1. EARLY GOVERNMENT Ancient Governments
This unit looks at how earlier governments developed institutions that still influence and impact us today. The hope is that by understanding how these institutions evolved, we will gain a better understanding of how our own current political institutions are continuously evolving. We begin by looking at governments in southwest Asia during the Iron Age, which began about 1500 BCE. Note: the “BCE” means “Before Common Era” – the “Common Era” beginning at 1 AD.
CIVICS
SRMHS
Mr. Hensley

2. How Did it Start?
Hunter-gatherers have always grown crops (sow, leave – return, harvest)
The more food you get this way, the greater your population
The greater your population, the more food you need – eventually, a tipping point is reached
AUTOCATALYTIC
We often associate the adoption of agriculture as if it were invented, like the telephone. But hunter-gathers have always engaged in some agriculture. They would plant seeds, move on to the next food source and then return, to harvest whatever grew. Those tribes that had the most success with agriculture had the most surplus food – and the most population growth. More people required more food which meant more planting. Eventually, a tipping piint is reached where the food needs are so great they can only be met through continuous planting. In such a manner did hunter-gather tribes transition from hunting, gathering and migration to settled agriculture. Such a gradual process is autocatalytic or self-starting. Once it begins, the positive feedback loop thus created will generate the final outcome.

3. Population Density Food surpluses create dense populations
Surpluses make specialization possible
Specialization makes government, religion, commerce science and the arts possible!
Civilization is created through extra food and specialization
Çatalhöyük, pictured here, is a large Neolithic settlement in central Turkey that represents this transitional period from hunter-gatherers to settled, city life. Çatalhöyük flourished about 7000 BCE and is interesting in that the buildings are grouped closely together, without any hierarchy (no one house is much bigger or better than the others). Access was via rooftop, not by side doors. At this point, agriculture is making huge population densities possible and those extra people can now engage in specialization. Specialization leads to hierarchies, to priests and kings but the evidence of Çatalhöyük is that humans in southwest Asia clung to older, hunter-gatherer ideas of equality even after population densities allowed for towns and cities. The final step in this process will be the development of writing in southwest Asia about 4,000 BCE and the beginnings of recorded history.

4. Government: Power vs. Authority
Power means getting people to follow your directions
Authority means your power is accepted and respected
Can have power with no authority (crime, force)
Cannot have authority without power
For government to work, those who govern must have power over the people. But power cannot come through continued threat – government works best when people want to obey their leaders. When someone’s power over you is seen as legitimate, we call that “authority”. Power without authority is a threat. Authority without power is a contradiction.

5. Traditional Authority
Authority has been made legitimate by long-standing custom
History is on their side
“Do what I say, not (necessarily) what I do”
Examples: Royalty, hereditary rulers
Everyday: mother or father
Respect given not earned
Only death ends it
We obey traditional authority because our culture expects us to, we are raised by our parents to respect their traditional authority. We don’t have to like or respect traditional authority figures, we merely need to obey them. The earliest governments relied primarily on this type of authority – often reinforced by religious beliefs. Today, states like North Korea, represent the total domination of the people by one person and that one person has tremendous power, based on long-standing tradition.

6. Charismatic Authority
Authority based on personal attributes and personal qualities
Respect is earned, not given
Conditional: authority is lost if personal qualities are discredited
Can be good (Gandhi) or bad (Hitler)
“Charisma” means the quality of being interesting and attractive – it is often (but not always) tied into good looks (recall the “Halo Effect” from our presentation on cognitive bias). Charismatic authority is often not enough to guarantee a stable government but when combined with other forms of authority, it makes those other forms even more effective. It has been argued that Hillary Clinton’s relative lack of charisma worked against her in the 2016 Presidential election.

7. Legal-Rational Authority
Authority lies with the position, not with the person
Authority is given by written document (Constitution or Employee Handbook)
Can only be withdrawn if the person violates the rules of the position
Ex: most modern government officials
The first written document that held this type of authority was probably the Code of Hammurabi, a set of laws written down by a Babylonian king about 1750 BCE. By writing the laws down, the king was giving up some of his power to make arbitrary decisions. Writing things down also guaranteed stability – a future king would be less likely to change a written law than an unwritten one. Such stability is critical for trading and about one-half of Hammurabi’s code deals with commercial issues. Still, at this point the king was above the law. True legal-rational authority occurs when the official is bound by the law and is subject to it.

