enabled the great es-
tates to minimize environmental risk and to shift personnel across the coun-
tryside while housing them in central locations in cities. Thus, the nature of
the soil and the exigencies of irrigation agriCulture promoted both corpo-
rate ownership of large landholdings and also nucleation and urbanization.
As already noted, if cities were in part the result of centralizing agricultural
activities, the phenomenon of urbanization is simultail.eously one of rural-
ization. Furthermore, the trend toward "enclavization" of the southern
Mesopotamian landscape in the early third millennium. resulted in regions
dominated by the city-states. Each region was composed of an urban com-
plex, along with its productive hinterland. This arrangement led to warfare
among the city-states for control of the countryside, which progressively in-
creased the central powers of the royal estate over the temples.
Land-sale documents show that in the third millennium. there also were
large and wealthy "community" estates, while the existence of assemblies
demonstrates that there were forms of community self-government. Even
under the extreme control of the Vr III state, private economic transactions
occurred (Steinkeller 1989), although Diakonoff, for example, has supposed
that the Ur III kings sought to limit such activities, perhaps under some right
of eminent domain they had instituted.
In the collapse of the Dr III state and subsequent absence of tight politi-
cal authority, the economy of southern Mesopotamia was, as it were, let off
the leash. Large private estates were formed, and new ways of circumvent-
ing partible inheritance practices were employed to keep the estates intact
in succeeding generations. The most interesting of these was the assignment
of daughters to "convents," preventing their marriage and the alienation of
property that was part of their dowries (Harris 1964, 1975; Janssen 1991;
Renger 1967). These "nuns" (nadrtum), however, also enriched by movable
property they were given in the form of "ring money," bought, sold, and
leased property and loaned silver to such an extent that they became great
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I n7

real-estate entrepreneurs of the Old Babylonian period. Freed from the au-
thority of husbands and fathers, they presumably led richer and more inter-
esting lives than other women in Mesopotamian antiquity.
The increasingly wealthy "private sector" was further drawn into the
economic activities of the royal and temple estates. Although no full picture
of these interactions has yet been drawn, a number of detailed studies have
appeared (Charpin 1980, 1986; DiakonotT 1985, 1990; Renger 1989; Stol
1982 [reinterpreting Koschaker 1942]; Stone 1987; van de Mieroop 1992;
YotTee 1977, 1982). While there were strong differences between north and
south Babylonia (which cannot be enumerated here), an important similar-
ity is that the great estates employed large numbers of outside people in ad-
dition to their own staff of dependents. These private contractors, members
of the "community" rather than of the temple estate or the royal estate, sup-
plied the estates with food (from fish to meat and wool products) and no-
tarized the hire of laborers on the estates' fields. In times of political
centralization during the reigns of Hammurabi and Rim-Sin in the eigh-
teenth century BC, the state naturally tried to control this independent sec-
tor, but in the time of weakness towards the end of the Old Babylonian
period, the power of these private contractors grew enormously.
In the Old Babylonian period, the economic resources of the great es-
tates were not small. On the basis of van de Mieroop's study (1992) of the
texts from Ur, dating to c. 1984-1864 BC, some figures can be cited to
illustrate this point. Tablets from the warehouses attached to the Ningal
temple complex record (mosdyannual) deliveries (from various years) of
140,000 liters of grain, 50 tons of dates, a group of31 shepherds managing
about 20,000 sheep, 16,803 came inspected, 18,710 liters of ghee, 16,200
liters of cheese, and 1,498 kg ofwool. The temple storehouse also purchased
9,600 liters of bitumen from a private businessman for 1 kg of silver. In one
text a group of merchants delivers 4,123 kg of copper to the palace. Dur-
ing the same early Old Babylonian period, the royal estate controlled some
23 km 2 of land.
Such enormous quantities of goods were produced not only in the "re-
distributive" sectors of the temple and palace estates. In Ur, private entre-
preneurs organized the fishing industry, engaged in long-distance trade,
supplied bread to the palace, and functioned as money lenders. One indi-
vidual loaned 1.03 kg of silver to a colleague at 20 percent interest that was
due in one month! An individual sent 14,700 liters of bread or barley to the
palace. Another businessman rented a boat with a capacity of9,000 liters for
a business trip.
It is not necessary here to repeat the importance of the private sector to
the Assyrian economy in the Old Assyrian period. .As numerous studies have
shown (e.g., Larsen 1976, 1977, 1982, 1987a; Veenhofl972, 1980), private
228 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

merchants transported tons of tin and textiles to central Anatolia and made
huge profits on the silver and gold markets there. The Assyrians did not con-
trol access to any resources, but they were expert in moving goods from
where they were plentiful to where they were scarce, transacting business,
formingjoint banking partnerships to accumulate capital, and taking advan-
tage of the lack of political centralization in the areas they exploited. Finally,
it is worth repeating Larsen's (1976) judgment that the merchants were im-
portant players in the Old Assyrian state, members of councils in Assur, and
provided reasons for state military intervention in foreign lands.
We have unavoidably drawn a superficial and too coherent picture of
economic behavior in earlier Mesopotamia. Research on the relations
among the various sectors of the economy, especially the private economy;
how these relations changed through time; and how economic activities
were restrained and/or facilitated by political processes has changed our un-
derstanding not only of the production and distribution of goods and ser-
vices in Mesopotamia, but of the structure of Mesopotamian society itself
The Egyptian economy is neither as well documented nor as well un-
derstood as that of Mesopotamia. The best known periods are the late New
Kingdom (c. 1300 -1100 Be) and the Greco-Roman period, but the mone-
tization and "colonial" character of the latter differs from the situation of
earlier times. The general picture is an extreme one of a centralized, com-
mand-driven economy (e.g., Janssen 1975b), but one that, contrary to to-
day's wisdom, worked acceptably for long periods (see Kemp 1989 for a
contrasting interpretation). Much interpretation has been in the shadow of
Karl Polanyi, but there is no consensus as to how viable his approach is. Both
the overall context and the detail of its operation are poorly known (see, e.g.,
HeIck 1975). In particular, the proportion of economic life that is covered
by the sources cannot be well estimated-as is true also for today's com-
mand economies-and this unknown leaves the picture of subsistence
strategies and private enterprise uncertain. Because of these difficulties, dis-
cussion tends to focus as much on issues of social organization and adminis-
tration as on economics more narrowly defined.
There was no "money," although various units of account and exchange
were used. The highly administered sector of the economy may have
touched the lives of most people relatively little, except to the extent that
they had to pay rents or taxes. The fact that most organization was in terms
of goods and the appropriation of labor, rather than of credit and such ab-
stractions, may have restricted what the center and, in particular, what en-
trepreneurs could do. (This is not to say that the Egyptians could not work
with abstractions: legal documents often record regularizing fictions [e.g.,
Eyre 1992; Lacau 1949], while grain was lent at interest in a local context
[e.g., Baer 1962:45].)
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 229

The state's basic economic interest was in ensuring that the land was cul-
tivated and in exacting taxation or rents from the produce. The state was
then responsible for storage and redistribution, notably of grain, in particu-
lar to those who did not produce for themselves. The state and temples made
many craft goods in their own workshops. Specialized workers were paid es-
sentially in emmer wheat for bread and barley for beer, the two staples of the
Egyptian diet. Much production was channeled through state institutions
(e.g., Posener-Krieger 1976). The elite appear to have received their remu-
neration primarily in the form ofland, from which they could derive an in-
come, and of other productive elements such as herds. The Old Kingdom
elite presented itself in tomb decoration as enjoying vast estates that pro-
duced most of the necessities of life and many luxuries (e.g., Harpur 1987).
This picture is idealized, but it is one pointer to how the monolithic char-
acter of the command economy might be tempered by a more complex
reality.
Apart from securing what was needed for the daily life of the center and
of specialists, major building projects, with their attendant requirements for
expeditions into the desert to extract raw materials (including gold), were
an important part of economic life and often of international relations.
There is a clear correlation between monuments and centralization; hardly
any major monuments were constructed in decentralized periods, but when
the country was centralized the amount of construction varied in both the
short and the long term. This pattern is anything but economically "ratio-
nal" and clearly obeyed other dictates (e.g., Morenz 1969). Two periods
when the resources invested in construction were at their greatest were the
Fourth Dynasty, with the building of the largest pyramids, and the late Eigh-
teenth and early Nineteenth Dynasties (c. 1400-1225 Be), with vast temple
and tomb building by Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Sety I, and Ramesses II
(as well as major private monuments). Even during these periods, there were
signlficant interludes without major construction. (Theories that the great
pyramids, and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, were constructed as some sort
of unifying project for the country-e.g., Engelbach 1943; Mendelssohn
1974 -founder on this difficulty.)
Land was held on a use-value rather than an absolute basis of tenure, al-
though parcels might remain in the same nomoyal hands for centuries. Gen-
erally, the cultivator was not the owner / tenant; most land belonged to large
institutions, including royalty, high officials, or perhaps wealthy individuals.
Cultivators were not free to leave their land. If land, whoever controlled it,
fell out of cultivation, the state assigned it to a new responsible tenant and
collected revenues from that institution or person (e.g., Gardiner 1951).
Those who fled and left their land uncultivated seem to have become va-
grants who were then organized for labor by a state works department (e.g.,
230 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

