Empire: World History - 49. The Dawn of Everything

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Is slavery hardwired into society? Is hierarchy inevitable? Who built the pyramids? Listen as William and Anita are joined by David Wengrow to discuss slavery in the world’s most ancient civilizations. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. So that's a quote from someone called Theodore Dwight Weld. He's a prominent American abolitionist. from the 19th century, and it outlines the horrors of slavery, American slavery, the transatlantic

slave trade. That's something we're going to come on to a bit later in this series. But today, in this our first episode of the new series on slavery, we're going to focus on slavery at the very beginnings of human existence. And we've got a very special guest, haven't we, William? Oh, so exciting. This is my fanboy moment. I spent my Christmas holidays reading David Wengra's wonderful, orange Bible, as it's known in my family now, because it's carried it around with me all over the Christmas hole, the dawn of everything, a new history of humanity, which David published last year, tragically just immediately after the death of his co-author, David Graber. And the book got astonishing reviews around the world. It's one of the most successful

non-fiction books to come out of this country in America, propelling the two Davids into the top of the bestseller list with extraordinary coverage. across the globe and we're very, very lucky to have David here. I mean, that's what he's saying to your face behind your back. He's been sending me pictures of your billboards going, oh, bloody hell, he's got another billboard. He's gone all over, New York. This one's in New York.

This one's in California. Yes, I know. I followed your progress too. This doesn't happen to academic. We're just trying, we're trying to break the mold. I hadn't realized that paperbacks are not really a thing in the US, the way that they are in the UK. So I got there and I was like, oh, where are the posters? We don't really do those. Come on, make an effort. And they did. Boy, did they. There's a reason for this, which is that the

daughter of everything is one of those books that makes you look at everything differently. It's one of those huge books that makes a very brave decision by academics to leave their little area of speciality and to look at the huge spread of human history. It's the kind of thing Peter Frankopan's been doing for climate lately. Again, a very brave decision. I think if you're in an ivory tower with lots of jealous colleagues sniping at you potentially for getting out of your little specialist rabbit hole. But this is, as the subtitle says, a new history of humanity. And that's why we've chosen David to start this series. Because what this book does is it tells us things about the nature of what it means to be human. And tragically, one of the essential features of

of human history, which is what is analyzed in this book, is the whole question of hierarchy, free and unfree. So that's why we've chosen this as the opening. So at this point, I want to talk to David. At this point, I'd like to ask David a question. Yeah, you can see he's mad keen on you, David. Right, so this is a very, very simple question. Okay, when you have taken a survey of everything or that is human,

Is it just inevitable? Is it built into the human psyche that once we get a little bit of power, we become really unpleasant and enslave other people to do our will? Well, that's what the standard narrative tells you in a way. And this is the story that we challenge in our book, The Dawn of Everything. It's a story that begins with humans living initially in a sort of prolonged innocence as how, to gatherers living a nomadic existence in tiny bands. Then comes the dawn of agriculture, and with that, supposedly, the first growth of material surpluses and private property.

And that is supposed to lead to two things, both the rise of cities and civilization, but also the sort of spiraling inequality and the exploitation of the masses by the elites, presumably including slavery. So the very process of civilization, according to our standard narrative, is supposed to sort of cumulatively amplify all those worst instincts that you've referred to, Anita. But actually, as we show in the dawn of everything, almost nothing about that conventional story is actually true. We know now that hunter-gatherers actually developed many different kinds of political societies before the coming of agriculture. We know that some of the world's first cities were actually remarkably egalitarian,

and we can come back to that maybe. So while we might be tempted to think that slavery has its origins with the appearance of large kingdoms and empires, actually the evidence of archaeology and anthropology suggests something different. So here's another general question. At what point did we decide to be shits to each other? Let me put it that way. I mean, it's not the most academic question you've ever heard.

But what is it? Is it a timeline issue? Is it an ambition issue that the more we wanted to build, the higher we wanted to build, the bigger we wanted to be, we started to treat our fellow human beings terribly? I would push back very strongly against that thesis. I think we have a huge amount of evidence now for societies that actually flourished and experienced great prosperity without being complete shits to each other. I'm not describing some utopian state of perfect equality or freedom,

but certainly not the worst excesses of inequality that are exactly encapsulated by slavery. And this has nothing to do with modes of production, and I just want to get this clear right at the beginning. It's very likely that slavery in some form or another actually predates the origins of agriculture, and there are many examples in more recent history of hunter-gatherer societies who kept slaves. But, intriguingly, as David Greber and I discover in the book, there are also examples of hunter-gatherer societies that abolished slavery in relatively recent times and developed

