Chapter 3 of 14

Kings Made by Gods: Bronze Age Empires and the Invention of Legitimacy

About 26 minutes to read

The priestess on the disk

In the winter of 1927, in the ruins of the sacred precinct at Ur in southern Iraq, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley's team pulled from the debris the broken pieces of a flat disk of white calcite, about ten inches across. When the fragments were fitted together, one face showed a carved procession: a naked priest pouring a libation before an altar, two attendants behind him, and in the middle a woman in a long flounced robe and a distinctive rolled headdress, her hand raised in a gesture of reverence. An inscription on the back named her. She was Enheduanna, high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, and the daughter of Sargon, king of Akkad.

Enheduanna is one of the most remarkable figures of the ancient world. Later Mesopotamian tradition credited her with a cycle of temple hymns and with poems to the goddess Inanna, which would make her the earliest author in history known by name. Some modern scholars doubt that she wrote them herself, and the question is still argued. But her appointment is not in doubt, and it is the key to this chapter.

Sargon was not a Sumerian. He came from the north, from the Akkadian-speaking part of Mesopotamia, and by his own account and later legend he had begun life as a nobody. Around 2300 BCE he conquered the ancient Sumerian cities of the south one by one, creating what is usually described as the first empire in history. He had armies. What he did not have was any traditional right to rule Ur, Uruk or Nippur — cities whose temples and royal houses were far older than his own. So he did something that conquerors would do for the next four thousand years. He placed a member of his own family at the heart of the conquered people's religion. His daughter became the bride, in ritual terms, of the god of Ur. Through her, the god of the conquered blessed the house of the conqueror.

The previous chapter showed how the first farms were built: grain, ledgers, debts and the great households of temple and palace. This chapter is about what happened when those farms were joined into empires, and their owners faced a new problem. A village headman can rule by custom. A city's ruler can rule by the authority of the city's god. But what entitles one man to own a hundred cities, thousands of square kilometres and hundreds of thousands of people, none of whom have ever seen him? The answer that the Bronze Age invented — and that has never entirely gone away — was that he had been chosen by the gods, or was a god himself, and that his rule was the very definition of justice.

The problem of legitimacy

The sociologist Max Weber, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that no system of domination is content to rest on force or self-interest alone. Every one of them tries to cultivate a belief in its own legitimacy — the conviction, among those who obey, that obedience is right. Weber distinguished three pure types of such belief. There is traditional authority, which rests on the sanctity of custom ("it has always been so"). There is charismatic authority, which rests on devotion to the extraordinary qualities of a particular person — a hero, a prophet, a conquering king. And there is legal authority, which rests on belief in rules properly enacted.

What makes the Bronze Age so revealing is that we can watch its rulers trying out all three, often in the same inscription. Sargon was a charismatic conqueror trying to acquire traditional authority. His grandson Naram-Sin turned charisma into divinity. The kings of Ur tried to make divinity routine. And Hammurabi of Babylon, the most famous of them all, presented himself to his subjects not primarily as a conqueror or a god but as a lawgiver — the man whom the gods had appointed to make justice appear in the land.

The historical sociologist Michael Mann, in The Sources of Social Power, argued that the early civilisations "caged" their populations: once people were tied to irrigated land, dense settlements and specialised economies, they could not easily walk away from the authorities who organised them. The cage was the fence of this book. Legitimacy was the paint on the bars. It did not make the cage less real; it made the cage look like a home.

The true king

Even Sargon's name was a claim. In Akkadian, Šarru-kēn means "the king is legitimate" or "the true king". Most historians think it was a throne name adopted after he seized power, which tells us how much he needed to say it.

The Sumerian King List, a document compiled in its known form some generations later, gives him a humble start as the cupbearer of Ur-Zababa, king of Kish. A much later text, the so-called Legend of Sargon preserved in copies from the first millennium BCE, tells a story that will sound familiar to readers of the Bible: his mother, a priestess, bore him in secret, put him in a basket of reeds sealed with bitumen and set him on the river, where he was found and raised by a gardener until the goddess Ishtar loved him and made him king. Whatever its origins, the legend did the job that founder-myths always do. It made the usurper's rise look like the will of heaven rather than the success of a gang.

Sargon's own inscriptions, known from copies made by later scribes at Nippur, are more practical. They boast of victories over the cities of Sumer, of having "washed his weapons in the sea", of the ships from distant lands that moored at the quay of his new capital, Akkad. One of them records that 5,400 men ate daily in his presence. Whether these were soldiers, courtiers or both, the figure describes something new: a permanent body of men fed directly by the king, owing their living to him personally. Earlier city rulers had called up their citizens for war. Sargon kept an army on rations. The shepherds now included men with spears.