Quirke 1988) and put to essentially the same tasks as those they had aban-
doned. In Greco-Roman times, it was temples that performed this resettle-
ment function (posener 1975). The reason for this regime-which is perhaps
characteristic of command economies while having obvious analogies with
feudal patterns-was probably that people were in shorter supply than land
(see Baer 1962); such evidence as can be gathered suggests generally low lev-
els of population density and life expectancy (Bagnall and Frier 1994; Baines
and Eyre 1983:65-74).
Salient questions raised by this rather bleak picture include how major
institutions meshed their economic activities together, how far the com-
mand economy could .provide the requisite range of goods, and the extent
to which there was an independent "private sector"; the latter two are
closely related.
Relations between institutions have been discussed primarily for the
New Kingdom (e.g.,]anssen 1975b), from which numerous economic docu-
ments are preserved (Gardiner 1941-52; Gasse 1988). These sources suggest
that the principal crown and temple institutions were not economically dis-
tinct, and that temples, in particular, could provide storage and supplies for
state concerns and interests. The state also could use temples as administra-
tors or as intermediaries in the transmission and import of goods. Nonethe-
less, the basis of temple power, which was in landholdings, allowed the high
priest of Amun in Thebes to become politically autonomous at the end of
the New Kingdom (c. 1070 Be; ]ansen-Winkeln 1992; Kitchen 1986: 248-
54). The region in which the temple of Amun was the principal landowner,
which stretched from the First Cataract to about 150 km south of Memphis ,
with its northern border fortress at el-Hiba, became effectively independent
during the Third Intermediate period.
Representations of marketplaces, where small numbers of perishable
goods were sold, are found in Old and New Kingdom reliefS and paintings
(e.g., Altenmiiller 1980; Hodjash and Berlev 1980). A late New Kingdom
administrative papyrus records the voyage of a ship belonging to a temple
along the river. The ship dispenses clothing and honey, probably from the
temple's estates and workshops, to women on the river bank; in return the
women give these and other goods, the latter presumably ones the temple
did not produce itself (Janssen 1980). This is one of the few clear cases of
an interaction of "state" institutions and the private economy (on transport,
see Castle 1992).
More detailed material, which shows the privileged artisans who built
the New Kingdom royal tombs trading among themselves and selling their
services, derives from papyri and ostraca (inscribed flakes of limestone and
sherds) from their desert settlement of Deir el-Medina (Janssen 1975a).
Among the most revealing aspects of their lives is that some of the artisans,
who were amply salaried state employees, owned land in addition and
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 231

farmed it or employed people to fann it (McDowell 1992a). They were thus

also small-scale entrepreneurs with diverse interests. Such a finding does not,
however, warrant the more generalized assumption of Kemp (e.g., 1972,
1981, 1989) that the major institutions and principal officials of the land
were "trading for profit" on the basis of the incomes they derived from ce-
reals and more specialized produce. Evidence Kemp (1981, 1989) has cited
from the size of storage installations at the short-lived city of el-cAmaroa
may not support his case in the way he suggests (see Janssen 1983 for one al-
ternative); more probably it relates to the vast numbers of dependents for
whom such people were responsible, to conspicuous display of material re-
sources, to the need to maintain massive stocks against crop failure and other
contingencies, and perhaps to control of seed stocks issued in the form of
loans (known from the Ptolemaic period; e.g., Crawford 1971: 26).
Other aspects of individual enterprise fit more characteristically within
the command-economy structure. People tried, notably in the Old and
Middle Kingdoms, to set up endowments that would secure their mortuary
cult in perpetuity (Goedicke 1970). This mechanism, which both king and
elite members employed, created exemptions from general patterns of
tenure and obligation; but the longevity of such foundations is uncertain,
because the cults themselves seldom survived more than a couple of gener-
ations in anything like their original form.
Administrative and priestly offices were bought, sold, and made into
family inheritances, at least from the Middle Kingdom, attesting to the suc-
cess of officeholders in appropriating as personal property something to
which they were appointed by the crown. In a grandiose example from the
Second Intermediate period (c. 1620 Be), a high official "sold" to a kinsman
the office of mayor ofElkab, a major town south of Thebes, for the equiva-
lent in accounting terms ofS.S kg of gold (Lacau 1949). The transaction was
registered in Thebes, the capital of the day, and ratified by being set up on
a stela in the city's principal temple. The transfer itself was a fiction, devised
to honor a debt that the vendor was otherwise unable to repay to the pur-
chaser. The debt in itselfhas economic significance, as does the prevalent ac-
tivity of tomb robbery, because both exemplify what one might expect, that
substantial amounts of wealth were dispersed, in ways that are invisible to us,
through what cannot have been official, command-driven channels. Nor
can the materials derived from such activities have been secret: they must
have formed part of the conspicuous display of the wealthy, as well as being
recycled again and again in tombs. Such evidence illustrates that a high pro-
portion of economic activity is not accessible to study; these gaps must be
drawn into any overall model.
The best illustration of how little the Egyptian economy was oriented
toward major private activity may be given by the intermediate periods,
from which there is little evidence for significant entrepreneurship and
'232 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

much for such local grandees as nomarchs taking over traditional royal func-
tions of administration, military action, storage, and largesse. One also can
contrast dynastic times with the progressively monetized Greco-Roman
economy, from which there are attested such features as banking, forward
sale of standing crops (pierce 1972:81-93), and elaborate internal account-
ing on great estates (Rathbone 1991). Nonetheless, the essential thrust of the
Ptolemaic economy, like its predecessors, was state control, which extended
through taxation, ownership, or regulation to the most minor activities
(e.g., Bowman 1996:56-121).

Insufficiencies of Political and Economic Analysis

Perhaps most clearly for Egypt, we have encountered areas where the data
resist analysis in primarily political and economic terms. In a socioeconomic
perspective, the essential difficulty is created by the scale of inequality in the
ancient social systems and by the vast expenditure ofhuman and material re-
sources on such projects as pyramids and major temples, or simply the bur-
ial equipment of a minor king like Tutankhamun. In Mesopotamia, where
the economy was more diversified and contested than in Egypt, the relation
between politics and economy was itself very complex. Political goals were
shaped through the forces of production, consumption, and distribution;
rulers alone did not dominate these economic spheres. Also, while the eco-
nomic activities of members oflocal groups were affected by policy goals of
the state, one still needs to ask to what extent these political goals were mo-
tivated by economic factors.
Inequality, such as existed in both civilizations, created a large surplus for
a small elite-the ruling group of high officials in Old Kingdom Egypt
numbered perhaps 500 people (Baines and Eyre 1983: 66); this required
legitimation to the people from whom the surpluses were exacted, or so
modern analysts tend to suppose. Although state formation created great
economic potential, its consequences may have left those below the elite, af-
ter the exactions required of them, in an economic condition similar to that
of their prestate forebears. Throughout the history of the early state, the ma-
jority of people hardly had alternatives or points of comparison beyond their
own societal environment; this limited perspective would have reduced the
requirements of legitimation, in comparison with those the outsider may
feel to be necessary. Data on "lower-class" residential areas, nonelite burials,
and the material inventory of people who are absent or depersonalized in
writing (all of this more accessible for Mesopotamia than for Egypt) provide
some evidence for the status of such people and of their social groups and
the way in which they were integrated into society as a whole.
While traditional forms of local social organization and their "moral
economies" may have retained some validity for the nonelite, precisely be-
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 233

cause the state (and/or large manorial estates) removed from them the means
of storage and provision against misfortune, the state appropriated the salient
discourse on the constitution of social order. Although we should not as-
sume that those outside the elite always accepted the rhetoric of their supe-
riors, state legitimations were generally designed so that elites could exploit
rather freely the resources available to them. Elites were able to be pro-
foundly separate from the rest of their societies. This separateness extended
to the system of values, which was hardly accessible to those outside an in-
ner social layer.
Despite the residual survival of the moral economy on which their infe-
riors relied for a legitimation of their dependence, elites had little regard for
the human lives of those whose efforts they were eager to utilize for their
own grand plans, taking huge disparities of circumstances between groups
for granted. Only rarely and mainly in the later stages of these two an-
cient states did the moral economy appear to a significant extent in the texts.
Since much of society was involved in the execution of the grand plans, ad-
ditional values and interests must have held societies together both in these
goals and more generally. But the analysis of those plans needs to focus prin-
cipally on the elite groups and on the ways in which they created and sus-
tained among themselves the mechanisms for supporting and ensuring the
success of specific types of goals. These elite values were not only political;
economics were a means more than an end. Political and economic analysis
only partly addresses elite motivations. In the next section we outline a dif-
ferent approach to these issues, which are common to the study of many
civilizations.

HIGH CULTURE
Context and Definition
The inner elite controlling ancient Near Eastern (and presumably all other)
states and civilizations were few; during early postformative periods their
numbers became further reduced. In Egypt, this process culminated in the
Fourth Dynasty (c. 2500 Be), when a high proportion of the country's re-
sources was devoted to the king's funerary monument. The number of the
surrounding, less grandiose tombs of the inner elite suggests that this group
consisted of no more than a few dozen male officeholders, in a population
of perhaps 1-2 million for the entire country. These men formed the cen-
tral decision-making group, who together with their families controlled and
enjoyed the fruits of the country's labors. The group was larger in other pe-
riods, but it can never have numbered far into the thousands.
The more populous and numerous city-states in Mesopotamia did not
gather resources to a single center in the same way, but in Mesopotamian
234 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

civilization, too, wealth and status were highly concentrated. The urban
implosion that began in the late fourth and reached its apogee in the mid-
third millennium accentuated the formation of an urban inner elite that is
reflected in extravagant practices, such as the mid-third-millennium royal
tombs of Vr and other cities. The lexical "list of professions" shows that
many bureaucratic titles already existed in the late fourth millennium, as
well as names of occupational specialists and community officials (Civil et al.
1969; Englund, Nissen, and Damerow 1993; Green and Nissen 1987). Few
of these, however, can be described as privileged elites. In all periods, these
Mesopotamian elites, which included high temple officials, private land-
owners, community elders, and wealthy traders as well as high military and
administrative officials, however numerous they may have been, formed a
minuscule percentage of the population, as can be seen by comparing lists of
officeholders in later third-millennium texts with the vastly greater numbers
of people who received rations during that period.
The formation and maintenance of elites, and then of elites within elites,
lie at the heart of civilizations: inequality is fundamental. For these two an-
cient civilizations, the option of equality or of a serious search for an inte-
grating "moral economy" hardly existed (contrast with Classical Greece;
Morris 1997). Cosmological elaborations and "political economies" are
among the features that can distinguish civilizations from noncivilizations.
The formation and entrenchment of such inequalities set the evolutionary
trajectory toward civilization apart from trajectories that led to less differ-
entiated and stratified societies.
In the most ancient civilizations, elites controlled material and symbolic
resources but were scarcely subject to cultural requirements to disburse them
in fulfillment of social obligations. The distinctive achievement of archaic
civilizations is as much to transform the meaning of wealth as to create more
wealth. Elites control symbolic resources in such a way as to make them
meaningful only when it is they who exploit them. This appropriation of
meaning is complementary to, and at least as important as, other legitima-
tions available to controlling individuals or groups. There is also the "reli-
gious" affirmation that cosmic order is maintained only by the activities of
leaders, typically of the king and the central priestly officiants or, if religious
imperatives are acted out in the wider world, of the military.
These elite activities are characterized by the massive appropriation of
material resources, which are put to use in the enduring forms characteris-
tic of ancient states. Such resources are due to the ruler and elite because
they are the carriers of exclusive and expensive cultural meanings that re-
quire such exactions for their maintenance and development. Elites, as the
principal human protagonists and prime communicants to the deities who
 ORDER. LEGITIMACY. AND WEALTH I 23S