8. Forms: Monarchy
Power and authority are hereditary and belong to one family
Rule can be unbounded (absolute – the tyant) or bounded (constitutional monarchy)
Can be identical to religion – a theocracy
Trade-offs? Stability versus regression towards the mean
Historically, the most common type of gov’t
Monarchy is a simple way to handle government. The king has the power to rule and everyone has to obey the king. Like most things in the social sciences, monarchy operates along a continuum (they can be ranked). Monarchies where the king has absolute power, where his word is law and the people are his property – this is sometimes called “tyranny” or in more modern times, “totalitarianism” (think of North Korea). Kings often derive their power from the people’s belief in religion. Situations in which kings are basically high priests are known as “theocracies”. Again, these things are ordinal, they lie on a continuum. Sometimes a secular king still claims his power ultimately comes from God – this is referred to as the “Divine Right of Kings”.

9. Oligarchy and Aristocracy
Rule by a small elite
Elite status not (necessarily) hereditary
May occur because of military or economic success
A monarch may be chosen from one of these elite families
Ancient Persia and India
“Oligarchy” is a form of government where only an elite group of citizens have power. Sometimes the elites are military in nature (think of knights). Sometimes the elites have wealth. Sometimes it is a combination of both. Once again, like with theocracy, the two can blend. In ancient Persia and India (and in medieval Europe), a group of aristocratic, noble warriors chose a king from their ranks.

10. Democracy Goal is to give every citizen an equal share of power
Pure democracies are those where (almost) all decisions are voted on
Representative democracies elect leaders who then make decisions for us
Extremely rare in the ancient world
Democracy is (historically speaking) the rarest form of all. In a democracy, power resides with the people. Again, it operates ordinally, along a continuum. At ine end would be a pure democracy, where everyone votes on everything and every person has an equal share of power. At the other end would be a representative democracy, where a subgroup of people called “citizens” elect representatives to make their decisions for them.

11. Functionalist Perspective
Government has 4 functions:
Planning and directing society
Providing for social welfare
Maintaining internal law and order
Managing relations with other countries
The perspective: government exists because it makes things more efficient
Sociologists look at government from two different perspectives: functionalism and conflict. From the functionalist perspective, government exists because cultures with governments can outcompete and outfight those that do not. Government exists, they say, because it makes everything more efficient. The four functions of government should seem familiar: planning out the actions of society, taking care of the people (social welfare), maintaining law and order and finally, handling relations with other nations. In this perspective, everyone can be a winner – the success of one group of citizens does not automatically mean some other group had to fail. Functionalist perspectives make more sense when resources are abundant.

12. Conflict Perspective
Power elites use gov’t to maintain their control over limited resources
Marx: struggle between proletarian and bourgeoisie; between labor and capital
The perspective: government exists to enrich some while excluding others
A zero-sum game (If I win, you must lose)
The conflict perspective says that government is a tool used by the elites to keep resources under their control and out of the hands of the people. From a conflict perspective, resources are always scarce and if I eat, you must go hungry. If I get rich, you must become poor. This is also called a “zero-sum game” in that if I add up all the positive gains of the winners with all the negative losses of the losers, they add up to zero.

13. Iron Age Governments Based on agriculture and centered on rivers
King owns everything and has a special relationship with the gods
Priests control writing and knowledge
Aristocratic nobles control the military
Peasants work the land and are owned
Egypt is our best example of a long-lasting Iron Age government, although Babylon and Assyria would have been similar. All these governments derived their power through control of river systems and irrigation that were essential for agriculture. They faced attack from neighbors who were poorer, less advanced and pastoral in nature (nomadic herdsmen) The theocratic nature of these governments cannot be overstated – the laws of the state are divinely revealed by the gods to the king. Hammurabi’s Code (about1700 BCE) is an excellent example of this. Another trend in Iron Age government was consolidation and empire-building: Egypt unified its Upper and Lower Kingdoms early on (3150 BCE) Babylon unified various warring city-states and Assyria conquered several rival states, merging them into a larger empire.

