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

The cultivation of grain crops likely led to the emergence of the first states that ran mafia-like rackets and the adoption of writing for tax purposes.

There is considerable debate about how the first large human societies arose. Some scientists see agriculture as the root of civilizationwhile others see it as an invention born out of necessity when traditional hunter-gatherer life became untenable. But many suggest that agricultural intensification provided a surplus that could be stored and taxed, and that this allowed the formation of states.

“By using fertilizers and irrigation, [early farming societies] could significantly increase production output, and therefore there was this surplus that was available for state construction,” says Keith Opie at the University of Bristol, UK.

However, the timing of these events does not exactly coincide. Our first evidence of agriculture dates back to approximately 9,000 years ago. it has been invented at least 11 times on four continents.. But large-scale societies did not emerge until about 4,000 years later, first in Mesopotamia, then in Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

To find more evidence, Opie and Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland in New Zealand turned to a set of family trees depicting the evolution of the world's languagesrepresenting relationships between cultures, and borrowed statistical methods from phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships.

The pair used language data combined with information from anthropological databases on hundreds of pre-industrial societies to estimate the likelihood that events such as the rise of the state, taxation, writing, intensive agriculture and grain cultivation occurred in a particular order.

They found that the use of intensive agriculture was indeed accompanied by the emergence of states, but that the relationship was not simple. “It's more likely that the states caused the intensification rather than the states causing the intensification,” Opie says.

Previous research on Austronesian societies also found that political complexity contributed to intensive agriculture rather than being a result of it..

“It makes sense that once you have a government with money and people, it can start doing irrigation,” Opie says.

But he and Atkinson also found that states were very unlikely to emerge in societies in which the production of grain crops such as wheat, barley, rice and corn was not yet widespread, whereas they were more likely to arise in societies where grain crops were the main crop.

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

That's because grains have a lot of tax potential, Opie says. They can be easily priced because they are grown in fixed fields, above ground, ripen at predictable times and can be stored for a long time. “Root crops like cassava and potatoes were hopeless for taxation,” he says. “The argument is that states or rackets will protect these deposits from outside states in exchange for taxes.”

When it came to writing the paper, Opie and Atkinson found that the practice was 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. The elites of societies who collected taxes then created institutions and laws to support the emerging hierarchical social structure.

The results also show that, once formed, states are more likely to stop producing non-cereal crops than non-state states. “I would say that we find strong evidence that they actually got rid of the roots, tubers and fruit trees so that every possible field could be used for grain, because everything else was not eligible for taxation,” Opie says. “People were forced to use these crops and it affected us badly and I would say it still does.”

Although the transition to cereal cultivation was associated with population growth during the Neolithic period, it also led to population decline. general health, growth And dental health.

“The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural evolution is innovative, but it may oversimplify the complexity of human history,” says Laura Dietrich at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. Archaeological evidence shows that in southwest Asia, the intensification of agriculture in prehistoric times led to the formation of stable states, while this did not happen in Europe, she says. For her, the crucial question is why these regions diverge so markedly.

David Wengrow from University College London says that “from an archaeological point of view, 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 manifestations of bureaucracy seem to be more closely related to the logistical organization of royal rituals than to the routine needs of taxation.