Agrarian Societies

When speaking of agrarian societies, the invention that made the transition
from pre-agrarian societies to agrarian societies was the Neolithic Revolution that
took place about 15000 years ago and consisted in the discovery of
agriculture(cultivating plants, raising domesticated animals).
The revelations of the Neolithic Revolution spread quite evenly in all
continents, mostly along the median axis of the Eurasian continent but also in some
places in Africa, the Americas and Australia. The discovery of agriculture issued into
a dramatic rise in human population, it was also accompanied by certain
technological inventions like ceramic pots used for storing foods and also by the
wheel as an instrument of transportation.
The Neolithic Revolution stays as one of the two most spectacular
transformations of history. The second one being the industrial revolution. In
between these two, one can identify another important transition that was
constituted by the invention of the state as a new form of the human association.
States were first erected about 5000 years ago or 3000 years BC. Unlike the
Neolithic Revolution the invention of the state was not evenly spread, taking place
only in some areas. The first states appeared in several spots of the near and far
east. In the near east, they were represented by the Nile river valley (northeast
Africa), the Mesopotamian valley (Iraq) and the Indus valley (Pakistan and India). In
the far east, the Chinese rivers acted in the same way.
The fertile crescent stretching from the Sinai peninsula through the northern
part of Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean basin comprising the Greek
peninsula, the Asia Minor peninsula(Turkey) and the island archipelago between
them.
As the invention of agriculture, so the invention of the state was
accompanied by new developments. In the field of technical inventions, the most
important was writing which sustained the political institutional structuring. It was
firstly used for administration purposes (keeping records about the civilian and
military responsibilities and involvements of emerging and evolving states). The
invention of the state was also accompanied by transformations in the domain of
social stratification. The first elements of social stratification anticipated the
emergence of states and even agriculture being present in the Paleolithic period of
history when societies were organized as hunting, gatherings, bands or tribes.
Already at the juncture of history, two categories of people emerged as holding a
special and higher position in society: the professional priests and the professional
soldiers. The priest watched over the relationship of human societies and the
cosmos which manifested itself as nature. They also watched over the system of

beliefs and rituals gradually emerging as a combination of links and communication,

keeping together individual humans into the existing forms of social solidarity.
Soldiers, in their turn, took care of physical survival of human groups being also
responsible of enforcing the sacred beliefs and rituals throughout the social body.
The invention of the state issued into higher forms of social stratification. The
chapter assigned emphasizes the difference between three criteria made for social
stratification in the old agrarian societies. One criterion was constituted by power
holding or by the distinction of people who held offices implying authority and
responsibilities in the state and the people who didnt hold such offices, being
governed by the power holders. The second criterion was status consisting of a
system of symbolic markers, underlining the different degrees of honor and
distinction assigned to various categories of people. In order to easily understand
what status stratification was about, one can think about the system of
classification still functioning in the contemporary societies (India). Status
stratification constituted in the separation of three orders of the states of society,
namely : the clergy (those who prayed), the aristocracy (those who fought) and the
common people (those who labored). The third criterion was class consisting in the
separation in various groups in society according in the factor of what role each
group plays in the economic process. Class differentiation consists in different
amounts of income and wealth characteristic to each social group (class). When
comparing the three different criteria, one can immediately notice that class is the
most dynamic of the three. Classes in the sense of economic groups and income
categories are more easily reshaped in connection to the underlying historical
transformations. Also, social mobility of industrials within each class and across the
borderlines between each classes, tends to be high when compared to the degree of
mobility allowed by the status and the power holding stratification system. People
can make fortunes and move from one class to another while it is impossible for
people in traditional societies to move from one status to another . This means that
economic distinctions are easier to transpass . In the early history, the class
criterion played a small role in society. Class was only to become significant only in
the pre-industrial to industrial era.
Agrarian Societies were marked by some tensions:
-one came from the relationship between settled societies and nomad
societies
-another came from the relationship between centers and peripheries within
large settled societies
Through the evolution of agrarian societies, social differentiation continued to
evolve leading to a three-tiled division of society: clergy, warriors(aristocracy) and
peasants.