are the supreme members of the total society, require the highest products
of culture (c£ Chang 1983). High culture, therefore, is one of the essential
loci, even the essential locus, in which order exploits wealth for legitimacy.
Here, high culture becomes self-motivating and self-susta.inillg, while its
meaning-bearing acquires a measure of autonomy through the expertise and
internal discourse of the specialists who maintain it.
These points are not new. As is widely accepted, if not in precisely these
terms, high culture is a central phenomenon of most civilizations from the
ancient Near East until today. Large-scale democracies and social move-
ments, among others, redefine high culture in terms different than those of
the ancient civilizations we are considering; few dispense with it. Cultural
pluralism, however, turns the question of what constitutes high culture into
an issue that appears to have been largely absent in our cases. This point
will become salient for Mesopotamia, where the existence of many ethno-
linguistic groups tended to promote rather than fragment high culture.
Despite the significance and centrality of high culture, it often does not
receive its share of attention as a factor in the creation and maintenance of
elites and civilizations. It is ironic that, while archaeologists acknowledge the
importance of high culture when they recover elements of it in the physical
record, they tend, for understandable reasons, to place more value on evi-
dence for less exclusive social phenomena. The general public, with its in-
terest in "treasures," may here be closer to the ethos of ancient elites than
are socially aware archaeologists.
We take high culture to be characteristic of civilizations rather than sim-
ply of states, and we see the boundary between one form of high culture
subscribed to by local elites and another as the boundary between one civi-
lization and another. We define high culture as the production and consumption
of aesthetic items under the control, and for the benefit, of the inner elite of a civi-
lization, including the ruler and the gods. The phrase "aesthetic items," rather
than "works of art," is intended to encompass a wide range of domains in~
eluding visual art, visual, verbal, and musical performance, gannents, per-
fumes, and the most highly prized food and drink. The phenomenon also
extends to such extravagant forms of "traditional" practice as big-game
hunting, the keeping of exotic animals, and the breeding of highly special-
ized ones. At the extreme, the whole lives of the ruler and elites are aes-
theticized, as well as strongly ritualized-the two aspects being mutually
supportive. The range of high culture is such that it can accommodate a di-
versity of interests and aptitudes among rulers and inner elite.
The aesthetic character of high culture does not imply that works of art
are ends in themselves. Many scholars object to the term "art" as applied to
non-Western cultures, and we do not wish to engage this issue here (see
236 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN TOFFEE

Bairies 1994; Hardin 1993). Works and practices of high culture are strongly
aesthetic, but the aesthetic element is mostly integrated into some broad
context, such as the conduct of royal and elite life, religion, festivals, or pro-
vision for the dead.

Communication, Expertise, and Restriction

High culture is a communicative complex: it enacts, celebrates, and trans-
mits meaning and experience. It incorporates writing systems as well as artis-
tic production, and in doing so, it may mark a distinction between writing
as a specialized medium of expression and as a broad instrument of social
control. The spiritual, moral, and intellectual content communicated in
high culture may be realized in visual art and architecture, in which case it
can be largely independent of verbal form, although in Egypt the verbal and
the visual are very closely integrated (e.g., Baines 1989b; Fischer 1986). We
discuss some issues relating to writing below, while noting here that because
of writing's verbal character, the content of its less materially extravagant
manifestations is in theory available through language to anyone and is more
difficult to control and integrate into the high-cultural complex than is vi-
sual art. Literature, initially no doubt in its oral forms and integrated with
other elements of performing art, contains the most complex and multi-
valent responses to the exclusive character of high culture (parkinson 1998).
Literature may, on occasion, be subversive of the high-cultural order, but in
our two cases such tendencies were mostly kept in check (Vogelzang and
Vanstiphout 1992). Even what is superficially subversive can be incorporated
into a richer pattern that confronts the complexities of human experi-
ence and reaffirms the established order, as we illustrate in our discussion of
each area.
Yet the communication of high culture appears as if subverted. It ad-
dresses itself to very few. Many richly communicative objects are deposited
in places where no one could ever apprehend their communication. In this
regard, past, future, and the world of the gods are as important as producers
or recipients of the communication as is the present world. Part of the ex-
travagance of high culture is that its message should be fully received by few
or none.
The exclusiveness of high culture requires formalization, probably be-
cause simple wealth is always too crude a criterion for access to elite activi-
ties and concerns. Thus, access to high culture is controlled not just by
wealth but also by social hierarchy, rank, initiation or the holding of specific
offices, kinship or other group adherence, or a mixture of these. Moreover,
the forms that are crystallized in high culture are vital to the institution as a
whole. We consider formalization and access under the categories of know1-
edge, style, and the maintenance of tradition.
 OlDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 237

Knowledge is a vital element in the control of cultural resources. Crucial

parts of high culture itself, or of the meanings that sustain and motivate them
(Baines 1990), may be secret. Such restriction of knowledge is common to
all societies, but it has special ramifications for inner elites. Much of what is
involved may be recondite without being secret, as may be true notably of
conditions surrounding works of art. Obvious aspects are the amount of
learning involved in becoming a provider of high culture, either as a spe-
cialized artist/craftsman or as a performer, and the special and restricted set-
tings in which such activities take place.
There is a corresponding, ifless onerous, investment in being a full con-
sumer. Only those who have the time and inclination are in a position to ap-
preciate the products of high culture, and even they may not do so, being
"philistines" who ¥e wealthy enough to consume without appreciating.
These possibilities vary with social forms and, no doubt, with individuals.
Thus, the professional, literate elite of Egypt may have been more directly
involved in the production and the meaning of works of art than were
nonliterate elites in Mesopotamia (where literacy was restricted to scribes
who were not necessarily members of the controlling elites), or other semi-
independent and landholding elites in such places as medieval Europe. But
because of the great significance of high-cultural items, the elite almost al-
ways exercise some control over them, even if its members lack relevant ex-
pertise. Members of elites use high culture and access to it in mutual
competition for status.
Style is produced within the broader elite and consumed principally by
the inner elite. Style is vital to a civilization's definition and to its demarca-
tion against what lies outside. High culture has specific carriers and a par-
ticular status as a tradition, and it is integrated in particular ways into a
civilizational, cultural, and stylistic context. Typically, the visual forms of a
civilization are so distinctive that an informed onlooker can identify them at
a glance. While this applies especially strongly in Egypt, one easily discerns
"Mesopotamian" styles from "Syrian," "Iranian," or "Anatolian" ones.
In most cases, a civilization's style (which is different and more encom-
passing than pottery types or lithic types as "styles") is more or less cotermi-
nous with its extent in space and time. The style is created in a high-cultural
context, is sustained by an elite that commissions and consumes the works
that transmit the stylistic tradition, and incorporates fundamental values. In
the case of Egypt, this fusion of style and values is central to a system of
decorum circumscribing and sustaining high-cultural artifacts and activities
(Baines 1985: 277 -305, 1990: 17-21). The values may often be submerged
or tacit, but they are no less powerful for not being expressed in verbal form.
This value-laden stylistic complex is crucial to the transmission of the civi-
lization's essence through time (Assmann 1992).
238 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

The aesthetic character of high culture is a powerful legitimizing force,

because works of art and architecture involve great material outlays, and of-
ten or mostly require activities that can neither be expected of the con-
sumers nor provide directly for more than a small proportion of society.
Both in the dedication of high-cultural products to deities and to the ruler,
and in the consumption of those products by the elite, there is little ques-
tioning of the view that it is impossible to do things in a less extravagant way
and that the necessary labor is provided by a dependent workforce.
The transmission and interpretation of high culture is a sigr.rifi.cant pre-
occupation of the elite, reinforcing their status as a community of discourse.
This community, with its many shared interests, diverts attention from the
effects of the attendant inequality on the rest of society. To the members of
the group commissioning, consuming, and creating the works, those outside
are hardly of account.
As indicated, the producers and the consumers of high culture are nor-
mally not identical. Despite the importance and scale of artistic and high-
cultural production, the executant mostly has the statu~ of, at best, a
privileged member of the broader, as against the inner, elite. The existence
of specialized craftsmen among this larger elite, and the privileged position
of the overlapping group of the literate, create subgroups who share con-
cerns both with the inner elite and with the rest of society, partially bridg-
ing the gap between the two poles. This limited involvement of producers
with elite concerns strengthens the position of high culture, because several
interest groups are involved directly in its propagation. No doubt even the
broader exploited society-which is itself not a homogeneous whole-has
an interest in the maintenance of the high-cultural complex because it is
seen as a stabilizing institution and, ultimately, as an almost unalterable
gIven.
But these mitigations of the divisions introduced by high culture do not
alter the fact that the phenomenon itselfnecessarily encompasses only a small
proportion of society, and that its prime intent is to remain restricted.
Moreover, in the absence of advanced technology or gross exploitation of
outsiders, the production of elite high culture adversely affects the material
culture and living standards of the rest. Thus, high culture contains an inner
dynamic and a paradox: it seeks to legitimize the whole order of society,
along with the role of the elite, as cosmologically just. If it is to do so with-
out simply imposing authority from above, it must offer real or perceived
benefits to the rest of society, but those who count most in perceiving the
benefits are once again the elite.
Civilizations must maintain their traditions if they are to persist for long pe-
riods. These traditions form complex entities. The complex of high culture,
whose full extent can be modeled from the archaeological and historical
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 239

