How Households Drive History

The Example of Sumer

You’ve been taught history backwards.

History books tell you about different countries and who their rulers invaded, the events of the kings’ courts, the big battles, and that’s mostly it. If you go to a museum, you might also see some forts, some weapons, paintings of the powerful, some daily objects if you’re lucky, and in passing, they might mention something like: “Their main sources of income were grain and cloth trading.”

The real story is that last little sentence. Why did one country go to war with another? “For glory and power” you might say, but is that really all the story? And where did that power come from? Or the wealth of the defendant? What determined who prevailed?

All of that was determined by economics, and economics, in turn, are driven by the needs of households. So let’s go visit a household in Ancient Mesopotamia in 2000 BC.

What Was Life Like in Mesopotamia in 2000 BC?

We’re in the 3^rd dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian kingdom in Mesopotamia:¹

Source

Nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this was one of the most fertile regions in the world (water plus sediments), so home to a large population, because food became people. Population meant money and soldiers, so the earliest and strongest powers always came from places like this.

In Sumer, the world revolved around the agriculture of barley.

This is the best image I could generate to give you a sense of what that was like. The image isn’t perfect, but from what I can gather it’s not too far from what the reality of the moment would have been like. I’m sure I made mistakes, the goal is to get a visceral sense. If you note mistakes, please send them to me. Things to note: There is the main river, and a hierarchy of canals distributing water from it. Gangs are working on the infrastructure: the levees, dredging silt from the canals, the sluice gates to let water through, etc. Gangs of farmers are working on the fields with their oxen. They were teams of three workers and two oxen (so the gang with four is wrong). One of the men would lead the oxen, another guide and push down the ard plough into the ground in the back, another put seeds into the feeder (this one the AI couldn’t do well). A shadoof is taking water from the canal and putting it on the fields to irrigate them. Notice that this one is not on the right bank of the canals. There would be reeds and palm trees on the sides of the canals. The palm trees would give dates. The reeds were used for all sorts of things, such as construction and baskets. You have a shepherd with a few brown sheep, the standard at the time. They were already being bred to be white, and those that were closer were traded at a premium. There are a couple of boats carrying some goods. You can see the city with a terraced temple all the way to the back. The city is probably not where these workers come from because it's too far.

This means making canals that take water from the Tigris or Euphrates and distribute it into smaller and smaller canals until every field can be flooded, then plowed and sown. Gangs must take care of the irrigation system, while others plow the fields, and yet others transport it. Grain is the source of most calories, it’s what makes cities and kingdoms big, because it can feed many mouths. But farming barley is just the beginning.

This is to give you a feel, it’s not perfectly accurate. I wanted to show a couple of two with four children, all working in the household except for the smallest. The mother was milling barley up to 5 hours a day (!). A boy would fetch water, a daughter would be cooking, anther would be working on the textiles, the man here is shown maintaining the shelter. Note there are several mistakes: That grinding stone would only appear 500 years later, the actual one at the time was a saddle quern. The loom was also not like this, it would have been a horizontal ground loom. The space is too big, this looks like a small plaza. The sheep would have been mostly brown, and so would the wool as a result. I’ll be working in the coming weeks to make these images more accurate.

Getting the grain was just the beginning. You had to soak, dehusk, winnow, sieve, grind, toast, cook… Of course, that also meant getting pots and fetching water and fuel, tasks that took a long time too. And you had to produce more food to sell, so you could buy other stuff, including other things besides grain. Overall, over 50% of a household’s time was spent on food.

Then you had to make your clothes, build and maintain your house, transport stuff, sell some of your production to the market, work for the state (as a farmer, a ditch maintainer, or a fighter, for example), take care of the children... Of course, everybody helped since they were pretty young, but it was brutal work, day in, day out.²

Source: Tomas Pueyo for Uncharted Territories. I’ll leave the methodology in the footnote.

Notice how different this is from our lives! We still have childcare, household coordination, trading, institutional work (ie, the work we do to pay taxes), cooking, and cleaning, but everything else we buy, which we can afford by doing one single job (usually) which is way better than doing these tasks.³ They worked substantially more than us, doing much harder work, among other reasons because they had to do most stuff for themselves.

There were a few things they consumed that they couldn’t make themselves, though, and that’s the key to history.

When Farmers Needed Others

Coordination

There are many things farmers simply couldn’t do alone, like building and maintaining irrigation systems. You have to dig the canals, build the levees, open and close ditches, and above all constantly dredge them to fight silting. These canals were extremely long, no single household could do all this, so they needed to coordinate so that everybody chipped in, which means they also needed to coerce people to work. So that was one of the key roles of the state, one of the reasons it emerged.

