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Outline
-introduction
Priests can become kings or kingmakers
Conquerors can become kings
Herders of cattle can become herders of farmers
Sometimes all the exits are blocked
War chiefs can become kings when the country is under attack
Conclusion
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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To find out how states were created, I read Origins of the State and Civilization by Elman Service. It summarizes what anthropologists have written about some of the last primitive cultures to acquire states: Zulus, Ankoles, Nupes, and Ashantis in Africa; the Cherokees in North America; and the Polynesians in Hawaii, Tahiti, and Tonga. It also describes what the experts know or surmise about the origins of the earliest civilizations in Mesoamerica, Peru, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, and China. As it turns out, a primary state (as opposed to a state that replaces an existing state) can arise in several different ways.

Of the eight recently developed primary states, six were created by conquest (but one of these was overthrown and replaced by a secondary state created by the leaders of the rebellion), one was created to mitigate disputes with foreign settlers, and one (Tonga) evolved endogenously from a theocratic chiefdom. In the earliest civilizations, primary states arose by conquest in Egypt and Peru and to defend against raiders in China and Mesopotamia. In Mesoamerica and the Indus River Valley there is no definitive evidence of a state until these civilizations went into decline, other people took over, and the old civilization disappeared.
 

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Priests can become kings or kingmakers.

Tonga is so small that its people only needed one priest-chief, and it is so remote that the people didn't have to worry about being attacked. So the Tonga state was not created by conquest nor was is created as a defensive alliance against invaders nor was it created as a means to conduct diplomatic relations with foreigners. According to local legends, the Tonga chiefdom was founded by the sky-god Tangaroa who created the lineage of the paramount chiefs (Tui Tongas). Apparently, one of the Tui Tongas abused his authority, began acting like a dictator, and got the people upset. To protect himself from a rebellion, he created a second big chief and delegated all the real power to him and to other members of the Tubou family. From then on the Tui Tonga was merely the high priest again and the Tubou family controlled secular affairs—until the arrival of Europeans, which eventually led to the demise of both the traditional religion and the traditional form of government.

The ancient civilization that appeared about 2300 BC in the Indus River Valley and disappeared around 1500 BC, may have been created and controlled by religious authorities who resorted to the political means of force, but we don't know for sure.

The Indus River Valley gets so little rain and the Indus River (unlike the Nile) floods so irregularly that the plains cannot be occupied successfully without manmade irrigation. So the first settlers must have brought knowledge of irrigation with them from somewhere else. People from the uplands to the east of Sumer who had the requisite knowledge of irrigation techniques may have brought their culture into this previously unoccupied territory. Civilization seems to have developed rapidly in this region as the result of a planned transportation of people with a high culture to an undeveloped land—like a Free Nation Foundation scenario, except we don't know whether it started out on a voluntary basis.

In the Indus River Valley, civilized people created the cities instead of the other way around. The two major cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were about 350 miles apart, yet they were laid out in similar grid-like patterns, indicating they were planned. The structures were built out of kiln-fired brick, which must have required the importation of large amounts of wood, which means somebody had to coordinate the transporting of the wood as well as the labor to create the bricks and to construct the buildings. When the cities got to be about one square mile, people were installed in them. After that the cities may have been allowed to grow naturally.

The cities were not walled in or fortified, which indicates that they were not built for defensive reasons. (They may have started out as religious centers.) Small villages were scattered around rather than clustered for defense. There is little evidence of either offensive or defensive warfare. It is likely that the people were unified by religion rather than by military forces. The whole region, which is larger than the Old Kingdom of Egypt or Sumer, had a uniform culture as shown in their decorative art and architecture. Somebody did central planning and coordinated foreign trade, but there is no evidence that it was done by a coercive state. City planning and foreign trade may have been done under the authority of the priestly class. The people may have be governed by religious rules and may have been organized along hereditary, religious-class lines. This culture could have been the source of the later Hindu caste system.

Around 1500 BC, the Indus River Valley was conquered by invading herdsmen and the civilization vanished. It is possible that no state existed in the region until then.

The Teotihuacán civilization (centered about 25 miles northeast of what is now Mexico City) appears to have been an original civilization that lasted from about 0 to 800 AD when it was destroyed, probably by nomadic invaders from the north. At Kaminaljuyu, on the outskirts of Guatemala City, ruins of monuments presumed to be for religious services have been found that were built in the same style, and probably served the same gods, as the monuments in Teotihuacán. So Kaminaljuyu may have been a colony of Teotihuacán. The civilization in the Oaxaca Valley (the present day city of Oaxaca in the southern highlands of Mexico) had the same calendar, hieroglyphs, and art styles as the Teotihuacán civilization, started at about the same time, and ended for unknown reasons about 900 AD. The Aztecs were the final invaders from the north who dominated most of highland Mexico from about 1200 AD until the Spanish conquered them in the 1500s.