record, is ideally perceived as an entity but tends not to be transmitted as

one. Its precise range, the style of its components, and their development
and potential all change, but either at a slow pace-which may seem faster
to the intense and informed interest of the actors-or in a "punctuated"
phase of innovation or reform, the latter often being presented as a revival
of the past. Revivals, too, may not seem to the outsider to be such, because
what is done appears sufficiently new for the notion of revival to appear out
of place. In Western art, phases of renewal have often gone under the ban-
ner of return to antiquity, and calls for such returns are often more artisti-
cally genuine than a nonartist may accept. Their essential aim is to distance
the artist from immediate predecessors, for which purpose a good point of
reference is the more remote past, with the degree of remoteness depending
on various factors (Baines 1989a: 135-40; such uses of the past are gener-
ally the opposite of the modem ones described by Lowenthal [1985]). What
is less conceivable for the ancient context is the creation of an altogether dif-
ferent style, or still less a different representational rendering of nature (see
next section).
Some writers on Egypt who do not use art-historical methods or are
concerned more with a theoretical abstraction from the works than with
specific analysis take the slow pace of artistic change as indicating that the
purpose of the art forms-and hence for our purposes of the high-cultural
complex-was to stifle change (e.g., Assmann 1992:169-74; Davis 1989).
Such a view is difficult to reconcile with phases of significant change, as seen
in Egypt with the new literary and artistic forms in the Twelfth Dynasty
(c. 1900 BC) or in Mesopotamia with the production of "wisdom literature"
(Lambert 1960; see conclusion) and the development of relief carving in the
first millennium BC (e.g., Winter 1983), and with the ample high-cultural
evidence for interest in novelty and its display. High culture persists in a
fruitfUl tension between maintenance of the status quo and renewal or
change, and readily incorporates both. The notion that its aim is stasis may
be influenced by its suppression of radically different alternatives, which is
integral to the identification of civilizations with their high-cultural styles.
Only when that link is broken, as it was in the eastern Mediterranean with
the civilizationally heterogeneous Persian Empire and its successors, does a
more rapid rate of change come to seem normal or desirable.
One way in which the high-cultural complex does have restrictive ten-
dencies is in the primacy of visual forms. In our cases, this primacy should
be connected with the tendency to anchor cultural forms and central values
in symbols that are more readily recalled and more stable than are verbal
modes. The complexity of the artifacts carrying these meanings in a high-
cultural tradition is one factor that favors the elite and the executants most
strongly in their role as guardians of a tradition. Here, we see no need for
240 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

a particular explanation of Egyptian civilization as striving especially after

permanence and opposing change and competition (e.g., Assmann 1991: 5-
92); for Mesopotamia, Irene]. Winter (e.g., 1983) has elegantly developed
a case for the existence of intraelite competition.

The Persistence of High Culture: "Two Cultures"?

The division between elite and the rest leaves open the question of whether
the rest have a different culture or values from those of the elite (not the
same as Assmann's [1991: 16-31] "two cultures"). So far as archaeologi-
cal and epigraphic evidence in Egypt and Mesopotamia goes, that does not
seem to be the case. Rather, elite high culture appears to stand in contrast
to a poverty or an absence of distinctive materialized ideology for others
(DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996). Of course, our sources are desperately
biased in the attempt by ancient elites to assert and propound just such a state
of affairs, since both the cohesiveness and potency of high culture are com-
promised if it is divorced from the culture of the rest of society.
Nonetheless, the social conditions in which ancient states and civiliza-
tions formed appear partly comparable to more modem ones in which
social historians have seen a drawing apart of elite and other culture (e.g.,
Sharpe 1987: 122-23; Thomas 1978:3-24; Wrightson 1982:220-21).
Enormous disparities in wealth create ample opportunities for difference and
legitimize the need for cultural elaboration among the elite. At the same
time, major disruptive social movements and changes in settlement patterns
result in the extensive displacement of older social fonns and their moral
economies (cf. Scott 1985). These changes all could and did lead to the self-
conscious formation of rival ideologies in some ancient states-and in the
modem world. But this evolution did not happen in ancient Egypt or
Mesopotamia; "Axial Age" cultures (after Jaspers, see Eisenstadt, ed. 1986)
were a later development.
Essential factors favoring the persistence of high culture in Egypt and
Mesopotamia seem to lie in the lack of available effective alternatives within
the same culture and, until the first millennium Be, even in neighboring cul-
tures. The assumption that only the native culture had validity appears to
have applied in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, where the civilizations per-
sisted for many centuries after foreign rule had become the norm (Yoffee
1988b). The view that one's own polity constituted the cosmos existed in
both large and small states (Liverani 1990).

The Formation and Exploitation of the High-Culture Complex

Since the main focus of our work is not on origins, here we need only to
recall the speed with which high cultures appeared in Mesopotamia and
Egypt. Although the changes of the late fourth millennium built on what
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 241

came before, the transformation of art, the introduction of writing, and the
centralization of symbolic structures all suggest that new meanings and val-
ues were arising from the cauldron of state formation. We further infer that
the evolution of centralized government and an inner elite was seen as hav-
ing the mission of enhancing the new order through its exploitation of the
wealth it created. In the new social and cultural hierarchy, the invention and
elaboration of high culture become self-legitimizing. We explore below
how this happens and how the high culture is maintained.
This legitimation also relates to the issue of change versus stability, since
both are goals of elites. Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization endured for
longer than any of their successors and achieved great consistency and sta-
bility of primarily high-cultural style. This style was adhered to by ruling
groups, and it was maintained and transmitted by them and by specialists on
the edge of the elite. In considering Egypt one can set aside short-term po-
litical instability, which often affected only the inner elites. The pace of
change in any period could have been almost imperceptible to the actors
(whose generally short lifespans render change more difficult to perceive
than it is for us); this imperceptibility was no doubt deliberately sought, for
it reinforces the image of the high-cultural order as given and immutable. In
Mesopotamia, the high culture was maintained in the face of numerous
episodes of political and other change, and it was reproduced to render such
changes orderly and legitimate.
An illustration of the value of restricted transmission incorporated in
works of art is the early Egyptian complex of representation and writing
(Baines 1988a, 1989b). Egyptian writing divided from the beginning into a
cursive variant used for administration and the "monumental," hieroglyphic
form used in works of art. In early times neither encoded full syntactic forms
of the language, yet the limited forms endured for some centuries. Writing
was an adequate and valuable tool of administration, even with little ex-
pression of syntax; in art it essentially supplied captions and was not needed
for continuous text. Captions were integrated with figural representation to
form a genre of record and display of such things as royal exploits; in com-
bination with the power of the visual image, this created a form that was
probably more effective for being laconic. Moreover, the visual qualities of
the hieroglyphs, and their interaction with fully representational images and
with an intermediate emblematic mode of representation (Baines 1985: 41-
63, 277-86), created an enormously powerful complex; the best parallels
may be in Mesoamerican artistic practices (e.g., Marcus 1976c, 1992c;
Reents-Budet 1994). These features were embedded in the system of deco-
rum already mentioned.
Most of the surviving early objects that bear hieroglyphs and pictorial
representation are quite small (e.g., Adams 1974), many of them dedicated
242 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN TOFFEE

in temples that were accessible only to those qualified by office and by

induction into the cult. The larger pieces, such as royal mortuary stelae,
were set up in the desert, far from settlements, where only mortuary priests
would see them. Their communication cannot have been addressed to
people at large, or even to a large proportion of the elite. Rather, they ad-
dressed society in the widest sense, which included the gods and the dead;
their creation was a focus of elite interest and discourse; and they related to
a broader past and future. The cultural complex ofwhich they formed a cen-
tral part became self-sustaining and value laden.
The centrality of artistic forms was reinforced by the way in which they
defined the cosmos and implied its maintenance, celebrating the world's or-
der and arranging it into hierarchies in which god and king were central.
Somewhat paradoxi,cally, even the elite playa relatively modest role in early
works. This reticence may have a legitimizing force: what are most sig-
nificant are the gods, the cosmos, and the king. These essential components
can be seen as important for all of society and not just the elite, even though
the rest could not have had access to the objects that codified these concep-
tions. Probably few of them were aware of much of what the artistic hier-
archies and system of decorum implied.
The domains of early Egyptian art had a specific configuration that re-
inforced their high-cultural character. The most characteristic surviving
products from around the beginning of the dynastic period are small-scale
relief carvings, decorated ivory objects (e.g., Quibell 1900: pIs. 5 -1 7), and
stone vases (e.g., el-Khouli 1978), some of which almost constituted sculp-
ture in the round. All have precursors, even though there are gaps in the in-
ventory among types of objects that might be expected to survive, notably
high-quality, three-dimensional stone sculpture. Stone vases were comple-
mented by copper and possibly precious metal containers, of which few sur-
vive (for copper, see Emery 1949-58[I]: 18-58, pIs. 4-7).
Already in Predynastic times, stone vases, most of whose raw materials
had to be fetched by expeditions into the Eastern Desert, were vehicles of
conspicuous consumption, finished to a high level through great expendi-
tures of labor. The First Dynasty brought a vast increase in production that
must have required huge numbers of craftsmen. The sculptural qualities of
the vases (e.g., Fischer 1972) are superior to anything in other media from
the period. By the late Second Dynasty, major royal stone statuary appeared.
Apparently at a stroke, the Third Dynasty innovator Djoser buried tens of
thousands of vases from the First /Second Dynasties under his Step Pyramid,
the first such monument to be constructed; not all these deposits have even
been surveyed (Lacau and Lauer 1961- 65). Stone vases never again had the
same importance as prestige products.
The vases have been found in temples and in nonroyal and, especially,
royal tombs. The most significant indications of their function come from
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 243

inscribed examples from Djoser's monument. It is uncertain whether their

uses were also typical of the uninscribed vases, but the inscriptions show that
they were used in temple rituals. A number were inscribed with names of
phyles, elite social groups evidently involved in major rituals (Roth 1991:
145-95). They seem to have been significant artistic furnishings of struc-
tures that might otherwise appear to be culturally less important than the
mortuary monuments (but see O'Connor 1992). Some vases also could have
been destined for royal or elite ceremonial use.
Two points emerge from this example. First, genres of high-cultural ma-
terials were pervasive in all attested contexts of elite action. It is not clear
whether any of these actions involved public display of the objects, or
whether the objects were accessible only to their immediate users; temple
and tomb contexts were in any case semisecret. Such large numbers of
people participated in the manufacture of the vases, however, that their sta-
tus in the high-cultural sphere must have been well known. Second, high-
cultural genres could belong in any domain: the emphases among them
cannot be taken for granted. This genre, to which a rather wider elite prob-
ably had access in the late Predynastic period, was annexed by the small
central group. Emblematic stone vessels, whose meaning could only be
comprehended by those who knew some writing, point to the completely
high-cultural character of the whole genre; they were not marginal, and the
significance of their Predynastic precursors was transformed.
The best-known early relief sculpture is on palettes and maceheads
from the late Pre dynastic period and Dynasty 0 (c. 3200-3000 Be; Assel-
berghs 1961). The latest exemplars, the Cities and Narmer palettes and the
Scorpion and Narmer maceheads, convey nonnative values that endured
through dynastic and Greco-Roman times. Their principal organizing fea-
tures are strict register composition and the hierarchical system of decorum,
whose crucial aspect here is that it centered on representations in human
form of king and gods (often with animal heads) interacting equally, with-
out other human participation. Such scenes characterize temple relief,
which is not attested until the late Second Dynasty although it very prob-
ably existed earlier, as is suggested by parallels in the partially pictorial year
tags of the First Dynasty. The palettes and maceheads ceased to be made at
the beginning of the First Dynasty, leaving a gap in the range of "monu-
mental" genres. The finest First Dynasty stone reliefS are carvings of royal
names on royal mortuary stelae from Abydos (e.g., Lange and Hirmer
1968 : pI. 6). Rather more informative nonroyal stelae, which ranked far be-
low royal reliefs, appeared by the late First Dynasty but are artistically infe-
rior (e.g., Emery 1949-58[III]:pls. 23b, 39).
Thus, stone relief carving, which was vital in the artistic development of
central ideology, seems to have disappeared from public contexts in the First
Dynasty. The general absence of high-quality work, in contrast with the
244 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN TOFFEE