14. Iron Age Religions Bound up with idea of fertility and harvest
Usually some sort of afterlife with rewards for the virtuous
Deeply connected to the government – king is divinely chosen and laws are divinely given
Patriarchal in nature
The Old Testament would be typical of most major Iron Age religions, except that as a pastoral people, the Israelites didn’t place as much emphasis on the harvest or fertility compared to their agricultural neighbors. Russell makes a distinction between Egyptian and Babylonian religion – he believes the Egyptians were focused more on the life of the world-to-come while the Babylonians cared about prosperity and success within their lifetimes. Some believe that various common religious themes involving male heroes slaying female chaos-monsters (Marduk versus Tiamat for example) represents a codification of a patriarchy replacing an older matriarchal culture.

15. Greek Government
Greek towns are small and isolated by both mountains and sea
Isolation results in small city-states and a range of government types
Kings exist but their power is not absolute
Size allows for democracy
Greek states are small and cut off from one another by mountains and the sea. This isolation because of geographical barriers makes union and empire much more difficult. While many of the Greek communities had aristocracies and kings, he lack of empire kept their power in check – a tyrant might soon find his subjects had fled to another community. Finally, types of democracy in which the citizens themselves were responsible for major government decisions was able to develop because of the small size of the Greek polis: it was possible to regularly assemble all citizens in one place and have a meeting. Something impossible (and unthinkable) in Babylon.

16. Greek Advantage: The Alphabet
Earliest alphabets are pictorial and complex
Phoenicians (1200 BCE) develop a phonemic alphabet – each symbol represents a sound
Greeks improve upon Phoenician by adding vowels (800 BCE)
Easy to learn – there are only 24 symbols
Infinitely flexible
The Egyptians had an alphabet as far back as 3000 BCE, as did the Sumerians. Both these written languages were pictographic in nature – a symbol stood for an entire word or concept. With hundreds of symbols, both writing and reading in a pictorial alphabet requires much training. The seagoing traders known as the Phoenicians developed a phonemic alphabet about 1200 BCE. In a phonemic alphabet, each symbol represents only a specific sound. Phonemic alphabets only have a few dozen symbols and are easier to learn and to read, which encourages literacy. The Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet and improved upon it by adding vowels. Now the Greeks had a simple, streamlined alphabet that could be learned quickly and used to record then transmit any type of knowledge. Philosophy without such an alphabet would have been a much more difficult undertaking.

17. Greek Advantage: Trading
Many Greeks were traders, exchanging goods between colonies and Iron Age empires
Superior naval technology like the trireme made trade efficient and profitable
Primary exports are wine and olive oil
The ancient Greeks had colonies all along the Mediterranean Ocean and Black Sea by the fifth century BCE. Using the trireme (so named for its three rows of oars), a brisk and profitable trade was carried out between the Greek colonies and the main Greek cities. Trading was also done between Greece and the Iron Age Empires of the day: Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Persia. Particularly prized were Greek wine and Greek olive oil, the two primary Greek exports. As for the impact of trade upon Greek philosophy - merchants need accurate information; they are natural skeptics and trading may have helped to emphasize rational thought at the expense of the supernatural in early Greek culture. giving philosophy a chance to develop unhindered by superstition.

18. Greek Advantage: Coinage
Nearby Lydia was the first to use currency in the form of gold coins but the Greeks soon followed
Money is more efficient than barter causing trading to increase
Greeks had easy access to rich gold mines, allowing for seigniorage
Iron Age trade had generally involved barter, but barter has obvious inefficiencies – what if I don’t need what you are offering? The Lydians of Asia Minor may have been the first people to hit upon the idea of using gold, silver and electrum coins to facilitate trade. The 6th century BCE Lydian king Croesus was responsible for this innovation and profited greatly because of it (according to Herodotus). The Greeks were early adopters of currency and because of access to gold mines on the Greek mainland, were able to take part in seigniorage profits. Seigniorage occurs when the cost of producing the coin is much less than the value of said coin. The profit, the seigniorage, goes to the government that produces the coin. Profits from currency-enabled trade and profits from seigniorage allowed the ancient Greeks the leisure time needed to engage in philosophy.
Distinctive Athenian “owl” coin (5th century BCE)