The Legible Society

In part four of Planet of the Barbarians: how early city-states used the world’s first information technology to finally close the agrarian trap.

[In the first three installments of this series, I explored how the widely accepted idea that agriculture was a sudden, catastrophic trap—a “colossal downgrade” popularized by writers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari—misses a massive chapter of our history. Recent scholarship has revealed that humans actually spent roughly 4,000 years enjoying mix of foraging and managed resources without submitting to the grueling toil of full-time farming or the tax collectors of an early agrarian state.]

If the adoption of agriculture wasn’t the immediate catalyst for the miseries of the early state, if our ancestors spent four thousand years happily dabbling in part-time farming without being conscripted into forced labor, what finally caused the agrarian trap to snap shut?

Start with the basic facts of the timeline. The first agricultural states were established around 3200 BCE, most notably in the expanding Bronze Age city-state of Uruk, followed shortly thereafter by the neighboring city of Ur. Centralized authorities, typically embodied by priest-kings or secular rulers, emerged to manage the logistics of a newly complex economy, overseeing the collection of agricultural surplus to support a burgeoning class of non-agricultural specialists. Subsistence gave way to extraction; most of the population worked to generate food not just for themselves and their families, but to support the increasingly lavish lifestyles of the administrative elite.

The emergence of statehood was dependent on a few critical ingredients. One of them, as James Scott powerfully explains, was the biological nature of grain itself. It was harvested in regular cycles; it could be weighed, transported, and divided up in even units far more easily than rival crops in other places where agriculture developed. Because grain was, in Scott’s words, uniquely “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable,’” it possessed an innate compatibility with a tax collecting regime that simply did not exist for the diverse staples of the earlier wetlands diet. A community subsisting on fish, waterfowl, and wild plants relied on common-property resources governed by a shifting web of natural rhythms. Even other domesticated foods like root crops and tubers proved remarkably resistant to the tax collector, because they grow underground and can safely be left in the soil for months, even years. All of which allows farmers to harvest them piecemeal as needed, making it virtually impossible for a tax collector to assess the yield or confiscate a surplus. Grains, on the other hand, grow visibly above ground, ripen all at once, and must be harvested and stored immediately, making them an easy target for centralized extraction.

But if there was something in the biological reality of grain that made it eminently “divisible” and “assessable,” our ancestors still needed a mechanism for recording and keeping track of those assessments. According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s influential “token-to-tablet” theory, the administrative origins of the state date back to a surprisingly simple Neolithic counting system that first appeared as early as 8000 BCE. Long before anyone drew an abstract symbol, these early record-keepers used small clay tokens shaped into basic geometric forms—cones, spheres, disks, and cylinders—to function as physical counters for specific goods: a small cone might represent a specific measure of grain, while a sphere represented a larger measure. For thousands of years, this tactile, three-dimensional system provided a primitive but remarkably effective means of resource tracking.

Clay accounting tokens used inside of a bulla (Marie-Lan Nguyen 2009)

Around 3500 BCE, someone hit upon the idea of enclosing these tokens within hollow clay envelopes called bullae. To allow an observer to verify the contents without breaking the seal, the citizens of Uruk began pressing the tokens into the wet clay exterior of the envelope before it dried. It was a clever security hack, but pressing those shapes into the clay also opened a new door in the adjacent possible. By transforming a physical, three-dimensional counter into a two-dimensional sign, these early accountants made a momentous step towards history’s inaugural information technology: writing.