representational mastery exhibited in stone vases, cannot be due to lack of

competence; it must relate to production in lost contexts-perhaps small-
scale temple reliefS within the floodplain-or to the transfer of skills into
other media and genres. Whichever was the case, these genres were appro-
priated to the largely invisible context of decoration within temples, and
they focused on scenes of king and deities that continued to fonn the core
of the system but did not become publicly visible for 1,500 years. Artistic
skills were divided into the more public, but still high-cultural, component
of stone vases and the largely secret one of temple relief, so that hierarchies
within the supernatural and the elite were reinforced artistically, with the
gods and the king as the ultimate authority that provided the core of mean-
ing. State formation, legitimation, and hierarchization were thus played out
in art, to the shorter-tenn detriment ofits availability even to the inner elite.
Although the communicative core of high-cultural forms remained, nego-
tiation with them was thus essentially through restriction of access.
This restriction can be exemplified in writing, the most ostensibly ex-
pansive domain of high culture. Developments in writing, architecture, and
artistic style exemplify ways in which the high-cultural complex is elabo-
rated. It is typically Egyptian that the first known major changes in the writ-
ing system, in the late Second and early Third Dynasties (c. 2700 BC),
extended its use to speeches of deities to the king, as well as being used to
proclaim the king's receipt of a favor from a god on a seal inscription, and
thus do not focus on general human utility or display. Nonroyal use of con-
tinuous writing in prestige contexts did not develop significantly until the
Fourth/Fifth Dynasties (c. 2550 BC), during and after the period of maxi-
mum centralization and construction of the grandest monuments. Until
then, visual forms of very limited currency, rather than verbal ones, re-
mained the most important expressions of cuitural values.
These developments share with wider historical processes the character-
istic of being "punctuated" changes identifiahle in subtle high-cultural shifts
such as the status of stone vases, as well as in grosser features. In the complex
of high culture, superficially minor changes or innovations can be pro-
foundly important. Limitations we may discern in the initial complex, such
as the absence of continuous written language or of topographical rendering
in pictorial representation, may not then have appeared as such. The com-
plex as it was must have been adequate for the demands placed upon it, since
it received the enonnous material and cultural investment required for its
maintenance (arguments in Cooper 1989 and Michalowski 1994 touch on
this point for Mesopotamia).
The way in which developments appear to mirror change in power rela-
tions, and to document the maneuvers of different interest groups, is probably
too neat, because the integrated artistic system acquired its own momentum
and detailed execution was in the hands of sub elites rather than central elites.
 ORDER. LEGITIMACY. AND WEALTH I 245

Nonetheless, the high-cultural complex was so important that the main elite
must have participated in changes.
The general development of the First-Fourth Dynasties was toward ever
more extravagant and elaborate monuments for the king and for a dimin-
ishing proportion of the inner elite. There is a striking contrast between the
extensive and widespread cemeteries of the First/Second Dynasties and the
central Fourth Dynasty, when almost all major tombs were at Giza, sur-
rounding the king's massive pyramid (for a provincial exception see Garstang
1904).
The Giza tombs were broadly separated into two groups. The highest-
ranking tombs were sited between the Nile Valley, on the east, and the Great
Pyramid, while the slighdy less prestigious were sited to the west of the
pyramid (e.g., Dunham and Simpson 1974-80). All were massive and, for
the first time, constructed in stone, and they partook in a grandiose under-
taking that projected elite hierarchies into the next world. The secondary,
western group lacked public decoration and, thus, marked a step back from
the finest tombs of the previous generation. The concealed stelae and sculp-
tured heads found in the tombs (e.g., Smith 1949:pls. 5-9, 32) show that
art of the highest quality was available to these people (see also Russmann
1995: 118). Even though relief decoration may not have been carved in ear-
lier tombs of the same status-which belonged to extremely few people-
its absence in these Giza tombs constituted a severe restriction of choice in
the context of a generally increased potential of writing and an existing dec-
orative repertory. This restriction conveyed in high-cultural terms the ap-
propriation of all major symbolic means to the king and his immediate
group, most of whom were members ofhis family. It also may have related
to a wider use of such media in lost temple contexts. An aesthetic aspect of
the development is visible in the contrast between the full decoration of the
temple of Snofru at Dahshur (Fakhry 1961) and the remarkably austere and
abstract style of the Second Pyramid complex of Reckha ef (Khephren) at
C

Giza (e.g., Arnold 1992: 198 - 202; Baines 1994: 77 -78).

This development was reversed by the end of the Fourth Dynasty, and
more clearly in the early Fifth, when both royal and nonroyal monuments
became smaller but richly decorated, and the beginnings of a nonroyal "lit-
erature" appeared in the form of inscriptions in elite tombs containing ex-
tended titularies and brief narrative passages (Baines 1998). This change was
political as well as cultural. A narrative preserved in a literary work from
a millennium later implies that the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth
Dynasty had the sanction of the sun god Re', the principal deity, and was
in some sense subversive (Lichtheim 1973:217-22). Yet both dynasties
accorded Re' great prominence, and an explanation in such terms does not
appear evident. Rather, there may have been struggles between elite groups
that mildly disfavored the kingship, which never again had quite the same
246 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

control of symbolic and material resources, and favored a strongly en-

trenched elite that was not closely bound to the king by kinship. This de-
velopment restricted the role of the royal family, while probably enlarging
the general ruling group. A crucial point of contention appears thus to have
been the restriction of display and high-cultural resources. Those associated
with the Fifth Dynasty spread these resources a little more widely, at least in
semipublic display on the monuments.
The broader society did not participate to any great extent in such tran-
sitions; rather, high-cultural resources were exploited both for their own
sake and for their political potential. The nature of the material at issue is
also significant: the eventual development toward a more widespread liter-
ate high culture was very difficult to reverse. No later reversal comparable
with the progressive restriction of the far less literate First-Fourth Dynas-
ties is known, although there was much variation; the indigenous temple
culture of the Greco-Roman period, which was significant in many ways for
the whole country, was accessible only to tiny numbers.
As before, those outside the inner elite appear not to have had a
significant historical role. What becomes visible is the existence of different
factions within the elite; one of these factions evidently offered benefits to
somewhat more people than did the tiny central group of the Fourth Dy-
nasty. Later in the Old Kingdom people exploited their old and secret reli-
gious knowledge in the play of status (Baines 1988b), again indicating a
diversity in the inner elite, which was then probably larger, if not wealthier.
Such displays, which rely upon shared high-cultural values, are part of the
currency of status competition in all ancient states. .
In Mesopotamia, writing lies perhaps still more at the heart of high cul-
ture than it does in Egypt. Mesopotamian high culture crystallized at about
the time of the fonnation of the first city-states, but its raison d'etre cannot
be explained simply as part of the political and social transfonnations of the
Uruk period (Yoffee 1993b: 64-68, 1995). Writing was from the start con-
cerned not only with economic recording but also with the re-creation and
standardization of Mesopotamian cultural "encyclopedism"-the descrip-
tion and systematization of titles ofpeople and things that became part of the
high-cultural complex. Although writing as a semiotic system was invented
in the late Uruk period (Boltz 1994; Michalowski 1990, 1993b), and "lexi-
cal lists" appear among the first tablets (Englund, Nissen, and Damerow
1993) and were used as part of the scribal curriculum, Sumerian writing did
not achieve much standardization until the mid-third millennium Be. It is
remarkable that such standardization owed little to political developments,
since the early third millennium was a time of endemic warfare among city-
states. It was in a multilingual environment of independent city-states that
systems of measurement and mathematical notation became regularized
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 247

(Friberg 1978-79; Powell 1989-90); indeed, it was because of the need

to write Akkadian names that the Sumerian script became increasingly
phoneticized.
Emblematic of the formalization of systems of communication and edu-
cation across independent polities is a particular corpus of cylinder seals
(mainly attested in the form of sealings), called "city seals." Their decora-
tion, which consists mainly of the names of city-states, has been interpreted
in various ways. Jacobsen (1957) thought the names implied an early Sumer-
ian "amphictyony" (Hallo 1960), a league of cities bound together as a com-
munity of worshipers. Wright (1969), Nissen (1988), Matthews (1993), and
Michalowski (1993c) consider the cities listed to document trade routes-
the seals to have been applied to vessels whose movement and storage were
thus charted. Another view holds that the names on the seals do not reflect
either a political grouping or an economic purpose, but are signs whose
playful combinations were charged with symbolic meaning (Yoffee 1993c,
1995b). It is suggested that the names of cities are written not with some
functional goal in mind but as a metalinguistic reflection of the cultural
interaction that also included the process of linguistic standardization that
was occurring in the Early Dynastic period.
For Mesopotamianists, more emphasis has always been placed on the lin-
guistic than the artistic in the preserved Mesopotamian record. This appar-
ent dominance may depend to a considerable extent on the media used in
ancient art, many of which are poorly preserved in tells; nevertheless, the
"limited" character of Mesopotamian art (porada 1979) is easily contrasted
with the far more extensive artistic record from Egypt. Egyptian high-
cultural forms that found material expression were primarily mixed visual-
verbal. In contrast, Mesopotamian ones were more strongly verbal. Although
even this weak generalization breaks down if one reviews evidence for, and
scholarship of, the first-millennium states, we concentrate on the high-
cultural complex as it can be read in the cuneiform sources.
Whereas some Mesopotamian texts-for example, private letters-re-
late to informal speech, most tablets are administrative or private records or
school texts. Indeed, the formal education required for scribal proficiency
(Civil 1992; Sjoberg 1975) included belletristic compositions, lexical lists
(lists of gods, official titles, vocabularies), ritual texts, and other compendia
(Civil 1975) that Oppenheim (1977) and Machinist (1986) have called the
"stream of tradition." While the nature of the "canon" (a term perhaps mis-
appropriated from biblical studies but in wide use) changed over time, it is
significant that such texts were consciously collected, edited, commented
upon, and copied to the end of Mesopotamian civilization (Falkenstein
1951, 1953; Hallo 1962, 1963; Lambert 1957; Michalowski 1993c).
As the context of the scribal schools themselves changed from the Old
Babylonian period (early second millennium), when "school texts" are
248 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