We don't know whether the people living in Teotihuacán civilization had a state before they were conquered by outsiders. If they did, it may have been a case of the priestly class resorting to the political means to expand their own power.
 

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Conquerors can become kings.

Probably the most common way that primary states originated was by one tribe conquering another. The ones who got conquered were made to work for the conquerors either as full slaves or as tribute payers. According to Franz Oppenheimer:

The Zulu state was created by the war chief Shaka Zulu who made himself the military dictator of his tribe and then created the Zulu empire by conquering neighboring tribes and instituting a reign of terror. The Ankole state was created when Bahima herders conquered Bairu farmers. The Nupe state was created by Fulani conquerors. States in Hawaii and Tahiti were created when one chief managed to conquer all the other chiefdoms.

In Mesoamerica (central and southern Mexico and Guatemala, the lowlands of Salvador, Belize, and part of western Honduras) the archeological record shows clear signs of civilization before any signs of a repressive state and without any densely populated cities. The Olmec and Mayan civilizations arose in the lowlands of the southern and central coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Olmec culture lasted from about 1500 to 800 BC. The Mayan culture lasted from about 600 BC to about 1 BC/AD. Based on the pyramids, plazas, tombs, and altars they left behind, the priests had a lot of influence in the Olmec and Mayan cultures, but as far as we know, they had no state until they went into decline and were conquered by outside groups.

When a theocracy is conquered by a group that worships different gods or that is not even a theocracy, the conquered people are apt to lose confidence in their own religion. This undermines their willingness to submit voluntarily to their chief-priests. Consequently, to get them to obey, the rulers may have to resort to force or threats of force. For example, the Hawaiian islands changed from a group of theocratic chiefdoms to a theocratic state when Kamehameha, who acquired guns and light cannon by trading with Europeans, finally completed his conquest of the islands in 1810. He was succeeded by his son Liholiho, who flouted the most sacred taboos of the ancient Hawaiian religion. ("This was as though a medieval ruler in Europe were to publicly deny the divine right of kings." )

This provoked the conservatives to rise against him. He was prepared for this and his army shot them. Thus Hawaii was changed from a theocracy to a secular state in a single generation by the use of guns. (American liberals are taking much longer to secularize the United States because they are squeamish about using guns against religious denominations larger than the Branch Davidians.) With the religious basis for the chiefdom gone, the chiefs had to rely on brute force to maintain their power. The subsequent years in Hawaii were bloody.

Tahiti was an anarchistic theocracy before the Europeans arrived, but upon contact with European sailors the Tahitians became debauched by alcohol, acquired syphilis and other European diseases, left their idols unattended, and began to die off. A Tahitian chief named Tu acquired a few muskets from the Bounty mutineers, renamed himself King Pomare, and set up a government based on violence. Since Pomare was not one of the highest of the chiefs in the traditional hierarchy, he could not control Tahiti without a monopoly of military force. When he died in 1803, his son Pomare II noticed that the old religion was undermining his authority, so he decided to adopt a new state religion. He was baptized in 1812 and set about making Tahiti a Christian state. His rivals defeated him and he went into exile on Moorea. He returned with more adherents and won the final battle in 1815. Then he had the ancient temples and idols destroyed and non-Christians put to death. He simply destroyed his rivals and their religion and required everyone to become Christian. By 1815, as a result of contact with Europeans, the establishment of the state, and the forced conversion of the Tahitians to Christianity, ninety percent of the population lost their lives.
 

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Herders of cattle can become herders of farmers.

A specific version of the conquest theory that explains the origin of some states is the pastoralists-conquer-agriculturists theory. Herders need to learn how to cooperate to manage their herds. They have more need of teamwork and a captain or coach to manage them than farmers do. These habits lend themselves to coordinated warfare.

The first criminal organizations were probably herdsmen. They kept on the move, looking for better pastures. When they came upon farmers who were unprepared to defend themselves they attacked and stole the produce. Eventually, they hit upon the idea of establishing a secure base of operations. They used their herding experience to domesticate the farmers. They realized that killing the farmers and stealing all the crops was not optimal. It was like depleting the herd and forgetting about the future. So they established territories in which the farmers could expect to be robbed regularly by the same gang. To secure steady income, the thieves kept competing predatory gangs out of the territory. Thus a primary state was born.

This is how the Ankole state was created in Uganda.