The empire was held together by such men, by governors drawn from the king's circle, and by appointments like Enheduanna's. The conquered cities hated it. When Sargon died, they rose against his sons. When his grandson Naram-Sin came to the throne, they rose again, in what Akkadian texts call the Great Revolt — a coalition of cities led by Kish and Uruk, each with its own king. Naram-Sin's inscriptions claim that he defeated them in nine battles in a single year.

What he did next was without precedent. An inscription on a copper statue base found at Bassetki in northern Iraq records that, because Naram-Sin had kept his city safe in its time of danger, the citizens of Akkad asked the great gods of Mesopotamia — Ishtar, Enlil, Dagan, Ea, Sin, Shamash and others, each named with the city of their chief temple — to make him the god of their city, and built him a temple. From then on, his name was written with the cuneiform sign that marked a deity. On the great victory stele now in the Louvre, he is shown climbing a mountain over the bodies of his enemies, larger than his soldiers, wearing the horned helmet that until then had been reserved for gods.

It is important to notice how the inscription frames this. Naram-Sin does not declare himself a god. His people ask the gods to make him one, in gratitude for their deliverance. The divinity of the king is presented as a gift from below, ratified from above. The farm is not imposed; it is requested. That is the most sophisticated version of the story: one in which the herd is shown asking for its shepherd.

When the story turns

The Akkadian empire lasted, in all, about a century and a half before it disintegrated under pressure from rebellions, invaders from the Zagros mountains and, some scholars argue, a period of drought. Its memory became the material for a new kind of story — not one that justified a king, but one that condemned him.

A Sumerian literary composition known as The Curse of Agade, written down some time after the empire's fall, explains the catastrophe. Naram-Sin, it says, wanted to rebuild Enlil's temple at Nippur, the most sacred shrine in Sumer. When the omens refused permission, he went ahead anyway: he sent his soldiers to tear the temple down and carried off its treasures. Enlil, enraged, sent the barbarous Gutians down from the mountains to destroy Akkad. The poem ends with a curse on the city that its canals would run with brackish water and its fields grow weeds.

Historians do not believe Naram-Sin sacked Enlil's temple; his own inscriptions record building work there. What the poem shows is something different and more interesting: who held the power to tell the story. Kings could commission inscriptions. But temples and scribes preserved, copied and taught the literature, and centuries later it was their version that survived. The same priesthood that could make a king legitimate could, once he was safely dead, explain his fall as divine punishment. This was the first great lesson of legitimacy: the people who write the story are not powerless. The 1% who serve the 0.01% are also, very often, the custodians of its reputation.

Kingship descended from heaven

The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, whose bureaucracy we met in the last chapter, learned from Akkad. Their founder, Ur-Nammu, was not deified in his lifetime, but his son Shulgi, who reigned for nearly half a century around 2094–2047 BCE, was worshipped as a god while he lived. Hymns were composed in his honour and taught in the scribal schools — hymns in which Shulgi boasts of his strength, his learning, his skill with languages and music, and his feat of running from Nippur to Ur and back in a single day to celebrate a festival in both cities. His statues received offerings. Months in some local calendars were named after his festivals.

Ur III also produced, or at least gave lasting shape to, one of the most effective pieces of political writing in history. The Sumerian King List begins with the words that kingship "descended from heaven" and then lists, city by city, the kings who held it — first at Eridu, then at other cities, through a great flood, and on through the dynasties of Kish, Uruk, Ur, Akkad and the rest. The earliest kings are given reigns of tens of thousands of years. Scholars have long recognised that the list is not a neutral chronicle. Dynasties that ruled at the same time in rival cities are arranged one after another, as if kingship had always been a single office passed from city to city. The effect, and probably the purpose, was to make the domination of all Sumer by one king look like the natural and ancient order of things — the way the world had been since the gods created it.

This is a pattern we will meet again and again. The farm's story very often takes the form of a history: an account of the past that makes the present arrangement seem inevitable. The king list does for Mesopotamian kingship what genealogies did for medieval nobles and what certain kinds of national history have done for modern states. It turns an outcome into a destiny.