systems, moral systems, ethical systems to stop it coming back. So it's actually highly unlikely, and I think this is a key point for the broader historical picture. It's highly unlikely that abolishing slavery is something that just happened once or twice in human history. Actually, it's likely to have happened many, many times. That's absolutely fascinating. How do you tell that archaeologically? How can you look at an ancient site and see an absence of hierarchy or even the existence of freedom and not unfreedom? I often get that response of, well, how do you study something like freedom in prehistory, to which the obvious answer is we've been studying domination for a very long time using exactly the same

evidence. But actually in the cases I'm thinking of, we have written sources because we're talking about ethno histories going back over perhaps one or two centuries, but indigenous cultures that had perhaps neighbouring societies who had practiced slavery for as long as anyone can remember. And archaeologists pick this up as well. But who show every trace in their own culture, in their rituals, in their narratives, in their oral histories for having very consciously done away with that. Brilliant. Now, David, you talk about this extraordinary site at Gobliqi Tepe in Turkey, which the more one looks at the more extraordinary it is. I mean, we all grew up on... Describe what it looks like. For those of us who've never even heard that term before, what does it refer to? What place in the world? What does it look like?

Gebeckli-Tepa is a site in the Valley of Urfa, close to the modern border between Turkey and Syria. It features these stone monuments and buildings which really are very striking. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call them temples, three-meter-high monoliths with very vivid carvings of wild and ferocious animals, freestanding monumental sculpture. And the incredible thing is that all of this dates back many thousands of years before Stonehenge, before the pyramids. We have to go back actually to the end of the last Ice Age and the beginnings of the Holocene Geological era. So we're going back in time at least 10,000 years to a period when agriculture has not yet emerged. So these are still societies living primarily on wild resources.

losses, but at the same time building these great centres. So how does that work, David? Because one of those things that were always taught when we read V. Gordon Child, is you don't get proper building, you don't get monumental building, certainly, until you get a settled society. And for a settled society, the idea is that you have to have fields and harvest. You can't just go out and sort of, you know, take blackberries off the bushes and come back and build the enormous temple. Yeah. This is another of those ideas that sounds like common sense,

but which really, if we take the evidence seriously, we just have to abandon this notion these days, because you have many examples, not just Quebec Ltepe, but sites like Poverty Point in North America, in Louisiana. With Quebecletepe, the science is really good, so we can say certain things about this process. We can't, of course, reconstruct precisely the labor arrangements or anything like that. But for example, there have been very detailed studies of animal bones. One of the intriguing things about these great stone temples is that they're actually full of junk. What seems to have happened is that they constructed them, had an enormous party, and then tossed all the refuse into the buildings, effectively taking them out of commission again. So, you know,

we tend to see something built in stone and we assume that it's there like an artwork to be admired forever. You're basically describing a teenage party where they trash the joint. In effect, that's what the equivalent is. Yeah, I don't want to give the impression that this was like the Bullingdon Club in the early Neolithic or something. But for example, we know from very clever isotopic studies of gazelle bones that you had huge migrations of gazelle coming through the Orpha Valley periodically, perhaps once or at most twice a year. So you would have times of enormous richness and abundance and a superfluity of meat and hides, and then other times of relative sparsity. So more than likely, we're talking about societies that pulsed

in and out and actually changed their demographic and social arrangements in quite radical ways. And this is not an uncommon thing for human populations that live mostly with wild resources. But then reading, you know, that landscape, do we know what this great edit? was for? Was it, I mean, what makes you think that it was anything more than a way to keep away from the elements? I mean, what do you think it was for? These buildings don't seem to have any obvious utilitarian function of that kind. They're not really the kind of places you would live in all year round. They really do seem to be statements in architecture of cosmological beliefs and ideas and probably myths. I mean, some of the images appear to narrate scenes,

which may be these people's idea of where they come from and what humanity is in relation to the non-human world. So, you know, we're talking about values that we would describe today as art and ritual. We're not talking about societies living on the poverty line, just sort of scraping by, you know, picking a few berries. We're talking about societies that clearly had sufficient resources to already engage in highly scientific observations and engineering feats that traditionally we've thought of as things that come after cities. Now we know actually they come not just before cities, but actually even before farming.

What does it say about hierarchy this site? I mean, do you get the impression that this is a society which is fair and equal, or is there already signs that you've got bosses and non-bosses? I think what it tells us fascinatingly is that these are societies that can turn hierarchy on and off. In other words, they can have periods of the year when they form into extremely hierarchical, probably stratified units. I mean, just to coordinate all of that stone carving and labor and even to decide on the scheme of a complex building like that. But then presumably there are other times of year when demographically things change, because there's no evidence at this time for anything like kingdoms or even sort of chiefly societies.

