“These days, we’re used to having government in our lives — but historically speaking, government is rare,” he says. Leander Heldring, assistant professor of managerial economics and decision science at Kellogg. “Most of the time, the hassle of dealing with all these people [outside of your own tribe] it just wasn’t worth it. So to me it’s always been a completely remarkable fact that we humans have been able to innovate these institutions.”
Social science currently offers two broad explanations for the origins of government – neither of which is definitive. The “mining” theory posits that this might make it right: powerful groups took resources from weaker ones and installed themselves as elites to perpetuate the cycle, in a kind of “institutionalized bullying,” Heldring says. Meanwhile, the “cooperative” theory holds that government was invented to coordinate certain tasks between groups where the net benefit of cooperation outweighed the relative simplicity of avoiding or conquering each other.
“People have been thinking this since the time of the ancient Greeks,” says Heldring. “What we wanted to do is see if we could bring some empirical evidence to the question.”
To do this, Heldring and his colleagues (Mattia C. Bertazzini of Oxford University and Robert C. Allen of New York University, Abu Dhabi) analyzed centuries of archaeological data from the ancient Sumerian civilization, which possessed the famous “fertile crescent” in it. it is now modern day Iraq. Analyzing how local communities responded to changing river flows in the region, the researchers found multiple lines of evidence supporting the government’s cooperative theory.
“What we see emerging is something like a social contract: people give up some of their resources and power in exchange for ‘public benefits,'” says Heldring. “Human societies are incredibly diverse, so it’s not like this settles things once and for all. But if we ask whether the origin of government, in general, is about cooperation or theft, this is a piece of evidence [for the former] in one of the first governments in history.”
Rivers change, fortunes change
Ancient Mesopotamia was not the only place where government first appeared, but it is one of the most exhaustively studied places on Earth by archaeologists. For Heldring and his colleagues, this made it an ideal area to look for evidence of cooperation or mining in early states. “The Middle East was researched in an extremely comprehensive, systematic way between 1930 and 1990,” says Heldring. “Imagine people holding hands in the desert and walking from Baghdad to the sea, picking up whatever they could find.”
The researchers used these historical “surveys” to compile an archaeological map of the area divided into five kilometer squares. Any evidence of early state formation between 3900 B.C. and 2700 BC would be contained within these squares. “We could be sure that if nothing appeared [in a particular square], it was really because nothing happened there – not because nobody thought to look,” explains Heldring. He and his colleagues used these grid squares to “time travel” through each patch of desert in the region: seeing where groups of people settled in farms, villages and towns, how long they stayed and what they built.
Special buildings within cities, called ziggurats, have long been known to archaeologists as centers of government operations. Heldring and colleagues used these ziggurat as clues to determine where and when local governments appeared in the region. But to shed light Why, more information was needed. Five thousand years ago, the region had only one river, called Ur (which would later split into the Euphrates and Tigris). Periodic fluctuations in the flow of the Ur, combined with the relative flatness of the terrain, would cause the river to change course suddenly. In response, local settlements either moved to follow, or stayed put while building canals to bring the river’s water back to them. This channel construction would require social coordination between groups, and not just within them—making it another indication not only of the presence of local government, but also of its purpose.
“If the river has moved and you try to dig a canal, it’s very likely that there are other communities between you and where the river is now,” Heldring explains. “So if you want to do that, you have to work with these people.”
By comparing the timing and location of these “river shifts” with the construction of ziggurats and canals, the researchers were able to construct what Heldring calls “a perfect natural experiment” for observing the origins of government. If the river shifted Away from a settlement, followed by the construction of both canals leading back to the settlement and ziggurats in a nearby town, suggests that local self-government had been formed in order to facilitate the necessary cooperation. Conversely, if the river shifted to a settlement, and the construction of ziggurats soon followed, would indicate that a mining government had emerged to exploit the new resources. (Channels, meanwhile, wouldn’t even be necessary.)
“If the government really wants to take things away from people, you would expect to see states forming where there are things to take away,” Heldring explains. “But if it’s really about trying to cooperate with each other and building organizations to facilitate that, then you’d expect to see states forming in the resource-poorest places where people have to come together to stay in place.” .
Words and actions
Heldring and his colleagues found three lines of evidence supporting the theory that early governments were formed to facilitate cooperation.
The first was that local communities tended to form states after the rivers were removed, rather than towards them. According to the archaeological record, any given grid square in the region was about twice as likely to become part of a state after one of these displacement events (as evidenced by the appearance of a ziggurat in a nearby city). The timing of events also showed that these new states were formed answer to river shifts, not because a previous government just happened to expand into new territory.
Second, the formation of new states quickly followed the emergence of “public works”—in this case, canals—designed to benefit local communities, not steal their resources. The researchers found that after a river was removed from a grid square, the probability that it would soon be irrigated by a canal increased by 40%.
“You can redraw the borders of a state and notice a few new ziggurats, but it doesn’t tell you much [about the purpose of government] if nothing else,” says Heldring. “That’s why the second finding is important: we see that something is actually being done to solve a problem. And, in fact, it is the very problem that we believe started all this need for cooperation in the first place”—namely, keeping the settlements irrigated after the river was taken away from them.
The researchers’ third line of evidence came from a different archaeological source: written records. The ancient Sumerians left behind thousands of clay tablets containing wedge-shaped symbols, called cuneiform, which was the oldest known writing system in the world. Analyzing extant translations of nearly 6,000 such tablets, Heldring and his colleagues often found “evidence” of tributes paid by communities to the state. In grid squares where a river moved away, the probability of finding this evidence in the nearest town doubled – further suggesting the presence of a fundamentally cooperative social contract, in which settlements exchange goods and autonomy to local government in exchange for beneficial services (see channels ). The researchers even found a new word that appears on the tablets after the states are formed: lugala kind of bureaucratic title meaning ‘chairman’ rather than ‘leader’.
“There are basically zero reports [of lugal] anywhere before a state is formed, but in places where states are formed, that’s when people start reporting it,” says Heldring. “So there is evidence coming from two sides. Not only do we see people building things, which leaves an archaeological record in the ground, we also see people writing about exactly what they would have to write about if they “upgraded” pre-existing social institutions to this new mode of cooperation. “
Beyond the story
There is academic value in shedding light on why early governments may have formed. But Heldring’s findings also shed light on long-standing concerns about the purpose of government—concerns that are very much alive today.
“It’s a contribution to this fundamental conversation that’s been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years: How do we, as citizens, relate to government?” He says. “If you see the government as an enemy in principle, just trying to get things for itself, then you see it as your duty as a citizen to keep the government at arm’s length, because who knows what it might do. This attitude prevails in parts of the United States and Europe and can lead to less cooperative relations between the state and society.
“Another attitude is ‘we’re in this together,'” he continues. “Every government in every country overreaches at times—sometimes outrageously. But if you consider the basic ‘job’ of government to be trying to do the right thing for its society, it becomes self-reinforcing: it helps structure everyone’s attitude towards cooperation in society.’
Of course, no government is entirely cooperative or entirely extractive. And while his findings lend credence to the idea that early states were formed to enable cooperation, Heldring believes that over time, governments tend to bend toward coercion.
“We see this clearly in the archaeological and historical records,” he says. “The initial meetings of the assembly become less important and you see people becoming law enforcers within the bureaucracies. So, even if the initial impetus for developing these institutions was coordination, you will then have to protect them. And that tension is still very much with us.”