The stone in the Louvre

In the winter of 1901–1902, a French archaeological expedition led by Jacques de Morgan was digging at Susa, the ancient capital of Elam in south-western Iran. In the acropolis mound they found three large pieces of black basalt that, when joined, formed a stele more than two metres tall, covered on all sides with columns of finely carved cuneiform. Within months the Assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil had published a translation. It was the law collection of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, who had reigned some 3,700 years earlier, from around 1792 to 1750 BCE.

The stele had not been made in Susa. It had been carried there as plunder in the twelfth century BCE by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte, who raided Babylonia and took home several of its most famous monuments — including, as it happens, the victory stele of Naram-Sin. The two most famous pieces of royal propaganda from ancient Mesopotamia ended up together as trophies in an enemy's city, and they stand today a short walk apart in the same museum in Paris. The story of legitimacy is portable. It could be stolen.

At the top of Hammurabi's stele is a relief. The king stands, his right hand raised to his mouth in a gesture of respect, before a seated god — usually identified as Shamash, the sun god and god of justice — who holds out to him the rod and ring, symbols of authority. Below the relief, the text begins with a prologue. When the great gods Anu and Enlil had established Babylon and its god Marduk in supremacy, it says, they named Hammurabi, "the pious prince", to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, so that the strong might not oppress the weak. The epilogue returns to the same theme. Hammurabi set up his stele so that the strong should not wrong the weak, and to give justice to the orphan and the widow. Any man who has been wronged, it declares, should come before the statue of the king of justice, have the inscription read to him, and find his case, and his heart would be set at ease.

It is an extraordinary piece of political communication. Most of Hammurabi's subjects could not read. The stele was not, in that sense, a law book for them. It was a monument: a public declaration that the king's power came from the gods and that its purpose was justice for the weak. Hammurabi had copies set up in more than one city. The text was copied by scribes for over a thousand years after his death. As a piece of branding for the farm's owner, it has rarely been surpassed.

What the laws say

Read the laws themselves, however — there are about 282 of them in the modern numbering, with a section lost where the stone was erased — and a different picture emerges. Hammurabi's justice was justice for a society divided into ranks, and it did not pretend otherwise.

The laws distinguish three main categories of person. The awīlum, literally "man", denotes a free person of full standing. The muškēnum, often translated "commoner", is a category whose precise meaning is still debated: it may have referred to people dependent on the palace, or simply to free people of lesser status. And the wardum was a slave. The penalties of the law depend on who did what to whom.

The famous principle of "an eye for an eye" appears in the laws, but only between equals. If an awīlum puts out the eye of another awīlum, his own eye is to be put out (law 196). If he puts out the eye of a commoner, he pays one mina of silver (law 198). If he puts out the eye of another man's slave, he pays half the slave's value — to the slave's owner (law 199). The same graded scale applies to broken bones and knocked-out teeth, and to the fees owed to surgeons, which were higher when the patient was a man of standing and lower when he was a commoner or a slave.

The laws protect property, and above all the property of the palace and the temple. Theft from a god or the palace is punished with death in some cases or thirtyfold restitution in others, while theft from a commoner requires tenfold. The final law of the collection, law 282, deals with a slave who says to his master, "You are not my master": if the master proves the slave is his, he may cut off the slave's ear.

The laws also make the fence explicit. Anyone who helps a slave belonging to the palace or to a commoner escape through the city gate is to be put to death (law 15). So is anyone who shelters a runaway slave in his house and does not bring him out when the herald calls (law 16). A barber who shaves off a slave's identifying mark without the owner's permission loses his hand (law 226). The gate of the city, the herald's proclamation, the mark on the body: these were the boundaries of the farm, and the law of the just king guarded them with death.

There are humane provisions too, and they are revealing. Law 117 limits debt bondage: if a man is forced by debt to sell or pledge his wife, son or daughter, they are to work in the creditor's house for three years and be freed in the fourth. Law 48 provides that if a storm or flood destroys a debtor's crop, he may "wash his tablet in water" — moisten the clay of his loan contract so that it can be altered — and pay no interest for that year. These clauses are real protections, and they connect Hammurabi's laws to the tradition of debt relief described in the previous chapter. But they also show what they are protecting against. A law that frees debt-pledged children after three years assumes that debt-pledged children are a normal part of life.

A whole section of the laws (roughly laws 26 to 41) deals with a particular kind of land tenure called ilkum: plots of land granted by the crown to soldiers, fishermen and other dependants in return for service. Such land could not be sold, and if a soldier was captured in war and his son was able to perform the service, the son inherited the plot. This is the military shepherd in his clearest form. The king paid his fighting men in land; the land was worked by others; and the arrangement tied the soldier's family to the crown for generations. Hammurabi's surviving letters to his officials in the conquered south, such as his correspondence with a man named Shamash-hazir at Larsa, are full of disputes over exactly such allotments: who holds which field, whose service is owed, which claim the king will uphold.

