Urban agriculture, surplus, and despotism: historical perspectives

Traditionally, agriculture has been seen not only as a necessary precondition for cities, but also as a source of tension in the rural-urban dynamic (a dynamic which, as we will see, is yet another false dichotomy).

To one degree or another, all those social thinkers concerned with the early city, each influential in his or her own way, reproduced in their writings a shared concept of the city in which urbanism is fundamentally based in the creation of a new order of human nature forever dedicated to the control of the many by the few, i.e. to hierarchy.

These assumptions about the moral life of the pre-industrial city were not only central to the writings of many of these early theorists, but also resonated with their scholarly and educated lay readership. McIntosh argues that one reason may be rooted in Yahwism, which was subscribed to by several generations of biblical scholars and, most importantly, by many social theorists of early city origins. Yahwism is the term both for this historical biblical commentary tradition and for the description of a way of life of the Israelites.^[339] The positive values attributed to an idealized, pastoral piety - and the condemnation heaped upon the impious lifestyles of urban dwellers - are a dichotomy that underlies much of this once monolithic and still main­stream Old Testament biblical scholarship. A historical critique of this tradi­tion demonstrates clearly why early cities were presented as a dark moral exemplar and why agriculture was incorporated in the same judgment.

In the Yahwist tradition, the clearest commandments of Judaeo-Christian piety strongly influenced interpretations of the Levantine Bronze Age, a period during which early Israelites revolted against the iniquitous and impious cities of the Mediterranean coast. In the period from roughly 1800 to 1200 BCE (and especially after c.

Yahweh was signalling not only his extreme displeasure with Canaanite urban culture. He was also offering a covenant to those willing to leave the material security of a centralized urban existence - including, importantly, agricultural surpluses produced by the enslaved or servile members of the towns' populations - for the spiritual fulfilment of a (pastoral) life on the margins, in Yahweh's care. The early city was both the physical seat and the metaphor of all the surpluses (artisan and agricultural), riches, and iniquities that would be lost in the move to the marginal existence of the Judaean hills. Those who elected to pioneer this new relationship with Yahweh would sacrifice the security of city walls, the potential to rise in citadel and temple bureaucracies, and, significantly, the abundant harvests and pastures of the coastal plain. Only by forfeiting these apparent advantages would the adherents of this new piety be in a position to become the chosen of an all-powerful God.

In Yahwist exegesis, early cities are characterized as having a particular sociopolitical structure in which the king's power rested upon a centralized, surplus economy supporting the standing army needed both to protect the city from covetous neighbours and to maintain a degree of state terrorism

University Press of America, 1983); V.H. Matthews and D.C. Benjamin, The Social World OfAncientIsrael, 1250-587 bce (Peabody: HendricksonPress, 1993).

7 Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh; Matthews and Benjamin, Social World of Ancient Israel, 3-5; A.

within the city walls. This economy depended on the administratively directed labour of an unfree populace, be they de jure slaves or the de facto servile urban peasantry, making only those relatively few with kinship ties to the monarch free; all others were the king's bondspersons. Thus, according to Yahwist interpretation, city life is equated with absolute submission, absolute loyalty to the monarch's person, an authority that is linked to the exclusive, personal relationship of the despot with the city's god. This is Weber's ‘anointed' right to rule at the dawn of Gottesgnadentum (the divine right of kings).^[340] The state (and all corollary institutions, such as the city - seat of the king) exists as an expression of the relationship of god and monarch, and consequently the monarch's power is absolute. There can be no higher check on the state.

The city as dark moral exemplar (and the underlying unspoken values of covenental piety) are such integral parts of the Western intellectual tradition that we must acknowledge and analyse their influence if we are to under­stand the history of archaeological investigations of cities, whether in the Levant or elsewhere. Few of the founding scholars who formulated our canon of historical sociology of the early city could have escaped the endless scriptural descriptions of bondage, despotic rule, and urban impiety that came out of Yahwist exegesis. The traditional mistrust of city life was fully subscribed to by the first urban archaeologists,^[341] and a conception of primitive urban despotism (standing in stark opposition to the free-will covenant with God and the harsh strictures of the pastoral life on the Judaean hills) drove these scholars' expectations for the kinds of artefact and feature that would serve as signatures for the earliest cities. Layard, preparing to dig Nineveh, could scarcely imagine finding anything of importance that did not reflect this primal state despotism: ‘It is very doubtful whether these fortified enclosures contained many buildings besides the royal palaces, and such temples and public edifies as were attached to them.'^[342]

Much of the excavation by early archaeologists did focus on temples and palaces, and the foundations of these edifices in control over agricultural surplus consistently figured in the resulting sociopolitical reconstructions.

Chinese, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and occasionally even Hellenistic war­lords founded cities, relocated them, and settled in them not only voluntary immigrants, but also human livestock rustled from here and there as needed and opportunity dictated. This was most pronounced in Mesopotamia, where the forced settlers first had to dig the canal which made possible the construction of the city in the desert. As the prince with his official admin­istrative apparatus in such cases remains the absolute master, no municipal association can develop.¹¹

Here, the population, the ‘human livestock', is supremely unfree. They are units of (often agricultural) labour, trapped by an authority based in a despotic covenant with the city deity. Wittfogel is even more blunt in his functionalist assessment of the social structure of early urban centres:

Unlimited control over the labor power of their subjects enabled the rulers of Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt to build their spectacular palaces, gardens and tombs.1^{[343] [344]}

For Wittfogel, farming in the arid lands of Mesopotamia, home of the earliest cities in the world, inherently demanded large-scale government organiza­tion to establish and maintain the essential networks of irrigation canals and to co-ordinate the specialists engaged in manufacture and long-distance trade of items not immediately available to the farmer. These ‘hydraulic' methods of social control (permanent surrender by the many of their labour and essential freedoms to a few, whether secular princes or temple bureau­cracy) provided the despot with the capacity to build monumental structures within the city (defences, roads, palaces, temples, tombs), which preserve as enduring memorials to the authority of the rulers.

Thus the intellectual underpinnings of the standard narrative - in which agricultural production not only enables larger urban populations than were supportable by the hunting/gathering way of life, but also necessitates water management and landscape manipulation that can only be accomplished under a stringently hierarchical form of government - have their foundations in Yahwist assumptions of the immorality of urban despots and, by extension, urban society. While this standard narrative has maintained a subtle influ­ence, modern archaeological research in what we now understand to be a multitude of heartlands of cities around the world challenges this unimodal conception of the relationships between agriculture, labour, surplus, and political control (Volume 3).