The Ankole Bahima decided to control the local farmers on a permanent basis. This required that they protect the local farmers from other raiding groups and that they protect their own herds from cattle raiders. The Ankole Bahima established military dominance over all raiding groups in neighboring areas and extracted tribute from them. They arranged the formerly independent chiefdoms into a hierarchy. The Bairu farmers were not allowed to own herds. Bahima cattle owners became clients of their chiefs and the Bahima chiefs became clients of the Ankole king. A cattle owner would swear to follow his chief in war and give him periodic tribute from his herd in exchange for protection from cattle raiders. The extracting of tribute was regulated and authorized by the king. The Bahima chiefs would swear to follow the king in war and pay tribute to him in exchange for protection from rival chiefdoms. The king maintained peace among his clients and tried any transgressors.

Something similar probably occurred in the Ruanda region of Africa, where:

However, this theory cannot explain the origin of all primary states. For one thing, it cannot explain the origin of primary states in Mesoamerica or Egypt or Polynesia where there never were any pastoral nomads. For another thing, it cannot explain the origin of primary states in Europe, because we now know that the earliest states in Europe came before the earliest European pastoral nomads.
 

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Sometimes all the exits are blocked.

Robert Carneiro developed a circumscription (nowhere to escape) theory as a refinement of the more general war and conquest theory. He argues that primary states originate in places where defeated groups can't get away because of geographic boundaries. For example, states arise in areas where unusually good land is surrounded by deserts such as along the Nile river in Egypt or where good land is surrounded by mountains or seas as in the Tigris-Euphrates and Indus valleys or the Valley of Mexico or the coastal valleys of Peru or the islands of Polynesia.

To illustrate his point, Carneiro contrasts the coastal valleys of Peru and the Amazon basin. In the Amazon basin the rain forests provided virtually unlimited agricultural land. Forest villagers did not go to war to get land—they fought wars for revenge or to capture women or for other reasons. One village or tribe could not subjugate another and make them pay tribute because the defeated villagers could easily escape into the forest.

In contrast to the Amazon basin, all the arable land in Peru lies in 78 short and narrow valleys along the coast. Each of these valleys is bordered by mountains, deserts, and the ocean. In Peru, from 1500 to 100 BC maize cultivation led to increased population in the autonomous villages. By 800 BC the economy of most villages could support a priestly class who fomented a cultural revolution. Villages were organized as theocratic chiefdoms. People were divided into food producers who had inferior status and non-producers, who had superior status. The priests developed forms of worship that enhanced their importance and gave them control of enough labor to have monuments erected and to subsidize religious fine arts. The priest-chiefs in the dry lowlands supervised the construction of irrigation canals, which made the valleys more productive and able to grow enough food to support a larger population. This was apparently done peacefully and voluntarily through religious authority. There is no evidence of military force being used during this period. The art style of this era (named Chavín) spread throughout Peru.

As the village populations grew, some villagers splintered off from time to time to settle in other parts of the valleys and to form new villages, until there was no arable land left unoccupied.

Once the valleys were fully settled, the people were easy to govern because there was no place for them to go. The first appearance of military force in Peru seems to have been for the purpose of conquering neighboring villages rather than for repression of the local population. Villagers defeated in war had no place to run to and no way to preserve their autonomy. The mountains, the desert, the sea, and neighboring villages blocked their escape in every direction. So the conquered villagers who were not slaughtered were subordinated to the victorious chiefdom and required to pay tribute.

The political units that fought over land tended to become larger as victorious chiefdoms incorporated vanquished chiefdoms. By 400 AD the Peruvian theocracies had formed super chiefdoms with armies to conquer valuable territories and to provide captives for the warrior-priests to sacrifice in worship services. The same process occurred in each valley. Once valley-wide chiefdoms were formed, the next step was conquest of the weaker valley-wide chiefdoms by the stronger ones until all of Peru was conquered by its most powerful state. The Incas were the last ones to establish an empire in Peru before the Spaniards took over in the 1500s.

Carneiro adds the concept of resource concentration to his theory to explain why warfare over land occurred along the banks of the Amazon River but not in the jungle. The riverfront property was extremely productive, valuable, and scarce compared to the rest of the land in the region. This explains why chiefdoms arose along the banks of the river but not elsewhere in the rain forest.

He also explains that circumscription can be social instead of geographical if a group cannot retreat because the adjacent areas are already occupied. The people might submit to conquerors from one direction rather than flee in the other direction where the land is ruled by a worse gang. The people might also submit to indigenous rulers if all the adjacent lands are uninhabitable or governed by worse rulers.