found in private houses (Charpin 1986), to the first millennium, when pri-
vate libraries were owned by priests (parpola 1983) and schools were affili-
ated with temples, so the context of the texts themselves changed. For
example, epic compositions of the early second millennium such as "Atra-
basis," which contains a creation story, were part of a ritual in the first mil-
lennium, when the text was used to cure barren women (Lambert and
Millard 1969). Although social and economic records and certain corre-
spondence (especially in the Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian periods,
when the writing system was the simplest; Larsen 1987b:219-20) were
written at the behest of elites, the art of writing was inaccessible to the
population at large. Written texts spoke to other written texts, and a high-
cultural corpus of written matter reinforced the separateness of the inner
elite and scribal class. Although scribes themselves did not often achieve the
status of elites, they were themselves not independent of the institutions of
palaces and temples and never became semiautonomous guilds of literati, as
Hsu (1988) describes for Han China. As in Egypt, some written texts faced
walls or were placed in mountain aeries: these impediments to sight, how-
ever, mattered little to the intended divine readership.
Again as in Egypt, high culture was mobilized in, and formed a leading
part of, major political and cultural changes. It is a commonplace in Meso-
potamian scholarship to note that Sumerian texts were learned well after the
time when Sumerian was actually spoken (c. 2000 Be), and indeed until the
end of Mesopotamian civilization. This continuity of an aspect of high cul-
ture illustrates well the power of the textually denoted Mesopotamian dis-
course community (Cooper 1993). By this term, at least for Mesopotamia,
we obviously do not mean the vast majority of Mesopotamians, who could
neither write nor understand the arcane language of belles lettres, religious
texts, or royal pronouncements. Rather, it was the inner elite (and their
scribal dependents) who sponsored and reproduced the texts that delineated
the hierarchies composing the world and defined the critical roles of rulers
and gods. There were, however, enormous changes in political systems
throughout Mesopotamian history, and it was the role of high culture to be
flexible enough to legitimize and naturalize those changes.
In the middle and late third millennium, official writing systems changed
at least twice. With the conquest of the House ofAkkade, Akkadian became
the normal language of the administration, and scribes /bureaucrats were
trained in new ways in Akkadian as well as Sumerian. In the Ur III period,
Sumerian was again the language of the bureaucracy, and scribal schools
were reoriented in the new imperial structure (Cooper 1973; Michalowski
1987). Ur III rulers, however, sought to depict themselves as descendants
from the heroic past, avowing their kinship with Gilgamesh and other kings
oflegend from the city ofUruk. In scribal schools, as well as in the inculca-
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 249

tion of new administrative language, tales of these kings were copied and / or
composed. High culture was thus manipulated in order to legitimize new
kings, a new bureaucracy, and new imperial rule.
In the second millennium BC, after the fall of the Third Dynasty ofUr,
the governments of city-states in Mesopotamia were progressively seized by
Amorite leaders, and the number ofAmorite personal names in the texts also
increased. By the end of the seventeenth century BC, one royal edict de-
scribes the population of Babylonia as "Amorites and Akkadeians" (Kraus
1984). Naturally, scholars (beginning with Clay 1909) have sought to iden-
tify Amorite social institutions and systems of beliefS that ought to accom-
pany these political and demographic changes. However, ascriptions of new
levels of private enterprise as a reflection of the business mentality of Semites
(pettinato 1971)-whatever that might be-or new marriage customs de-
riving from a tribal past (Falkenstein 1956 -57) are oddly juxtaposed against
the absence of any texts written in Amorite. Indeed, it is the lack of large-
scale culture change in early second-millennium Mesopotamia, other than
those economic and social changes that can be accounted for as internal his-
torical developments (Yoffee 1995b), that can be explained as a conscious
policy of the new rulers of Mesopotamian city-states.
Seizing political power in city-states, Amorite leaders contested not only
with local elites but also with other Amorite elites. One mechanism that ad-
vantaged Amorite leaders was their ability to mobilize support across the
countryside, that is, beyond the borders of the autonomous city-states. In a
letter from the king ofUruk to the king of Babylon, the former appeals for
help against enemies because the kings of Uruk and Babylon are of "one
house" (Falkenstein 1963: 56), presumably of one particular Amorite group
(the Amnanum Amorites). These Amorite rulers, having successfully gained
power in Mesopotamian city-states, made sure that Mesopotamian high cul-
ture was reproduced faithfully. The Akkadian language of Hammurabi of
Babylon (descendant of the same Amorite ruler of Babylon mentioned in
the letter cited above from a king ofUruk) , as embodied in his "Law Code,"
is regarded to this day as a classical text to be assigned to first-year Akkadian
students; most of the Sumerian poetic compositions that were presumably
composed in the late third millennium are known from schoolboy copies
discarded in Nippur and Ur in the Old Babylonian period.
After the collapse of the Old Babylonian order in the mid-second mil-
lennium, the Kassites, who spoke a non-Semitic language (an isolate, pos-
sibly evolved in remote valleys in the Zagros Mountains), established a new
dynasty in Babylonia. Their family structure, composed of landholding
lineages (Brinkman 1980), seems distinctive in this period. The kudurrus
(boundary stones) of the Kassite period are similarly distinctive, and the Kas-
sites were endogamous (Maidman 1984). Yet the literary and high-cultural
250 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

corpus of the period is traditionally Mesopotamian. Inscriptions on cylinder

seals are written in Sumerian (Limet 1971), and the great scribal guilds of
the first millennium traced their origins back to the Kassite period rather
than to earlier times (Lambert 1957). The "author" of the late version of the
Gilgamesh epic lived and worked under the patronage of Kassite kings.
In the last days of the Neo-Assyrian period (late eighth century BC),
when the population of Assyria included many thousands of subjects who
had been forcibly resettled, especially from the Levant (Oded 1979), and the
language of the Assyrian empire was becoming progressively Aramaicized,
the Assyrian warrior kings appealed increasingly to venerable Mesopotamian
cultural traditions. In a famous example, Assurbanipal, the last great Assyr-
ian king, was obsessed with collecting all possible texts from Babylonia, in-
cluding those arcane ritual texts that were incomprehensible to Assyrian
kings, citizens, and subjects alike (Machinist 1984/85). Similarly, in the
sixth-century-Bc Neo-Babylonian empire, kings like Nebuchadnezzar and
Nabonidus faithfully emulated the styles of Babylonian kings who ruled
more than a millennium earlier and launched "archaeological" expeditions
to recover their Mesopotamian past (Beaulieu 1989).
The composition of the Enuma elis, the "Babylonian Epic of Creation,"
represents a major change in Mesopotamian religion. Although one still
finds arguments that the work was written in the Old Babylonian period
(e.g., Dalley 1989:228-30), none of the manuscripts dates before about
1000 BC. Lambert's argument (1964) that it was the return of the statue of
Marduk to Babylon at that time from Elamite captivity that provided the in-
spiration for the text remains plausible. The text's major point is, of course,
not the creation of the world, but the accession of Marduk as paramount
among the gods. Threatened by primordial monsters, the fearful gods give a
tremendous banquet, become drunk, and, after witnessing the performance
of a magic trick, sign over to Marduk the supremacy of the universe. Other
texts imply that the personalities and powers of all the gods are now simply
parts of the ineffable nature of Marduk (Sommerfeld 1987-90).
Through this movement toward henotheism (or perhaps monotheism),
Marduk (Bel) became the most important divinity in the Babylonian pan-
theon. This religious change, however, was cast in the most conserva-
tive possible terms, squarely within the high culture of Mesopotamia. The
Enuma elis borrowed its motif of a god competing with monsters from much
older Sumerian compositions, especially the contests of the dragon-fighter
Ninurta (Lambert 1986; Machinist 1992). Whereas a former generation
(Kramer 1944) thought that all Mesopotamian literary compositions ulti-
mately went back to Sumerian prototypes, the reason why such older mo-
tifS were used in the Enuma elis was precisely to cast religious change within
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I lSI

the idiom of high-cultural conservatism. The very unoriginality of the

poem's structure, and its ultimate mid-first-millennium raison d'etre as part
of the New Year ceremonies, suggest that those who composed it were try-
ing to achieve the maximum Mesopotamian orthodoxy for their new theo-
logical doctrines.
Ethnic groups in Mesopotamia, far from fractionalizing Mesopotamian
high culture, served to promote it and safeguard it (Yoffee 1988b). Precisely
by appealing to high culture, new political elites could legitimize their par-
ticipation and leadership in Mesopotamian society. Even large-scale theo-
logical change represented no challenge to the high culture, but could be
molded as part of it.
Examples of the significance of high culture, of the concept's analytic
utility, and of its application to various contexts could be multiplied. Those
we have chosen are intended to illuminate comparisons and differences be-
tween Mesopotamia and Egypt, especially by marking differences in the ma-
nipulation and reproduction of a textual "canon" in the former and the
salience of visual modes in the latter. It is worth citing one further case that
exemplifies points we have been arguing.
In Middle Kingdom Egypt (early second millennium) belles lettres were
introduced and a retrospective golden age of civilization was created and
sited in the Old Kingdom (e.g. Baines 1989a: 135-38). The late Old King-
dom was the artistic point of departure, whereas belles lettres looked to the
reign ofSnofru, its first great king, and to famous names of the period as wise
men (HeIck 1972). Perhaps a little later, works that fictionalized more re-
cent times were composed. None of this literature was "popular"; it was
written within the" elite for the elite (see McDowell 1992b for a later, slightly
more "popular" local perspective on the past).
In Mesopotamia, too, Dr III kings looked back to Early Dynastic heroes,
and Old Babylonian scribes copied panegyrics to the Dr III kings. For
Mesopotamia the existence of a "popular" literature is also debatable. While
"wisdom texts" (Gadd 1963; Lambert 1960) presumably reflect aspects of
daily life and occasional street language, most of the texts use rare words, ar-
cane grammar, and difficult signs that were accessible only to scribes.