Was it law at all?

One more fact about Hammurabi's laws matters for this book's argument. Despite their fame, there is surprisingly little evidence that judges in Old Babylonian courts actually used them. Thousands of legal documents survive from the period — contracts, records of lawsuits, verdicts — and they almost never cite the king's laws. Many Assyriologists, including F. R. Kraus and Jean Bottéro, concluded that the collection was not a code in the modern sense at all, but a work of royal self-presentation and scholarly jurisprudence: a set of model verdicts demonstrating the king's wisdom, framed by a prologue and epilogue proclaiming his divine appointment. Others, notably Raymond Westbrook, argued that it reflects a real legal tradition and may have served as a reference for judges. The debate continues, and both views may be partly right.

Either way, the stele's political function is plain. Hammurabi was not the first Mesopotamian king to publish laws. The collection attributed to Ur-Nammu, about three centuries earlier, already contains a prologue boasting that the king did not deliver the orphan to the rich, the widow to the powerful, or the man of one shekel to the man of one mina. What Hammurabi did was to perfect the form. The law became a story about the king: a demonstration that the owner of the farm was its protector, that the ranks of society were the order of justice, and that the gods had willed both.

This is perhaps the most enduring invention of the Bronze Age. Divine kings have come and gone. But the idea that the ruling order is the embodiment of justice — that the law which protects the powerful is the same law which protects the weak, and that both should be grateful for it — has never gone out of use.

The priests' estates

If the king was the owner of the farm, who were his shepherds? In the Bronze Age, the answer more and more often was the priesthood.

This needs some care. "Priest" in the ancient Near East covered a vast range of people, from the high priest of a major god — usually a member of the ruling elite, often a relative of the king — to the part-time ritual specialists, singers, cleaners, butchers and bakers who served in the temples on a rotating basis and spent the rest of their lives as ordinary farmers and craftsmen. Not every temple servant was part of the 1%. But the great temples were among the largest landholders, employers and lenders in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the people who ran them were among the most powerful people in the land.

One example from Old Babylonian Mesopotamia shows how religious and economic power could be bound together. At the city of Sippar, the temple of the sun god Shamash was associated with a community of women known as nadītum. They were often the daughters of wealthy families, dedicated to the god, living in a walled compound and forbidden to bear children. Many of them were also active businesswomen: they received a share of their family's property as a kind of dowry, bought and leased fields, lent silver and grain at interest, and managed their estates through agents. When a nadītum died, her property generally returned to her birth family. The historian Rivkah Harris, who studied their archives, showed how this institution helped wealthy families keep property together while placing a daughter close to the god. Piety, property and lending were part of the same arrangement.

In Egypt, the temples' wealth reached a scale that is hard to imagine. The greatest beneficiary was the god Amun of Thebes, whose temple at Karnak grew under the kings of the New Kingdom (about 1550–1070 BCE) into one of the largest religious complexes ever built. Pharaohs who won wars sent prisoners, livestock and treasure to Amun in thanks; pharaohs who wished to be remembered endowed his temple with estates. The most detailed record is the Great Harris Papyrus (Papyrus Harris I), compiled at the death of Ramesses III around 1155 BCE. It lists the king's gifts to the gods during his reign. According to the standard reading of the papyrus, the Theban temples of Amun at that time controlled some 86,486 people, 421,362 head of livestock, 433 gardens and orchards, dozens of ships and workshops, and scores of towns, as well as vast areas of fields in Egypt and its foreign territories. How large a share of Egypt's land all the temples together held is disputed — estimates by modern scholars have ranged from under a tenth to around a third of the cultivable land — and much temple land was still subject to some royal taxation. But there is no doubt that the god of Thebes, and therefore his priests, had become one of the greatest landlords in the ancient world.

Royal decrees protected this wealth fiercely. The Nauri Decree of Seti I, carved into a cliff in Nubia around 1300 BCE, forbade any official from conscripting the workers of the temple estate of Osiris at Abydos, seizing its boats, cattle or fishermen, or interfering with its property. The penalties it lays down for offenders include beatings of two hundred blows, open wounds, and the cutting off of noses and ears. The temple's dependants were protected — but they were protected as the temple's property, from rivals who wanted to use them, not as people with rights of their own.

