The Fifth Beginning by Robert L. Kelly

Author:Robert L. Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520293120
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER 6

Kings and Chains

The Beginning of the State

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

—Finley Peter Dunne

If you ever find yourself in London with time to visit only one attraction, I recommend the British Museum. Walk in through the front doors (it’s free) and enter the massive atrium. Straight ahead, in the atrium’s center, is the former library where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. Walk around the library to the left and through a deceptively unassuming door. There in front of you will be the Rosetta stone, one of the world’s most significant archaeological finds, an emblem of the fourth beginning.

I wish I could say that an archaeologist discovered the Rosetta stone through careful research and dogged fieldwork. But no; it was found in Egypt in 1799 by Pierre-François Bouchard, a member of Napoleon’s military force, while rebuilding the Ottoman Turks’ fortifications. Fortunately, Bouchard thought the stone might have historical value and he set it aside for study by French scholars. But the British defeated the French forces in 1801, so today the stone rests in the British Museum rather than in the Louvre.

Discovery of the Rosetta stone was just the beginning of what archaeologist Brian Fagan called the rape of the Nile.1 By the mid-nineteenth century, Egypt’s archaeology, as well as that of Greece, Italy, and the Near East, was for sale to anyone daring enough to move humongous blocks of stone. The Nile received particular attention because its archaeology was, and is, stunning—the pyramids, tombs, statuary, palaces, and towering columns. The dirty laundry of many famous museums is that they got some of their best stuff by pillaging conquered nations or by buying it at bargain-basement prices from cash-starved rulers.2 In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll point out that these plunderers created the field of archaeology. To be polite, we call them antiquarians and we treat them the way everyone treats their eccentric uncle: we don’t like to talk about them.

Sitting on your perch in space, watching the history of the world unfold, you might feel some fanny fatigue at this point. But you soon forget any discomfort, because after agriculture appears, change comes fast and furious. The last ten thousand years, and especially the last five thousand years, witness more change than the previous six million. This is the time of cities, swords and spears, gold and silver, temples and palaces, roads, bridges, jewelry, spices, chariots, money—and men and women in chains. This is the time of states.

For anthropologists the term state refers to societies that have at least three levels of political hierarchy: most simply, a ruling class, a bureaucratic class, and laborers. More important, these levels entail relationships quite different from those of the foraging and horticultural societies that dominated the world for tens of thousands of years. Only a few people were buried in a pyramid that took forty years and thousands of backs to build. In fact, a select few benefitted far more than the masses from developments in trade, the arts, and the sciences.

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