Summary: High Culture

In brief: several distinctive features of change in high culture have been
noted here. First, novelty legitimized itself not as something new but by its
creative negotiation of an older, putatively timeless tradition (the "revolu-
tion" of Akhenaten in Egypt is the major exception; Baines 1997b). In-
vented traditions are archaeologicaIly recoverable because they are sustained
through visual forms that afford, among other things, the periodization and
252 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

objectification that archaeologists mark in the material record. Such tradi-

tions are made feasible by writing and material high culture, which recur-
sively enhance their meaning and which can be shaped by inner elites. In the
cases we have chosen, then, change is particularly warranted in times when
new political leadership requires stabilization and legitimation.
Major innovations in high culture were fundamentally important for the
self-image of Egyptian civilization; later times looked to the Middle King-
dom as the "classical" epoch. Despite the continuing significance of the vi-
sual arts, the clearest later focus of this classicism was language and literature,
so that the Middle Kingdom reforms of written language and genre acquired
a retrospective conservatism that protected the continuity of Egyptian self-
definition. In Mesopotamia, scribes in Hellenistic and later times were
doggedly half-learning languages and textual traditions that were of little
meaning or importance to anyone but themselves. Singing the praises of an-
tediluvian sages (Klochkov 1982; Reiner 1961), they appealed to a tradition
that now was totally divorced from any inner elite or high culture and was
soon to disappear even from that marginal condition.

CONCLUSION: COMPARISONS,
CONTRASTS, COLLAPSES
Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth: Coda
In this comparison of Egypt and Mesopotamia, we have attempted to delin-
eate some critical institutions of these civilizations and to investigate what
made these civilizations distinctive and what allows them to be compared.
We have devoted little space to origins. In conclusion, we review our find-
ings and consider still more briefly the collapse of the civilizations.
In the rapid crystallization of states in both regions, we see the rise of a
new kind of order that reformulated the cosmos so that a new form oflead-
ership and the principle of hierarchization were proper to the continuance
of that cosmos. In all aspects, from the material and economic to the reli-
gious, the institutionalization, continuance, and, on occasion, expansion of
the new order are the essential tasks of the leaders.
Although this ideological principle of order evolves or is invented in
both civilizations, in Egypt the cosmos is firmly connected to one head of
state and one organized system of values and beliefS; office and values are in-
extricably linked. Even the much discussed diversity of such conceptions as
creation myths proves to apply principally to later periods (Bickel 1994).
The manifestations of values and beliefS, which in the archaeological record
begin with artistic forms, spread very slowly to extensive verbal forms and
to texts of the type known from many civilizations (but are hardly preserved,
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 253

for example, from Mesoamerica) as transmitting central concerns; the artis-

tic forms are maintained for as long as the civilization.
In Mesopotamia there was no single political system, but a strong cul-
tural sense of unity was manifest in the material culture and in standardized
language and school curriculum. In part,. this order was originally imposed
because of the necessity to keep track of people and commodities, which is
the logical outcome of trajectories toward differentiated societies that result
in centralized administrative institutions. Nevertheless, the early trends to-
ward standardization of written expression across separate and independent
city-states and the counterfactual conception (especially vivid in the Sumer-
ian King List) that there should be political unity in the land bespeak the ex-
istence of an overarching cultural sphere of interaction (Yoffee 1993a) that
cannot be reduced to economics.
Order is more than a political necessity. It is the logic of a new way of
thinking about society and about the cosmos, one that justifies the associa-
tion of people who are not kin, especially those in the service of the inner
elite, and establishes the principle of stratification and of limited access to
wealth. Insofar as order itself creates a "natural" progression toward in-
creased order, complexity, and hierarchy, especially in its high-cultural man-
ifestations, it must exploit wealth for this self-enhancement; it cannot be
generalized to everyone.
Wealth, together with its restriction to certain groups, is one of the most
obvious facts of civilization. The acceptance of agreed measures of wealth
and the creation of storable and to some extent convertible forms of it trans-
form its social potential. The move toward imperishable forms is especially
significant, even if fashion may bring an opposite effect by devaluing the
wealth of the recent past. Wealth is displayed, and such displays require fur-
ther stratification because it is obtained through the labor of others, from
networks in which the negotiants are not kin, or from organizing the pro-
curement of materials, some of them from remote regions, on a scale not
feasible for kin groups alone. Wealth therefore requires new codes of com-
munication that establish the ability to trade with foreigners and connect
these distant people in a community of interests. Such activities assume a
scale and importance hardly seen outside complex societies. "Interaction
spheres" in the archaeological literature usually denote such elements of elite
negotiation that interconnect people and regions above any conunonality in
ethnicity, language, or politics. Alternatively, wealth may involve "raiding"
on a scale that is feasible only if highly unequal relations can be imposed
on surrounding groups. In either case, civilizations contend in their search
for wealth with other groups whose values and organization may be quite
different from their own. In doing so, they must achieve more than a simple
254 'JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

material domination; in ambivalent fashion, they must moderate and en-

hance their comprehension of those with whom they deal, assigning nega-
tive values to the world defined as outside and thus further limiting access to
their own values.
The internal elaboration of order and its exploitation of and expression
through wealth involve significant legitimation. The ruling elite must return
benefits to the rest and to posterity. This return is made in matters of war
and defense, economic security, and legal procedures, but above all in per-
petuating the cultural patterns that establish and maintain order. These pat-
terns include sacred rites, which may sometimes be the irreducible focus of
elite activities, but they also extend to the entire high-cultural complex
within which the rites have meaning. Kings and rulers must show their con-
cern with the whole population by promulgating "laws" and edicts that pre-
sent such concerns and by staging events in which spectacle and ceremony
define the state's role. Through the common definition and labor of ruler
and ruled, the arenas of temple, palace, city, and country in which the rul-
ing elite act out their role, their concerns, and their privileges are con-
structed as interlocking representations and enactments of the cosmos and its
maintenance. All these activities emphasize the dispersive ties between ruler
and ruled, interweaving order, wealth, and legitimacy into the civilization's
fabric. What they do not do is enact any legitimizing requirement that the
elite redistribute the wealth created by order throughout society.

State and Civilization

We have insisted on the utility of employing the term "state" in the sense it
took on in the European Renaissance: as the central, governing institution
and social form in a differentiated, stratified society in which rank and sta-
tus are only partly detennined through kinship. We use "civilization" to de-
note the overarching social order in which state governance exists and is
legitimized. As such, civilization includes the possibility of social resistance
from groups both apart from and within the elite, since all participate in a
community of interests within the civilization. Cohesive tendencies, disrup-
tive tensions, and enduring continuities were played out in different ways in
our two cases.
Although we have hardly discussed nonurban folk, peasants, and the na-
ture of dependency, or kinship and how it is affected through time (Adams
1978), we have attempted to assess both centripetal tendencies and modes of
local authority through assemblies and provincial and supraprovincial group-
ings. If we have dwelt less on the differential access to agricultural property
than on the power that accrues through control of knowledge and values,
that is because there has been far more study of obvious matters of political
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 255

control and economic differentiation in ancient states than of what mattered

most to those who led and motivated those states: cosmologies. It is a relief
that some colleagues who study New World civilizations also have come to
this conclusion (e.g., Demarest and Conrad 1992).
Mesopotamian states, which used to be considered centralized and stable
or totalitarian monarchies (depending on the politics of the observer), are
now regarded as inherently decomposable, incapable of instituting a region-
wide fonn of administration. They sowed the seeds of dynastic destruction
in the very act of conquest. It is suspected that ideals of Mesopotamian po-
litical unity and claims to control foreign territory are mainly attempts
to justify ephemeral conquest and political rhetoric (e.g., Liverani 1993;
Michalowski 1993a). The cultural ideals of a single civilization (as opposed
to state), while easily incorporating diverse ethnic groups, languages, and so-
cial strata, could not be converted effectively to political ends. Separating
political ideologies from cultural ones may at times seem odd to an onlooker
from a large nation-state, but that seems precisely to have been the case in
Mesopotamia. It would probably seem more natural to an inhabitant of pre-
1870 Italy or Germany.
The Egyptian case differs from the Mesopotamian. Egyptian ideology
focused on one or two centers, the administrative and religious capitals that
were sometimes the same and sometimes not, and strongly on the frontier,
especially to the south, which was in Egyptian terms the "front" (posener
1965). The ultimate defining concern was with the dualities of Egypt and
with what was within the Egyptian world and what was not. This interest
in demarcations and boundaries that responded to the Egyptian environ-
ment was elevated into a general principle, powerfully visible in the archi-
tecture and iconography of temples (e.g., Arnold 1992:40-44; Baines
1997a; Winter 1968). Temples fonned microcosms, enacting and symboli-
cally encapsulating in nested layers a model of the order they defended and
celebrated. The city around them could give that model enonnous extra
resonance (Kozloff, Bryan, and Berman 1992; O'Connor 1998). Each ma-
jor temple, while following a similar architectural and cosmological model,
was dedicated to a different group of deities, so that gods encompassed the
land. Yet, just as the model of the temple dominated the diversity of gods,
so the centralizing impetus dominated tendencies to regional variety (see
Seidlmayer 1996 for administration, Bickel 1994 for ideas). As we have
noted, Mesopotamian civilization, with its lack of sharp, permanent, inter-
nal boundaries and manifold interactions and interdependencies with the
surrounding regions, was vastly influential as a totality throughout the an-
cient Near East, whereas Egyptian civilization, like Egyptian script and lan-
guage, was far less disseminated except farther up the Nile.
256 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