The divine kingship of the pharaohs was itself a work of the priesthood. When Hatshepsut, a woman, took the throne as king around 1473 BCE, she had her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari decorated with a sequence of reliefs showing her divine birth: the god Amun, in the form of her father, King Thutmose I, visiting her mother, Queen Ahmose, and the infant Hatshepsut being shaped on the potter's wheel of the creator god Khnum. Amun was her true father; her kingship was his will. The relationship ran both ways. The kings gave Amun his estates; Amun's priests gave the kings their divinity.

The king against the priests

There was one famous attempt to break that bargain.

Around 1350 BCE the pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and launched the most radical religious revolution in Egyptian history. He elevated the Aten, the disk of the sun, above all other gods, closed or neglected the temples of Amun and the other traditional deities, had Amun's name chiselled out of monuments across the country, and built a new capital on a virgin site in Middle Egypt, Akhetaten, known today as Amarna. In the new religion, the king and his family were the only intermediaries between the Aten and humanity. Courtiers prayed not to the god directly but to the king.

Historians have argued for a century about what drove Akhenaten: sincere religious conviction, a bid to break the power of Amun's wealthy priesthood, or some mixture of both. Through the lens of this book, the episode reveals a conflict at the top of the farm — an attempt by the 0.01% to cut out a branch of the 1% that had grown too powerful. And it reveals who paid for it. Excavations of the non-elite cemeteries at Amarna by Barry Kemp's Amarna Project, with bioarchaeologists including Jerome Rose and Gretchen Dabbs, have found skeletons with high rates of injuries consistent with heavy labour, signs of poor nutrition, and many people who died young. The researchers have linked these findings to the pressure of building an entire capital city in a few years. A revolution at the top did not lighten the load at the bottom.

The revolution did not outlive its maker. Within a few years of Akhenaten's death, his successor — the boy king who changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun — had abandoned Amarna. A Restoration Stela set up at Karnak in his name describes a land in chaos because the gods had been neglected, and announces that the temples have been restored, their priests appointed from among the sons of notable families, and their property renewed. The priests had won. Akhenaten's name was later struck from the king lists. A pharaoh had tried to take the story back from its custodians and been written out of it.

Three centuries later, the custodians took more than the story. As royal power weakened at the end of the New Kingdom, the high priests of Amun at Thebes became the effective rulers of southern Egypt. Around 1080 BCE one of them, Herihor, had himself depicted with royal titles in the temple of Khonsu at Karnak. For the next century and more, Upper Egypt was governed by a line of priest-generals. The shepherds had become owners of a part of the farm in their own right.

Breakouts: the people who walked away

So far this chapter has described conflicts within the elite: conquerors against old dynasties, kings against priests, one city's god against another's. What about the 99%?

Much of their resistance is visible only indirectly, through the efforts made to prevent it. Hammurabi's laws against helping runaways would not have been needed if nobody ran. Treaties between Bronze Age kings very often included clauses for the return of fugitives. And in the fourteenth century BCE, a group of people appear in the records who seem to embody the breakout in its simplest form.

The Amarna letters — some 380 clay tablets of diplomatic correspondence found at Akhenaten's capital — include dozens of letters from the rulers of small city-states in Canaan, who were vassals of the pharaoh. Many of them complain about people called ʿapiru (or habiru). The word did not designate an ethnic group. It referred to people who had left their place in settled society — fugitive peasants, debtors, deserters, outlaws — and who lived on the margins, sometimes as bandits, sometimes as mercenaries hired by one city against another. Rib-Hadda, the ruler of Byblos, wrote letter after letter to the pharaoh complaining that his lands were being lost to the ʿapiru and that his own peasants were going over to them. To the rulers, the ʿapiru were a plague. To the people who joined them, they were presumably an escape.

Whether the ʿapiru had anything to do with the later Hebrews, whose name is similar, has been debated for more than a century, and most scholars today are cautious about any direct connection. Some historians, such as Norman Gottwald, went further and argued that early Israel itself emerged from a revolt or withdrawal of Canaanite peasants from the city-states — a theory that remains controversial. What is clear is that the Bronze Age farm had leaky fences, and that its owners spent a good deal of effort trying to repair them.

The great collapse

Then, around 1200 BCE, the fences fell down altogether.

