Easily taxed grains were crucial to the birth of the first states

Grain cultivation likely led to the emergence of early states – which operated a mafia-style protection racket – and the adoption of writing for recording taxes.

There is widespread debate about how the first large human societies emerged. Some researchers view agriculture as the root of civilization, while others see it as an invention born of necessity when traditional hunter-gatherer life became untenable. But many argue that the intensification of agriculture provided a surplus that could be stored and taxed, allowing the formation of states.

“By using fertilization and irrigation, [early farming societies] Production could increase significantly and, therefore, this surplus was available for state building,” says Kit Opie of the University of Bristol, UK.

However, the timing of these developments doesn’t quite add up. Our earliest evidence of the emergence of agriculture dates back around 9,000 years and was invented at least 11 times on four continents. But large-scale societies did not emerge until 4,000 years later, first in Mesopotamia, then in Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

To search for more evidence, Opie and Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand turned to a set of family trees tracing the evolution of the world’s languages, representing relationships between cultures, and borrowed statistical methods from phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships.

The two men used linguistic data in conjunction with information from anthropological databases on hundreds of pre-industrial societies to assess the likelihood that events such as the emergence of a state, taxation, writing, intense agriculture, and grain cultivation emerged in a specific order.

They found that the use of intensive agriculture was indeed associated with the emergence of states, but that the relationship was not simple. “It seemed more likely that it was the states that were causing the intensification, rather than the intensification that was causing the states,” Opie says.

Earlier study of Austronesian societies also found that political complexity was more likely to have motivated intensive agriculture than to be the result of it.

“It makes sense that once a state has money and people, it can start irrigating,” Opie says.

But he and Atkinson also found that states were very unlikely to emerge in societies that did not already widely produce grains such as wheat, barley, rice, and corn, while they were very likely to emerge in societies where grains were their primary crop.

The results show that grain production and taxation were often associated, and that taxation was less likely to appear in grain-free societies.

Indeed, cereals have great taxable potential, explains Opie. They can be easily evaluated because they are grown in fixed, surface fields, mature at predictable times, and can be stored for long periods. “Root crops like cassava or potatoes were without hope of taxation,” he says. “The argument is that states, or protection rackets, would defend these fields from outside states in exchange for taxes. »

When it came to writing, Opie and Atkinson found that this practice was very unlikely to be adopted in societies without a tax system, but very likely in those that did. Opie suggests that writing was invented and adopted to record these taxes. Elites in tax-collecting societies then created institutions and laws, maintaining the emerging hierarchical social structure.

The results also indicate that once formed, states were more likely than nonstates to stop producing crops other than grains. “I would say we find strong evidence that they got rid of roots and tubers and fruit trees so that every possible field could be used for grain, because nothing else was good for taxation,” says Opie. “People were forced to use these types of crops, which had a detrimental effect on us and, I would say, continues to do so. »

Although the shift toward cereal cultivation was associated with an increase in population during the Neolithic, it also led to a decline in overall health, height, and dental health.

“Applying phylogenetic methods to cultural evolution is innovative, but it risks oversimplifying the complexity of human history,” says Laura Dietrich of the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. Archaeological evidence shows that in Southwest Asia, the intensification of agriculture in prehistoric times resulted in the formation of a sustainable state, whereas in Europe this was not the case, she says. For her, the crucial question is why these regions diverge so sharply.

David Wengrow of University College London says that “archaeologically, it has been clear for decades that there was no single ‘prime mover’ for the emergence of early states in different parts of the world.” In Egypt, for example, he says, the first bursts of bureaucracy seem to be more closely linked to the logistical organization of royal rituals than to the routine needs of taxation.