Religious beliefs and rituals also continued to evolve in connection to both

state institution development and social development. The system of religious
beliefs acted as the core of the cultural system encompassing social organizations.
Gradually, religious culture came to be accompanied by secular non-religious
cultural creations. All together, the religious and non-religious cultural elements
created a characteristic medium for communication and debate within and across
social groups. The dynamic of social cultures acts as the most important borderline
between physical evolution, shared by humans with the rest of nature and social
evolution which is specific to human species.
Cultural evolution and physical evolution- the borderline between nature and
society
Up into the modern period religious cultural markers continued to act as hugely
more important than the non-religious ones. In terms of cultural evolution, an
important transition was the emergence of great monotheistic visions: Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. These visions put a heavy stamp on the evolution of the
Eurasian region and all parts of the world. Their emergence took place over quite a
long span of history(600 BC-700 AD).
Judaism was the first, acting as the religious vision of a cultural linguistic
group (Jews) with the self-designation of the chosen people of God. Although a
national religion, Judaism was to play a heavy role in the evolution of mankind.
Christianity was to be born from within Judaism, although comprising cultural
elements of heavy importance coming from outside Judaism.
Islam was to be born in continuation to both Judaism and Christianity.
All three religious visions were underlined by an eschatological (=imagining
the unfolding of history as a journey from the original sin to the final redemption)
conception about the destiny of mankind.
When conceiving human evolution in this way, the 3 religious visions invented the
conception of linear history taking a departure from the previous cyclical view of
human evolution prevailing in the context of previous characteristics of religious
views. It is significant that the other two most important religious views emerging in
the eastern part of the Eurasian continent did not follow the pattern of these three.
These were Buddhism ( born in the Indian Peninsula and also beyond the limits of
the region)and the Confucian view(that would have come to dominate in China).
The Buddhist religious conception continued to cherish a cyclical
representation about human evolution across time. Confucianism otherwise evolved
as a cultural world view staying at the borderline between religious philosophy
proper and state ideology encompassing important characteristic elements of
cultural formation.

State building throughout the Oriental area and in the eastern Mediterranean
basin issued two different patterns of state. These were the empire and the citystate. Oriental civilizations were dominated by the imperial form of political
association. City-states, which developed mostly in the Mesopotamian and Indus
valley came to be engulfed by emerging and expanding empires.
The opposite prevailed in the E Mediterranean (Greek Peninsula) where the
city-state established itself as the norm( the general rule), up to the period before
the 4th century AD.
The non-resilience of city-states in the Orient and the prevailing of large scale
empires has to be explained by the geo-climatic characteristics. The great river
valleys of the Orient (Egypt-China) were exceptionally fertile regions , surrounded
by deserted areas. The river valleys allowed to the practice of extensive agriculture,
yielding rates of productivity much above the average of the Neolithic societies.
However, such rates of agriculture productivity were dependent upon
exploiting of the opportunities offered by the seasonal floods of the Great rivers. In
their turn, floods could only be exploited efficiently by the means of large scale
irrigation systems. The irrigation systems could only be installed and managed by
large scale states and state authorities. Theyre followed by a connection between
agricultural economy and a prevailing of large scale despotic empires.
The characteristic of Oriental Empires came to be analyzed and
conceptualized in connection to the characteristics of European political dynamics.
The comparison between western European and Oriental or Asiatic political patterns
has stayed at the core of modern historical analysis, political philosophy, sociology,
political science.
Oriental characteristics came to obtain different or complimentary
characterizations or conceptualizations offered by two of the most important
historical sociologists (Karl Marx, Max Webber)
The Marxist conceptualization rested on the notion of the Asiatic mode of
production underlined by state property over the means of production that is over
the agrarian land, the irrigation systems, tools and the domesticated animals.
The Weberian conceptualization revolved around the notion of patrimony
which underscored the absence of a separation between the public and the private
domain and the social life of the some societies. The patrimonial system of which
the original modern empires were characterized by the conflation of the state and
social domain with the private patrimony of the monarchical ruler.
The political model of the despotic empire was also to play a heavy role in the
history of the European civilization and of the western world. The historical career of
the imperial political form of European and western history was to be linked with the

vision of imperial universalism, that is the vision of one single existing empire with
the vocation of expanding in the entire world.
The universal empire, in connection with history, appeared in the 4 th century
BC. The period was marked by the Greek expansion originated in the Greek
peninsula into the Middle East. This expansion took place over a short period of time
by virtue of the military campaigns into Asia led by Alexander of Macedonia, a
northern Greek state that acted as hegemony. The conquest of Alexander the Great
in the years 330-320 BC made Hellenism from a phenomenon of local citizens into a
phenomenon of large, regional and global significance. Alexanders empire didnt
survive the death of the emperor. The combination between cultural, social and
political forms did survive and continued to act as an important avenue of historical
transformation.
After the death of Alexander the Great the region of Eastern Mediterranean
and Middle East was to be dominated by the Hellenistic kingdoms. The Hellenistic
monarchs acted as ideological inheritors of Alexander, cherishing the imperial idea.
The form of the city-state went into decline, the transformation being underlined by
a philosophical-ideological one(?), which consisted in the transition from the Platonic
and Aristotelic to the post-Artistotelic view , having at the core the philosophical
school of stoicism.
The difference between the two was remarkable. The Aristotelic vision was
centered around the polis, underlined by the conception of human being as
essentially a being which lives in the polis. This conception had the meaning of
conceiving human life, developed to the full as only possible for the free and male
citizens of the polis who attained the level of full humanity by taking part in the life
of the polis, the political life.
Non-polis people which comprised all of the non-Greeks (barbarians) were not
human beings in the entire sense of the term. At the center of the Aristotelic view
stood the image of the active citizen.
The Stoic view was exactly the opposite. At the center stood the image of the
supreme or the highest order as encapsulated in the figure of the wise men or the
philosopher envisioned to contemplate the harmony of the universe in isolation
from the social and political life. If the perfect human being was not active anymore
but instead was the secluded philosopher, there followed that political life was the
integral domain of the monarchical ruler. The Stoic conception was to be
transmitted to the Christian world view which in matters of political involvement
rested upon the piece of wisdom attributed to Christ according to which the
Christian has to give to the emperor what was the emperors and to God what was
His. That was non-Aristotelic and contributed to creating the underlying ideological
background for the prevailing of imperialism over the city-state.