We don't see very rich burials in the archaeological record, for example. So we're not talking about one-dimensional societies, and this is an intriguing feature of hunter-gatherer societies in general and in prehistory as well, is that they seem to be able to almost perform hierarchy, almost as a sort of costume drama. So we see it in burials, we see it in ritual, but they're not in everyday life. So when you say you see it in burials, because this world is all familiar to you,

but a buried body to most people is just a buried body. What does the positioning or the geography of those buried bodies? What does it tell you? Well, we think it's normal to dig graves and put people in the ground. actually for most of human history, that's not what people did. The people who are buried in a way that we find familiar were often highly unusual and exceptional individuals. If we go back to the last ice age of Europe, the few burials that we do have actually look like royal burials. Archaeologists have given them nicknames like Il-Principé for one of the Italian examples.

There are examples in Russia all the way down to the Mediterranean. And if you took them out of context, bearing in mind that these actually date back to about 25,000 years ago, the last glacial maximum, if you just took them out of context and looked at them, you'd say, oh, this is clearly an aristocratic person of some sort, but this is the last ice age. So we see the lavish costumes and the regalia and the fancy weaponry in the ritual, but we don't particularly see it anywhere else. And again, these are cases where we can show these are societies that morph in and out.

You know, they might be hunting mammoth at one time of year. Again, period of huge richness and abundance, but then they can step out of that into a different kind of society at other times. I mean, we will come to this later in the series, but there are societies later that are demonstrably slave-owning societies. And what they do is that they give burial and ritual and significance to the death of people they care about. But to the slaves, they'll just basically toss them in a heap and let the dogs eat them. or leave them out, so they just rot in a pile. How far back does that attitude go, and when did you start finding that? The earliest example I can think of off the top of my head that might conceivably fall into that category

is a site in Syria, appropriately called Tel Mahznanuna, which means the mound of the insane woman. William, do not make the joke that's brewing and your head. I was thinking high thoughts about Leila Majnouin. Okay. So this is a strange place located outside one of the earliest cities in the world. And it is a kind of chaotic jumble of bodies. Some of them show signs of violence.

Some people think it's where perhaps bodies were dumped after some terrible conflict. But it's the first example I can think of off the top of my head of that kind of indiscriminate treatment of human remains. What sort of day two talking there, David? So this takes us back 6,000 years before the presence, so about 4,000 BC, something like that. So Goplektepe is in northern Mesopotamia, modern Eastern Turkey, but part of that world of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Going forward to about 3,200 BC, we end up in Uruk. What was Iraq?

Uruk is the modern place called Warka, which is in southern Iraq. Uruk is its ancient name. It appears in the Old Testament as Erech, and it's generally regarded by archaeologists as both the place where writing was invented and the earliest city in the world. We're talking about syllabic cuneiform script, which actually begins more or less as a form of mathematical notation, and is then sort of adapted to language. So, yeah, here we're going back to the civilization of the people who we know as Sumerians. Now, the Sumerians, apart from giving us the first cities and writing system, are also the first people we know of in history who actually thought of human labour in abstract terms. They actually have a word for physical work, making goods, performing services, which was counted in work days, in much the way that we're accustomed to. And we know this from these very early cuneiform tablets, these written inventories and other sort of bookkeepers. documents. There are slaves which are mentioned in those very early sources, but they seem to be very small in number. They don't seem to have played an important role in the economy. Mostly

they crop up as household servants or debt slaves who originate in the free population, and on repaying their debts, they would achieve manumission. Actually, the word for that in Samarian Amar Ghi is thought to be the first written word in history that means something along the lines of freedom, as we would understand it. Really, the first written word in history is freedom. But literally what it means is going back to mummy, return to mother. Oh, oh, that's very moving. That is very moving.

I mean, if there were permanent slaves, these would mostly have been people captured in war, so people regarded as foreigners. Often these were women who were distributed among the city's temples to work, particularly in weaving in the textile industry or in agriculture. We know from later sources that men who were captured could be blinded and put to work doing very repetitive tasks in orchards or temple gardens and things like that. And how do we know, though, blind? Because I'm just, again, just, I love your work.

I love this world of sort of treading through dust and finding these stories. I mean, you know, how do you know that the visor of an eyeball has gone from these people? How do you know? Or is that a cuneiform reference? You correctly surmise that we can't know that just from archaeology. These are periods when we have both archaeology and some quite detailed written sources to complement it. So information like that only really can come from written sources.