Over a few decades, the interconnected palace societies of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. The Hittite empire in Anatolia disintegrated. The great trading city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast was destroyed; among the last tablets from its archives is a letter from its king, Ammurapi, to the king of Cyprus, describing enemy ships burning his towns while his own troops and ships were away. Egypt survived, but only after fighting off invasions by the groups it called the "Sea Peoples", and it emerged much weaker. In Greece, the Mycenaean palaces at Pylos, Mycenae and elsewhere were destroyed or abandoned.

The causes are still debated: drought, earthquakes, invasions and migrations, the breakdown of long-distance trade, internal revolts, or, most likely, several of these acting together on societies that had become too rigid to adapt. What the collapse did to the farm, however, is easier to see.

The Mycenaean palaces kept their records in a script called Linear B, deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris. When the tablets were read, they turned out — like the archaic tablets of Uruk — to be almost entirely administrative: inventories of chariots, bronze, perfumed oil, livestock and land, and lists of workers and their rations. Among them are tablets from Pylos listing groups of women and children assigned to tasks such as grinding grain and working textiles, some identified by place-names on the coast of Asia Minor, such as Miletus and Knidos. Many scholars interpret these women as captives or purchased slaves. The palace counted them and fed them, as the great households of Ur had counted and fed their weavers a thousand years before.

When the palaces fell, Linear B fell with them. For roughly four centuries, the Greek world appears to have had no writing at all. The ledger vanished. The population shrank, many settlements were abandoned, and long-distance trade dwindled. By any ordinary measure, it was a catastrophe, and it is traditionally called a "dark age".

But Walter Scheidel, in The Great Leveler, uses this very collapse as one of his examples of how state failure reduces inequality. When the palaces disappeared, so did the elite that had lived off them. Burials became more uniform; the extravagant grave goods of the palace era vanished; the enormous concentrations of wealth that the palace system had made possible were gone. Life for most people was poorer and more precarious, but the gap between top and bottom had narrowed sharply. The farm had not been reformed. It had burned down. This is the bleakest of the breakouts in this book, and the one that its owners have always feared most — because it is the one in which they, too, lose everything.

What the Bronze Age added

By the end of the Bronze Age, the human farm had acquired its classic form. To the fence, the feed and the shepherds of the first harvest, the empires added three things.

The first was scale. Sargon and his successors showed that one owner could farm many cities, using standing armies, appointed governors and family members placed in key religious posts. Empire was, among other things, a way of making the farm bigger than any one community could resist.

The second was legitimacy as a system. The Bronze Age kings did not merely claim the gods' favour; they built an apparatus to display it. Royal inscriptions, statues, steles, king lists, hymns sung in schools, birth legends carved in temples and law collections set up in public all said the same thing: this order is the will of heaven, and its head is either chosen by the gods or one of them. Weber's three types of authority — tradition, charisma and law — were all being used together.

The third was the priesthood as an estate. The temples were the farm's most important managers: they owned land and herds, employed and fed thousands of people, lent at interest, trained the scribes, preserved the literature and, crucially, conferred or withheld the sacred approval on which kings depended. They were the first 1% powerful enough to bargain with the 0.01% as something close to equals — and, in Thebes, eventually to replace them.

The breakouts of the period were mostly of two kinds. There was quiet escape — the runaways of Hammurabi's laws, the ʿapiru of the Amarna letters. And there was collapse — the end of Akkad, the end of Ur, and finally the great collapse of around 1200 BCE, which levelled the palace societies by destroying them. Neither was a revolution in the modern sense. In the Bronze Age, it seems, the 99% could leave the farm, or watch it burn; they could not yet take it over.

Bridge: the cities without kings

That would change in the Greek world that slowly re-emerged from the dark age. When writing returned to Greece in the eighth century BCE, it was a new alphabet, borrowed from the Phoenicians, rather than the palace script of the Mycenaean scribes. The new communities that grew up were small and fiercely independent city-states, many of them with no kings at all. They were not free of the farm. Within a couple of centuries, the old disease of debt had returned: by the early sixth century BCE, according to our sources, many poor Athenian farmers had fallen into dependence on the rich, and some had been sold into slavery abroad. In 594 BCE the Athenians gave an aristocrat named Solon extraordinary powers to resolve the crisis. His first measure was called the seisachtheia — the "shaking off of burdens" — a cancellation of debts and a ban on enslaving citizens for debt. It was the Bronze Age clean slate, reborn in a society without a god-king.

What followed was one of the most famous experiments in history: rule by the citizens themselves. In the next chapter we will see how Athens invented democracy, how Rome invented the republic — and how both were built on the backs of people who were not counted as citizens at all.