Kalervo Oberg's study of the Kingdom of Ankole in Uganda supports both the pastoralists-conquer-agriculturists theory and the "nowhere to escape" theory because Ankole is:

Carneiro's theory seems to explain the birth of the state in Egypt better than the pastoralists-conquer-agriculturists theory. In Egypt, the primary state, called the Old Kingdom, was created when tribes from southern Egypt conquered northern Egypt. Once the Old Kingdom, which lasted from about 3100 to 2200 BC, was established, the people were easily ruled (with little need to resort to force) because their religious beliefs support the ruling class. The entire navigable length of the Nile in Egypt was like a single temple community on a large scale. The Pharaoh was the leader of the state and of the only religion. The economy of the Old Kingdom was a theocratic form of socialism. The desert protected Egypt from raids by nomadic herdsmen and foreign ethnic groups such as the Sumerians and Semites. Since the kingdom was protected by the desert, it needed no army:

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War chiefs can become kings when the country is under attack.

Primitive tribes, which in peacetime usually recognize the authority of the chief-priest, will unite behind a war chief to organize their defense when they are attacked by an outside group. If a tribe is subjected to frequent attacks, the war chief may become a permanent big chief, and he may use his military authority to impose coercive control, usurping the allegiance normally given to the chief-priest.

The Ashanti chiefdoms in west Africa were subjugated by the Denkyira and forced to pay tribute to the Denkyira king. This gave the Ashanti chiefs a reason to unite in a common cause—to overthrow the Denkyira state. The priest-leader Anotche and the chief of the Kumasi tribe, Osai Tutu, united the Ashantis, and they defeated their enemies at the battle of Feyiase. They preserved the military confederation after the revolution and formed the new Ashanti state.

The United States of America was formed in a similar way. The thirteen British colonies in North America forged a military alliance to overthrow the primary state created by their foreign rulers. After establishing their independence by force of arms, they created thirteen new secondary states and a central government to form them into an empire, which created a free-trade zone throughout the whole area and continued their military alliance against foreign intruders.

The Cherokees had no central government in the early 1700s. Each village had its own priest-chief. The first step toward a central government among the Cherokees was a council to negotiate with outsiders, mainly with the colony of South Carolina, to prevent reprisals for Cherokee acts against white settlers. If an organization that uses coercion to restrain it own hot-headed warriors but does not collect taxes and does not use coercion for any other purposes can be called a state, then the Cherokee state was formed by Standing Turkey who was a respected priest-chief.

It is possible that the first states in China started as defensive alliances. The steppes of Mongolia came to be dominated by nomadic herdsmen while the valleys of North China filled with farmers. Eventually, the nomadic herdsman acquired horses and, with the use of the compound bow, they became a formidable cavalry. The scattered farming villages were easy targets for them and were dominated by them. Rather than stay and be perpetually exploited, the villagers tended to either join the nomads or move closer to the developing walled cities where they could get better protection from the raiders. The walled cities became city-states ruled by military chiefs.

Farmers living between cities came under increasing attack by raiding nomads who wanted to steal their crops and by warriors from city-states who wanted their land. These farmers were forced to join the nomadic raiders or move to the cities for protection. Consequently, the number of nomadic raiders and the number of people living in urban areas increased rapidly. The cities of Kish and Warka may have had 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants by 3000 BC.

The war-chiefs became the most important chiefs during this period until by 3000 BC the war-chief in each city-state had the power of a dictator. Sometime between 2900 BC and 2500 BC hereditary kingdoms were established in several of the city-states. By this time the cities were distinguished by massive fortifications more so than by temples. Society in the city-states was stratified into classes with different levels of power and prestige. The military leaders were at the top, with all the power and most of the prestige. Next came the priests, who also enjoyed higher status than the productive classes. Next came craftsmen and farmers and their families who constituted the bulk of the population. At the bottom were the slaves, who were usually foreigners captured in war.

From 2500 BC to 1500 BC the leaders of the city-states tried to establish empires. In about 2370 BC Sargon of Akkad managed to win control over all Mesopotamia. This empire lasted about 100 years. More stuff happened after that, but we are beyond the point where the primary states originated, so it doesn't matter.
 

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Conclusion

Primary states are created when leaders use their social status, bribes, or intimidation to induce their cadres of followers to systematically impose the leaders' will by force on others. We know of four variations of this method that have been successful: (1) by organizing the conquest of other groups and extorting tribute and services from them, (2) by leading the military defense against outside invaders and taking the opportunity created by the external threat to become a military dictator, (3) by assuming the authority to negotiate with foreigners to reduce the threat of war, and (4) by being the high priest in peacetime, when this position is the most revered, and using this authority to establish coercive rule over one's own people. Three of the four methods require war or the threat of war, and they account for almost all primary states. In the only case we know of in which a primary state was created without the threat of war, the creator was the hereditary high priest of the only religion in the culture. So, in general, primary states arise either out of conquest or out of organized military resistance to conquest. Not only does war provide the best opportunity for leaders to create states, it strengthens the power of already established states: "For war is the health of the state." D

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