And we have them for ancient Mesopotamia because they inventing. writing and the adult literature in the world. So actually slavery seems not at any point in Mesopotamian history to have been a central feature of the economy the way that it would become, for example, in ancient Greece or Rome. So if you had monumental construction of which, of course, there is a lot, you have huge irrigation systems, ziggurats, temples and all the rest of it, road systems, city walls, where did all that labour come from. And what's the answer?

And what is the answer? Yes, we're on the end of our seats. Where did it come from, David? It is thought to come from something that historians call Corvay, Corvay systems. And what this means is that for, it's always sort of taking us back to these points about seasonality of labour, because it meant that for several months in a year, work was owed to the king or to the guards of the city. usually on those kind of big public projects like building temples or palaces or maintaining irrigation systems.

And many of those things, I guess, could be considered public goods. So in some way, Corvay is a bit like taxation. Or like National Service, where you have to give your time and body for a certain amount of time to the state? Yeah, exactly. Although it seems to have often taken place more on a seasonal than, you know, an annual or biennial basis. But the point is that the people who perform. form it are free people. By definition, they come from the free population. They are not slaves. How interesting. So it's not slaves building the ziggurat of her. It's free labor.

No. And if you were a very rich Mesopotamian, you could basically buy your way out of your Corvay service and get poor people to do it for you. But this would have been morally frowned upon. It seems to have been the done thing for people of all social classes, the literate, and the non-literate to perform Corvay. We even have depictions of kings, like Ornanshe of Lagash, this is going back to 2,500 BC, pictures of kings performing what look like very humble operations, carrying mud bricks to lay foundations for a temple. I'm fascinating.

But you have got kings. So you've got hierarchy. You've got royal, you've also got royal grades at a d'oeuvres, haven't you? And priests and priestesses, I guess. I mean, are they also part of the hierarchy? Yes. I mean, actually, religion is central to all this, and the Mesopotamians had a fascinating way of thinking about Corvay Labor.

They imagined it as something that came before kingship and even before cities. So in the Mesopotamian flood myth called Atrahasis, which actually gives us our prototype for the biblical figure of Noah, we learn in that story how the gods actually first made people, to do the Corvay on their behalf. So the Mesopotamian gods are very hands-on. They work. But they get sick of building their own irrigation canals.

So initially, they create sort of mini-gods to do the work for them. Then the mini-gods go on strike in the story. And that's why we exist. And what's the date of that sort of Proteine Noah story? When are we talking about? The earliest recorded versions of it go back to about 2000 BC. But they're almost certainly older those stories. Okay, so I'm really interested in this.

So apart from, you know, the very, very wealthy who managed to buy their way out, a story as old as time, it turns out, literally. But apart from them, I mean, all the other families who are giving members of their family for Corveh, I guess that actually makes a really egalitarian kind of, I don't want to use the word kibbutz, but that kind of thing where you don't, you know, you're all working together to the common aim. Is it like that? Well, we actually have hymns.

We have royal hymns from the reds. of a king called Gudea of Lagash, which give you exactly that feeling of this kind of festive labour, when everyone muddles in and actually even rolls get reversed. There's something of the carnival about it, maybe more than the kibbutz. There's a nice quote from your book, Women did not carry baskets, only the top warriors did the building for him. The whip did not strike. That's it. You got it. Wow, William, you really can cite chapter and verse. This is great. The word we've done here, David. Mother did not hit her child.

So can I. Mother did not hit her child. The general, the colonel, the captain and the conscript. They all shared their work equally. The supervision indeed was like soft wool in their hands. Lovely quote. Sometimes the party went on beyond the carnival because they would actually cancel debts on these occasions. Okay, but there is one line at the end of this quote, which gives me pause,

because it ends with the whip did not strike. Now, you can't talk about the whip did not strike unless there is a whip striking somewhere, because otherwise that's not a thing. So where is the whip striking? Where is, you know, all right, this is a lovely idea of everyone getting together, doing something for society, for the common good. But somewhere out there, there is a notion of a whip hand. And where's that coming? Oh, yeah. Well, the whip is striking most of the time.

We're talking about highly unequal societies with some of the world's first peasantries. So these are not societies to be in any way sort of idealised. However, unlike ours, for example, they do seem to have had a certain respite from all that and actually had some notion or held out some notion of a different kind of society, which came into effect in particular contexts. Okay, so you would say that the whip hand struck in a worker, sort of overseer kind of way, but not in a slave-owning kind of way. You're absolutely convinced.

