Page 28 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

IO Bronze and Stone

mensely fertile alluvial dirt, land which even according to his
own tax returns (we have them) gave a yield of thirty-three
times his outlay in seed corn. But to farm this safely and con­
sistently he needed a complicated and expensive system of wa­
ter control. And he needed tools. Elsewhere tools could be made
on the spot, by the farmer, of timber and of stone. But the alluvial
mud of lower Mesopotamia contains not a single stone, and could
not support hardwoods. From the very beginning the settlers in
this region had been faced with the urgent necessity of producing
not merely enough to live on, but a surplus which could be traded
for essential equipment, for hoes and sickle blades and spades
and hammers. This involved at a very early stage the establish­
ment of a central authority which could organize canal con­

struction on an economically large enough scale, and which
could arrange the marketing of the surplus agricultural produce
in the regions outside the alluvial area, and the purchase there
of the missing raw materials. The result was, again so long ago
that its origins were lost in the mists of antiquity, the city-state,
consisting of an urban center of trade, manufacture, and ad­
ministration, supporting and supported by a surrounding area
of farmland and farming villages. And the city-state is an in­
dependent, or semi-independent, political entity.
An incidental result, too, is that the farmer is not nearly so
typical an inhabitant of Mesopotamia as he is of Egypt. The
organized artisan and the organized businessman are very nu­

merous—and very vocal—in the city-states. And just now they
are becoming very much more vocal, for a most interesting reason.
The city-state has from the beginning been a closely knit
administrative unity. And the form the administration has taken
is one that undoubtedly by a present-day observer would be
called communist. It is necessary to be very careful in applying
modem terminology to earlier ways of life, and the parallel here
is not of course point by point exact. But it is close enough to be
very suggestive.
The means of production in the state are owned by the god
of the state and administered by a governor who is also the chief
priest of the god. The body of priests forms the administration
acting on the authority of the governor. The inhabitants of the