The Collapse of Egyptian and Mesopotamian Civilizations

While the difference between the convergence of state and civilization in
Egypt and their extreme divergence in Mesopotamia is enormous, it is the
commonality of an active inner elite that defines these civilizations (perhaps
all civilizations) as such. Another way of shedding light on their role is to
look to periods of dissolution.
We suggest that political and economic change are not the decisive forces
that detennine dissolution and collapse. Here, we restrict our discussion to
a single fundamental point: as we hope to show, it is the eclipse of the
Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmologies, and especially the subscription to
them by elites, that defines collapse.
If alternative value systems were present in these civilizations, they were
so weak that they neither had a major effect nor are visible archaeologically.
In Mesopotamia even the most radical changes, in ruling groups and in re-
ligious orientations, did not take the form of systematic challenges to the
core values of venerable traditions, but instead used such traditions to cloak
and to legitimize change. However, after the conquest of Cyrus the Great in
539 BC, when new rulers accepted all possible belief systems as legitimate and
deprivileged the Mesopotamian tradition from its connection with govern-
ment and especially the bureaucracy and those contracting with it, Meso-
potamian culture became progressively attenuated. Ultimately, only a few
temples maintained it, and finally none. Mesopotamian civilization thus col-
lapsed hundreds of years after the Mesopotamian state (see Yoffee 1988b).
Some reasons for the withering of Mesopotamian high culture and de-
composition of the inner elite may have had less to do with political conquest
by others. As Larsen (1992) has discussed, in a number of first-millennium-Bc
"wisdom literature" texts (Lambert 1960), it is the very orderliness of the
universe that is in jeopardy. In a world in which any action or feature of the
universe can and must be interpreted for the ruling elite, especially through
the skill of the divination priests, uncertainty and even nihilism now became
evident (Jacobsen 1976:226-39). Although it is unclear how much these
learned texts reflect public feeling, it would require undue skepticism to
propose that such emotions were felt only by scribes. No breakthrough to
moral systems that would replace ceremonial ones, rationality that would
supplant magic, or transcendental philosophies appearing next to state reli-
gions occurred (Garelli 1975; Machinist 1986; Oppenheim 1975; Tadmor
1986). The world had changed and Mesopotamian high culture, which had
endured for minimally 3,000 years, could not.
The Egyptian case offers a clear ancient outsider's perspective on what
mattered to a civilization (e.g., Bowman 1996). The Macedonian and Ptole-
maic dynasties (332-30 BC) were culturally alien to Egypt, and in some re-
spects lacked cultural self-assurance. They sought such assurance principally
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 257

in the Hellenic world, but within Egypt the kings worked through the tra-
ditional elites, temples, and general cultural forms. The Greco-Roman pe-
riod saw the greatest expansion of high culture in the numerous large and
small temples constructed throughout Egypt and Lower Nubia (e.g., Arnold
1992), and for Ptolemaic times in widespread artistic and literary produc-
tion. This cultural provincialization-since native culture was not strongly
represented in the capital Alexandria, and Hellenistic culture was in second
position outside it-had a partially leveling effect, because the entire native
population could be set as provincials against the Greek incomers. There also
was broad religious participation of a kind poorly attested from earlier times.
Yet the main temples were even more elite products than their predecessors,
with inscriptions carved in an arcane elaboration of the script that few could
read. In relation to central patronage, it is characteristic of this development
that the peak of temple construction in the south-financed by the ruler,
not the local population-was around the time of the Roman conqueror
Augustus (30 BC-AD 14). The Ptolemies and the Roman emperors made
Greek the official language, and the Romans suppressed the traditional elite
politically, but they had to use the core symbolic forms of the ancient civi-
lization (it is said that only Cleopatra VII [51-30 BC] ever learned Egyptian,
but also that she learned a host of other languages).
If we are not to follow Voltaire's Brahman interlocutor (see Miiller-
Wollermann 1986: 1) and say that Egyptian civilization died because it had
lived, it is difficult to explain its demise and inappropriate to attrIbute this to
any single cause. So far as one can speak: of demise, the notion that a civi-
lization is an interconnected entity remains valid. While the world within
the temples never accepted the Ptolemies as fully as it had accepted native
kings (Quaegebeur 1989; Winter 1976), the changes imposed by the new
rulers were not irreversible and are insufficient to have set the scene for dis-
solution. What seem more serious are the disappearance of a wealthy native
elite in early Roman times, reduced integration of the temple high culture
into local communities (Baines 1997a), and the difficulties of the Roman
Empire in the late second and third centuries AD, which led to a worsening
of general conditions (Bagnall 1993). This was when Christianity began to
spread, being taken up in Egypt by both the elite and others (Frankfurter
1998). At this point, a reversal of interests is very suggestive. Although tra-
ditional Egyptian religion maintained a hold in the extreme south into the
mid-sixth century, when pagan cults had already been suppressed in the em-
pire, Christianity gained ground by accompanying a revival of the Egyptian
language written in Greek letters (now known as Coptic) and was thus
both a religious and a cultural rallying point for Egypt against the foreign
rule that was now almost a millennium old. Thus, Egyptian civilization was
long able to maintain itself in the face of foreign rule through its focus on
258 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

the high-cultural concerns of religion. It was a new religion that provided

some renewal, but in the idiom of a successor civilization.
These continuities and transformations-which focus on high culture
even though Christianity aimed to reach more widely than its predecessor
religion-appear far more significant in the long term than the vagaries of
political and economic life. Egyptian high-cultural evidence also supports
this view. In the religious ferment oflate antiquity, numerous Gnostic, Her-
metic, and related texts were composed in Egypt (mainly in Greek). Some
of them eloquently formulated the connection between the maintenance of
traditional culture and of what they saw as Egypt, turning to apocalypticism
in presenting what would happen when the cult ceased to be observed
(Fowden 1986). These developments were influential even among elites in
very remote communities, as is documented by new finds in Dakhla Oasis.
Some of these ideas can be traced in Ptolemaic Egyptian texts (Derchain
1990: 25 - 28). Here again, the same preoccupations of ancient elites are at
the fore.

Civilizations of the Ancient Near East and Ancient Civilizations

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that these two civilizations, emerging at
roughly the same time and with some mutual contact at crucial stages, offer
no justification for any concept of a unitary "civilization of the ancient Near
East" (C£ the title of Sasson 1995). The two civilizations are profoundly dif-
ferent in mode of emergence, shape, nature of kingship, and avenues of re-
sistance and change. In these differences we have found certain analytical
concepts useful, notably that of an "inner elite" that provides an "order" to
the civilizations, exploiting wealth and aspiring to be self-legitimizing
through its role as the carrier of the civilization.
Even though our approach derives from thinking about the ancient Near
East, we have formulated our initial statements on this point in an abstract,
quasi-axiomatic form. This is deliberate, not because we can claim to have
established patterns for, or still less studied, the whole possibly relevant range
of civilizations, but because the enterprise of comparison may be served by
a model that can, we hope, be assessed against other material, among which
early China offers an obvious possibility (e.g., Schwartz 1985: 1-55). We
have alluded to modern civilizations that could not be described adequately
in such tenns; Classical Greece is another society with a different orienta-
tion, as probably are most major empires. Yet even in such cases, the posi-
tions of elites and the role they allot to high culture and to wealth may offer
important elements of comparison.
In view of the central significance we give to cosmologies, an obvious
point should be made, even though its role in distinguishing our cases
from others is uncertain. In civilizations with autochthonous character that
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH I 259

looked to no outside influence for their formation (whether such influence

played a part or not), the ideologies ofEgypt and Mesopotamia did not need
to come to terms with a cosmology that would relativize their own presence
as one society among many that could not claim global centrality. Many
other states and civilizations-not just those that are often seen, follow-
ing Karl]aspers, as being on the other side ofan "Axial Age" divide (e.g.,
Assmann 1990; Eisenstadt, ed. 1986)-are secondary in that they relate to
an older civilization of the same general type and region. Yet the lesson of
other examples seems to be that in this area elites and whole cultures can in-
corporate an overarching ideology and still have a local focus or a "galactic,"
regional one; the Buddhist and Hindu polities of India and Southeast Asia
studied by Tambiah (1976; see also Geertz 1980) illustrate this phenomenon
(for the ancient Near East see Liverani 1990:33-78). Universalism may be
valuable for aspiring world empires, but otherwise it is something states and
civilizations find uncomfortable, not least, perhaps, because it sits uneasily
with the high culture of a particular civilization.
The principles we have outlined are not recipes for analysis, but they do
allow certain kinds of comparisons to be pursued beyond the cases we have
studied. We would ask, for example, what Mayanists may think is compara-
ble to Egypt in the realm of an encompassing royal ideology that orders the
universe. In Maya civilization, despite the prominence of the role of rulers,
one finds no overall political state like that of Egypt; rather, in the political
dimension, the Maya city-states (large and small, hegemonic and resisting
hegemony) resemble the Mesopotamian ones-independent and fated to
military and other rivalry under the belief that there should be one order
that hinds them all.
While we conclude that Egypt and Mesopotamia differed profoundly in
their political and cultural organization, we wish to reaffirm strongly the
value of the act of comparison. Through comparison we see exemplified
what is unique in a civilization, why what works in one state does not work
in another, and what is the more general shape of a civilization. We believe
that "shape" and "style," although nebulous and hard to define, are vital to
the actors, operating at deep levels and in the focused concerns of elites. We,
too, apprehend them in our objects of study and wish to render them ac-
cessible. Contrasts allow such characteristics to emerge for analysis. Finding
contrasts among ancient states and civilizations, therefore, is an enterprise
that suggests more comparison is warranted, not less.

NOTES
We are grateful to Jeremy Black, Marianne Eaton-Krauss, GeoffEmberling, and Andrea
McDowell for commenting on drafts, and to Alan Bowman, John Davis, and, especially,
Geoff EmberIing, for patching holes. John Baines's initial formulation of the ideas on
260 I JOHN BAINES AND NORMAN YOFFEE

high culture was presented in a lecture to the School of American Research, Santa Fe, in
April 1992. Norman Yoffee wishes to acknowledge the NEH fellowship that enabled
him to be a resident scholar at the School of American Research, 1991-92, when this
essay first took shape.

This essay is argued principally on a theoretical level. In the frequent absence of synthe-
ses, the argument could not be supported with references without extending the bibli-
ography beyond reasonable· bounds. Citations are selective; where possible, we have
chosen items that lead to additional material.· Our text was composed in 1992 for the
seminar at the School of American Research and revised for publication in 1993. Since
then we have not extended the number of citations significantly.
 ORDER, LEGITIMACY, AND WEALTH: REFERENCES % 1

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