Well, so slaves were definitely part of the picture, especially war captives. I mean, where are the slaves fitting into this? Because you're painting a picture of a lovely place that, you know, neither is mine being in. Everyone's mucking in, doing their bit. There's no arguments over the washing up. You've forgotten about the blinding and the poor women distributed in temples, making textiles all the time. But, I mean, actually what we do know is that slaves taken from other populations,

And this is true for ancient Egypt as well, were generally resettled on agricultural lands and became dependence of the king. May I ask you about the role of women in all of this? Because I've come across one character who I'm a little bit obsessed with, the daughter of Sargonne of Akkad from this kind of region. And Heduana, who supposedly wrote the first history of her kingdom. And that's about 2,300 BC, I think. I think there's dates around about there. Yeah, there was actually a lovely exhibition about her in New York at the Pierpont-Morgan Library. Oh, well, I can't wait for it to come here because I am getting a bit obsessed with her.

But it suggests to me that it's not an automatic condition of this hierarchy that women are at the bottom, because she's a high priestess and she rises to the top. That's right. And I am sure that that is absolutely fundamental to understanding the difference between these societies. I mean, ancient Greece, as we know, was a highly patriarchal society where women were totally excluded from public and political life. And I think that must be linked to the phenomenon of chattel slavery. Equally, I would say, in ancient Mesopotamia, we do have women in positions of really quite high status. So, David, we have this picture of Mesopotamia during the Sumerian period as a relatively egalitarian place. But some of the most horrific images of slavery and suffering that you can see from the ancient world is from the Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh and so on, where you see whole populations being impaled and being moved out with all their goods and women and children exiled with their flocks and so on.

That's right. I mean, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was a brutal machine of extraction. which displaced vast numbers of people and would have created slavery probably on an unprecedented scale. But there we've skipped ahead a couple of thousand years from ancient Sumer. So we're talking there about the first millennium BC. Well, before we hop, skip and jump any more, we have, I mean, I think this is so eye-opening. We have established that human beings don't automatically have to be shits or awful to each other. There are places steeped in antiquity where they weren't. We've got the big pyramid-shaped question coming up after this break.

So join us after the break. Who made the pyramids? Welcome back to Empire. Before we get into the business again, just to give you a heads up that next Tuesday, we have a very exciting announcement about our first live show. So hang on because on Tuesday that exciting bit of news is going to break. Welcome back. So we have the marvellous David Wengrove with us who has written this marvellous book, which William keep quoting to me, the Orange Bible, the dawn of everything, a new history of humanity. And we're very grateful that you're with us. When most people think of slavery, they will think, well, I do, of a big drum, the sound of heavum, hevo, that kind of big ropes, dragging big blocks of stone and making a pyramid. That's the image. that I have in my head. Your Brinner, sometimes just for my own amusement, is in all of these visions.

But, you know, that's the kind of thing that we think about. Tell me, who made the pyramids, David Wemgrove? This story has all changed in the last few decades. If you go back a few decades, there was this prevailing idea that the great pyramids of the Egyptian old kingdom, the pyramids of Kuf and Khafri and Mancawere on the Giza plateau must have been built by slave. So we're going back here to the fourth dynasty of Egypt, the 26th or 25th centuries BC. There was never any direct evidence for this. There is indirect evidence for the taking of captives in large numbers at that time by the Egyptian court. For example, there's a monument called the Palermo Stone, which carries inscriptions of royal annals.

So it names the achievements of particular kings in particular years. And in the reign of a king called Senephiru, who actually founded the 4th Dynasty, is recorded the capture of 7,000 men and women from Nubia, which today would lie within the lands of modern Sudan to the south, along with vast numbers of sheep and goats. And also lots of timber. We think of the pyramids as stone constructions, But a huge amount of wood was also necessary for their construction as part of the infrastructure of scaffolding and sledges and platforms, but also all that ornate panelling and the royal barks or boats which are buried alongside the pyramids.

And the best woods actually came. They all had to come from outside Egypt. It's floodplain. So the best ones actually came from Syria and Lebanon, these great cedars, where Egypt sent foreign expeditions and also took captive. There's actually a temple attached to the pyramid of a king called Sahure in the 5th dynasty where there's a scene of the goddess, Ceshat, actually recording the number of captives taken from all the foreign lands. So we have these Libyan tribesmen and their cattle being taken in the hundreds of thousands.

But you've got to remember, these are religious monuments. These are not straightforward fiscal records. They're intended to commemorate the superhuman achievements. of this or that king or queen. So we can't really take them at face value. But we also have sort of lesser figures in the old kingdom government who leave more information about what actually happened to foreign captives. I'll get back to the pyramids in just a moment and how this all relates.