Since the value of land was a direct consequence of the locations of the canals, it was also coordinated by the state. Land was allocated, and habitation land was dirt cheap—unlike today.

I wrote much more about how this shaped the cities and kingdoms of the regions in this article. Here’s an extract:

In Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates channel in and out, forming a network of rivers between them.

Rivers and canals in Mesopotamia

Floods don’t happen just before sowing, like in the Nile. They come at harvest time. Therefore, water needs to be tightly managed:

• When sowing, little water was available, so it was precious. It had to be used sparingly.

• When harvesting, floods came, and water had to be managed in a completely different way.

There is a fresh water table and a salty water table, which determines which soil is fertile, which soil can be reclaimed from marshes, and which fields had to remain fallow. If you look at the diagram above, you’ll see the A-B line. Its cross-section is below:

You had orchards, gardens, cereal fields, marginal fields, and marshes, all of which needed to be managed. Canals would bring water during dry times to irrigate the soil. Some fields had to be left to fallow, others had to be reclaimed from the marshes. Marshes could be used for reed and fish.

But which canals should be opened and when? What fields should be left to fallow? How much water could be tapped through wells? What marginal lands could be reclaimed? How high was the salty water table? Most of these decisions required knowledge of local conditions that varied throughout the seasons and were unique to each parcel of land, so the people who managed these fields in Mesopotamia were not easy to replace. In fact, productivity would plummet with the wrong managers at the top. So distant kings couldn’t use this stick to control local managers.

However, local rulers did understand all these nuances, and they controlled access to water during the dry times, so they were able to exact taxes that distant kings couldn’t. This is why rulers were local and not distant, and hence why Lower Mesopotamia had many city-states but no strong and enduring kingdoms and empires until much later.

Besides water, the state had other roles.

Oxen were expensive, and a household didn’t need one full time, so it made sense to share that asset too: Today, you help me plough my field with the group’s oxen, tomorrow I’ll help you. The same logic is valid for the plough itself.

Yet another function that the state could sometimes perform. In some cases, seed was also provided by the state for sowing. It also makes sense, as centralizing grain is a sort of insurance, and it’s cheaper to maintain one large granary than lots of small ones.

All of this could be done locally, so it required social coordination (which evolved into states), but not much more than that. The next level was trade.

The Role of Scarce Resources

This is what people had to buy from the market:

Source: Tomas Pueyo for Uncharted Territories. The methodology is the same as for the other graph.

Other Food

You can’t survive just on grain or your vegetable garden. People also bought fish, meat, dairy, dates, vegetables, salt, condiments… Many of these required specialized people: fishermen, shepherds, date farmers, salt producers… But in the case of Ur, most of these could be done relatively close by, by people who didn’t possess unique knowledge, and without unique resources. Salt could be quite unique in other parts of the world, but not here.

Pottery

What do you put your food on? Pottery plates. You also used pottery for storage.

Source

Pottery needs three things: clay, kilns (ovens), and expertise.

Source

Clay is quite common, but it’s not literally everywhere. Kilns require big investments, because the bigger they are, the hotter they can get. Pottery needed enough skill that potters had to specialize. The result is that pottery tended to have some sort of state coordination, but owning a pottery operation didn’t get you very much political power, only maybe in your area.

Timber

Timber is a bit harder to get. In Mesopotamia, farmers could grow reed and palm trees, but neither are great for construction. For that, you need long, strong beams, which had to be imported. But there are lots of sources of timber, and it could be floated downstream, so the result was that there wasn’t too much political power to be gained by controlling its trade, even though local civilizations or kingdoms could emerge based on the trade of timber. In fact, that’s exactly how Phoenicians emerged, just around that time, in what’s today mostly Lebanon. This is a satellite map of the area today:

Source: NASA

You can see how these mountains catch snow and rain, irrigating the mountainside that can’t be easily farmed, so the trees were not cleared, and Phoenicia became one of the biggest sources of timber for both Mesopotamia and Egypt.

As I’ve written in the past, Phoenicians were the first civilization to spread across the Mediterranean, and it’s not hard to understand why: Anatolia and Mesopotamia are where civilization emerged in the area, and Phoenicia is one of their closest coasts. But unlike the other ones (the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), there’s plenty of timber here, needed for ships, so Phoenicians made their ships and sailed around the Mediterranean. This advantage would allow them to found colonies left and right in the Mediterranean around 1,000 years later.

Copper

Now we’re really talking. Metals like it can explain, among other things, the predecessors of Bahrain and Oman.