Hellenistic imperialism came to be inherited by the Roman Empire. The

Roman state emerged as a city-state of the Italian Peninsula in the W
Mediterranean basin. The territorial expansion of Rome was accompanied by the
transformation of its political system leading from the original monarchy to the
intermediate stage of the republic to the format of the universal Empire.
Over the next 4 centuries (1-400 A.D. ) the Roman Empire developed a strong
connection with the Christian Church, the two entities originally stood in conflict but
they united later. The story of the link between these two was linked with the
evolution of the Roman state itself.
The transition from republic to empire was completed under the rulership of
Octavianus Augustus (27 BC-14 AD). Augustus concentrated into his hands most of
the offices, coming to impose himself as a Caesar and imperator. While doing so, he
maintained assemblance of the survival of the Republican institutions. His
successors proceeded in the same way. They consolidated the imperial offices and
the universalism while maintaining the illusion of republican political life centered
upon the Senate.
At some junctures, Republican survivals manifested themselves as more than
just appearances, at times of crisis the Senate having a word to say in the state
affaires.

The death of Marcus Aurelius was followed by a period of decline. The

decline itself issued into civil wars and political anarchy which attained the lowest
level during the period called the Military Anarchy (235-284 A.D.) when 22 emperors
succeeded on the throne. Military Anarchy was ended by Diocletioanus who made
two transformations:
-the institutions and ideology of government: republican
survivals were curtailed. The imperial office was consolidated and the government
s ideology took a greater inspiration than before from the oriental tradition of
monarchic despotism. The new political system eventually came to adopt a new
label the dominate replacing the label of principality (used previously in order to
refer to Augustuss political system). In fact, Diocletianus inaugurated what was the
byzantine style of imperial rulership that was to prevail in the E Roman Empire op to
the medieval EU (15TH century)
- the inauguration of the practice of dividing the empire for the
purpose of more effective administration in two halves(E and W). This system was
inaugurated in 293 when Diocletianus established the institution of the tetrarchy,
providing for two emperors called Augusti reigning in E and W, having as
subordinates two sub emperors called Caesars. The tetrarchy did not survive, yet
the practice of dividing did, being reverted in the following period.

The Tetrarchy era ended while Constantine the Great who inaugurated his
rulership in the west (306-337) in order to reunify the Roman Empire. Constantine
went on the path opened by Diocletianus in the sense of consolidating the dominate
with higher powers and responsibilities to the imperial office, underlined by a
heavier ideology of imperial rulership. Constantine also contributed to entrenching
the practice of empire division. To this extend, he founded in the E a second capital,
a second Rome, this was Constantinople, located on the shore of Bosphorus and on
the side of the ancient greek town of Byzantium. Constantinople was founded in 330
and following, it was to emerge as the center of Roman administration in the E
Mediterranean basin.
The end of the fourth century was marked by the beginning of large scale
migration coming from N Europe and the Asian steppes. The era of migration
started in 375, when the Visigoths were pushed away from the temporary
settlement to the N of the Black Sea by the Asiatic Huns.
The migration of the Visigoths was also accompanied by the beginning of a
characteristic political pattern of the late Roman era consisting in the practice,
employed by the E Roman administration, of diverting the migrations from E to W.
The last great Roman emperor exercising his authority over the entire
territory was Theodosius (379-395). His death issued into the definitive division of
the empire in the E (Arcadius) and W (Honorius) regions.
The following decades witnessed the very rapid fall of the W Roman Empire,
Rome was conquered twice (410 by the Visigoths by King Alaric, 455 by the Vandals
under King Genseric) .
Between these two, stood a military event of great importance The Battle of
Catalaunian Plains (451) SE France where the general Aetius called forth the last
of the romans leading a combined roman-germanic army that inflicted a decisive
defeat on the Huns led by king Attila.
Following the battle of Catalaunian Plains, the Huns, who had acted
previously as the most powerful of the migratory got, dissoluted as a political entity.
This was of great importance as W Europe avoided in this way, a domination by a
group of people indebted to the Asiatic political practices and ideologies. The
German people came to prevail and the characteristics symbiosis occurred in W
empire but also beyond the borders of the Roman Empire between Roman
Mediterranean and German elements of civilization. This Roman-German synthesis
was to stay at the core of the W medieval society and culture.
The W Roman Empire, in its classical form was drawn to an end in 476, when
the last emperor Romulus Augustulus was the deposed by Odoacer formerly acting
as the military administration of the Italian Peninsula.

Odoacer assumed for himself the title of King in the fashion of all the other
Germanic rulers.