But we do know, for example, that rather like in Mesopotamia, foreign captives were resettled eventually on agricultural lands owned by the court. And this is very clever because what the court does is slowly and gradually reorganize the countryside into a series of kind of dependencies. And the people living in these places are largely people who've been separated from their homes and their families and are therefore loyal to the crown. Egyptologists sometimes call this process internal colonization. The point is all these bits and pieces of written evidence are actually inconclusive when it comes to the

building of the pyramids themselves. They show us that captives were taken and resettled, although the numbers are probably inflated. They show that this coincided with these massive construction projects, but they don't tie the two things together in any explicit way. Now, a few decades ago, a whole picture of how this worked and how the pyramids were, in fact, built, started to change not as a result of new inscriptions, but actually because of archaeology. Go on. Go on. Don't start there.

What does that pause? Two people in different sides of the world almost fell off their chairs. Okay. What did you dig up? On the Giza plateau about 400 meters south of the Great Sphinx, archaeologists began to uncover this large settlement, which has come to be known as the Workers' Town, because it housed the labourers who built the pyramids.

Now, at first, it looked like something pretty consistent with the idea of slavery or bonded labor. There are these long barracks and galleries in orthogonal arrangements. It looks sort of a bit like a military camp. But actually, after many decades of studying the site, archaeologists have concluded it was nothing of the kind. Actually, whoever lived there was enjoying a rather wonderful standard of living, much better than that of ordinary villages. Though those great bakeries... Like one of these fancy hotels next to the pyramids today, the Mina House or the Taj Bengal or whatever. Bakeries, there are breweries, huge amounts of leavened bread, which they bake into these big communal loaves called Beja bread.

And enormous quantities of meat from the royal livestock pens. So these are things that would have been unavailable to ordinary labourers. That's so interesting because, yes, you absolutely don't hear about slaves having, you know, beer and state. That just isn't in the... It's the Bernie in of Giza. It gets even better. There are actually graffiti on the back of some of the blocks used to build the royal pyramids, where these labour crews have recorded their names.

And they usually call themselves something like the friends of the king, so the friends of Menkaure, or in one case, the drunkards, the drunk dudes of Menkowry. Now, clearly this is not a lifestyle. whatever you may aspire to. It's not a lifestyle you could keep up all year round or for very, very long. I know you try, William, but you've been to our job board at a festival. I was thinking it. You said it.

But it's not good for anybody. No secrets here, David. No secrets. But actually we can link these, you know, back to the organization of Labor, we can link these work crews to another kind of organization, which Egyptologists call the file system. So they use the ancient Greek word for a tribe or a clan. And these, again, are seasonal work units.

They're made up mostly of men who passed through rituals, initiation rituals. And they seem to have modeled themselves on the crew of a ship or a boat. And this is fascinating, because if you think about it, the kinds of team skills used for maritime travel and engineering are actually pretty similar to what it takes to manipulate multi-ton blocks for construction. And occasionally there are inscriptions that make that analogy explicit. There's one at the site of Sakara in northern Egypt, which shows you see a scene of workers pulling a sledge with masonry, but it's actually labeled with an inscription that says,

Behold, the dance of pulling the boat. Fascinating. So hang on a minute, just a minute. Are you telling me? Are you seriously telling me that Charlton Heston did not go up to Pharaoh and say, let my people go? I mean, that whole episode of sort of having to free that's in the Bible. I'm making light of it. But, you know, there is a biblical pathway that, you know, Moses went unto Pharaoh and said, let my people go.

And they were the ones who were toiling and slaving on the pyramids. I mean, that's not, it isn't a thing. I think the Bible specifically says the pyramids. No, they didn't. Charlton Heston said that. I mean, I'm mixing two things up, of course. Yeah, this is definitely an idea that Hollywood was very big on, sort of mixing the Bible of the pyramids and Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston is coming back next week in our Roman episode, but I will say no more. No, don't. For a change, don't. I suspect that the truth about who built the pyramids of the Old Kingdom is actually pretty complex and probably lies somewhere in between those two extremes of this sort of festive labour and slave labour. Probably we should envisage some combination of free and unfree workforce, probably attuned to particular tasks. So you will have some tasks which

are basically just sort of manual, brutish labour tasks, moving extremely heavy objects, and others which are incredibly skilled and would have involved different kinds of work crews. Some of them would have been foreign, some of them would have been local, some would have been highly trained, some would have been manual laborers. Some of them were probably just there as part of their seasonal file duties, and some of them were probably there all year round, like the scribes and the bakers and the brewers. So it's complex, but again, I would emphasize that even the unfree parts of that workforce were probably based on the evidence we have,

were probably eventually settled on agricultural lands. Okay. I mean, one thing that I've just taken, my kids are, you know, doing the pyramids and scarab beetles. And, you know, my house is filled with things made of clay that look like they could be scarred beetles if you squint. But when you go, you know, you see in the British Museum

tales of slave girls being buried with their pharaohs and slaves being buried with their pharaoh. So, I mean, it doesn't sound like, you know, particularly a choice or, I mean, what do we know of sacrifice and slavery? You also have, I think, these forced labour camps within Lower Nubia. That's right. I mean, again, we're jumping around widely in time and space. So we've left the pyramids behind here if we're talking about the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, as opposed to the old kingdom. We've jumped ahead about, well, quite a number of centuries

to a time when Egypt did establish garrisons in Lower Nubia, what's now northern Sudan, which do seem to have been absolutely brutal places where slaves were kept and put in transit to Egypt and also put to work particularly in the mining industry, so gold mining. And when you go around the Cairo Museum, you see those footstools, which have Nubians on them. And very clearly you have black Nubians as something you rest your feet on. You do, but you also have generations of Nubian pharaohs. I mean, Egypt is a country where the monarchy rotates among different populations and ethnicities. We have Libyan dyn dynasties and Nubian dynasties.

And what you're talking about there is a kind of royal display, which appears right at the beginning, the origins of ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago and continues all the way down to Greco-Roman times, where the king is shown in his or her sort of cosmological aspect as dominating all forms of life, human and non-human.

And the ancient Egyptians had ways of depicting people which look a lot like our racial stereotypes, so they would have a particular way of depicting people from Nubia, people from Western Asia, people from Libya, which remained incredibly stable over thousands of years. Have you, though? I mean, you're quite right to pull us up for jumping into another kingdom. So do you have any idea of why between the old kingdom and the new kingdom we're talking about?

There was a sudden mind shift that before there was slavery, but it was on, you know, it was rubbed along as part. And then you're describing a new kingdom where their entire swathes of humanity that are taken manacled and forced. to work until they die. What happens? Why does that change? Similar to what you were saying in Mesopotamia, that the old world of summer did not have mass slavery, but the Assyrians did. What happens? It's a fascinating question because what we're really into here is the origins of empire. And one thing that's important to remember is that between those two things, between the old kingdom and the middle kingdom, is something else, a period called by the rather unattractive name. the first intermediate period. Ancient Egyptian history is a bit unfortunate in that sense,

in that a lot of the interesting things actually happen in the in-between periods, which are given these dreadful names, like first intermediate, second intermediate. There's even something called the late period, which is actually fascinating because women become incredibly powerful in Egypt during the so-called late period. We have these women who have a role called the God's wife of Amun, who effectively take over the country, and they're foreign women, Libyan and Nubian princesses, they have the biggest estates in the land, which historically I think, you know, is pretty striking and unusual, but it all happens in a period called the third intermediate slash late period, which is like a big sign saying, nothing going on here,

you know, don't take any interest in this. So the first kind of big pulse of imperialism in the Middle Kingdom actually comes after this period of disintegration, when Egypt stops being this incredibly top-down society as represented by the pyramids and breaks off into these local factions, where you actually have much more sort of local, charismatic, almost politician-like leaders rising to prominence. And I think one can understand some of the expansionist and centralizing impulses, of the Middle Kingdom as a kind of backlash against that. But it's important to remember that these things are always ebbing and flowing.

It's not a linear development towards empire by any means. What you said earlier about people buried or even sacrificed, people ritually killed, to be buried with their masters or mistresses. This is a phenomenon that really just belongs to the very dawn of the Egyptian state, what we call the first dynasty and a little part of the second dynasty of ancient Egypt. So we're going back here to 3,000 BC, something like that. When there is an intriguing phenomenon in the burials of those first royal dynasties at a place called Abidos in southern Egypt, these are much less well known than the later pyramids

at Giza, but in their own way they're just as spectacular. So each royal burial comprises a large tomb sunk into the ground and then surrounded by hundreds of other burials, much smaller ones, in neat rows, containing the bodies of people who do seem to have been ritually killed just for the occasion. So were these slaves? Were they? Actually, he's doing the dramatic pause. He's doing the pauses, better than I am. I know, and I know someone who's a good pauser. Actually, the evidence suggests they were not, or mostly not.

There are tombstones found with them, which actually carry inscriptions that tell us about their titles in the royal court. And they're actually very high-ranking people who are killed and buried around the king or queen. How fascinating. That's really interesting. It's the top of the hierarchy. We're talking about royal wives, royal guards, officials, cooks, cooks, cooks, grooms, entertainers. How were they killed? Do we know how they were killed? Flanders Petrie thought it was strangulation

in some cases. But these are very old excavations. If these were done today, we'd have a lot more information about pathology and things like that. What we do see in some cases is that the age ranges and not random. So there'll be a lot of young men aged about 20. You know, this is not some random sample of the population who've just popped their clogs. So actually these people, I mean, you may be getting in later episodes into Janissaries and the Ottoman Empire, for example, where, you know, we have this phenomenon of people who are in fact slaves, technically rising to the highest ranks of government and the military. In this case, in the early Egyptian dynasties, we seem to have a mixture of blood relatives and other people who were taken into the court, perhaps, because

of their skills or their personal qualities. And I guess the violence of those mass killings and rituals must have created a sort of terrifying equivalence between all of them. Now, I mean, there's so much, there's so much more we could ask you, but there's one thing I'm burning to ask it. I'm not just going to leap from time a bit, but also continents. We've done the pyramids. Your stonehenge, right? Your stonehenge. Now, who did that? Because there was a rather marvellous exhibition in London last year. Last year, with all those wonderful gold hats. Oh, it was fabulous. Really, really good exhibition. But it certainly moved away from what I was taught

when I was a kid, which was, you know, it was again, he even whip, move, push. This wasn't the case at all. Bring those blue stones for Wales. Where do you? Who brought them? What happened? I don't remember being told that as a kid. I just remember seeing pictures of, you know, happy

sort of people who look like Anglo-Saxons or something schlepping great rocks around but looking quite happy about the whole thing. It furs. Where is the truth? Who did this? And why did they do this? Well, I'm quite lucky because I have direct access to a man called Mike Parker Pearson, who's done a lot of the great fieldwork on this topic over the last few decades, and is a colleague of mine at the Institute of Archaeology in London.

Actually, a few years ago, I couldn't go and do my field work, my own fieldwork in Iraq, because of the Daesh invasion. It's been a few obstacles to fieldwork in Iraq lately. Yeah, I was getting cabin fever sitting at, home and I called Mike up and he very kindly let me go and dig a few holes in a place called Durrington Walls. Very near Stained Hedge, yeah. Is the place that holds the answer to your question, Anita, because it's a bit like the workers town is to the pyramids, so Durrington Walls is to Stonehenge.

Are you saying steak and beer again? Pigs. Pigs. Pork. Pork. Pork parties. Right. Pork party. Sausages rather than sticks. How interesting. Barbecues. Darrington Wall seems to be,

it is actually a fascinating comparison because in both cases, you've got large settlements with thousands of people that may only have been occupied or densely occupied for part of the year. Again, the science is really good at Darrington Wall, so they think it was wintertime, strangely enough, when people would congregate.

When you didn't have to harvest, of course. That's when you've got time of your hands. Well, ah, you've touched on something. fascinating, which is that the period when Stonehenge and a lot of the other great megaliths of the British Isles were built is a period in which people, having practiced cereal agriculture, seem to abandon it and actually go back to wild nuts and other wilder plant foods as their staple. They've got to the local health food shop.

They keep the pigs and the cattle, so they're still herders. They're not hunter-gatherers or farmers. They're kind of some hybrid herder, forager, hunter population. So there was indeed no harvest of wheat on any significant scale. People would come together in great numbers, have these great meat feasts, and presumably at that time engage in the kind of construction activities that resulted in Stonehenge and in its many iterations. Now, David, I'm speaking to you from India,

and our ancient civilization, the Indus Valley, that seems to be far less hierarchical. You seem to have, I mean, it's famous that the houses are the same size, the standardized living quarters and so on. You don't get that sense of hierarchy other than one raised enclosure with the baths. Is that right? Or not? Sort of. So we're talking about the Indus Valley civilization, which took form in the third millennium BC and what's now Pakistan and parts of India. So contemporary with Uruk and Samaria, but in what's now Pakistan and...

Right. It becomes kind of the third great urban civilization alongside those ones. There was a writing system, but nobody can really read it, and its uses seem to be pretty limited. So most of what we can reconstruct is archaeology. At Mahendra Dara, which today is in Sindh province in Pakistan, yes, you have evidence for tens of thousands of people. in a city going back to about 2,500 BC, which is clearly a highly planned settlement. It's got the upper town and the lower town. The upper town is sometimes called the citadel, but actually there's very little evidence

that it was a military fortification. Actually, there's very little evidence for conflict or warfare in general in the Indus Valley civilization. And it's up on the top of the upper town that instead of a palace or a temple, you find this rather enigmatic structure called the Great Bath, which could really have been a bath. I mean, it's beautifully rendered for that purpose. It's sealed with plaster and bitumen. But you're right.

I mean, what's really intrigued scholars about Mahenjo Dara and other centres of the Indus Valley system is that despite the great scale of everything and the high-quality housing and the sanitation, there is simply no evidence for a ruling class or an aristocracy. There's no managerial elite. There's no warrior class. There's no rich tombs or palaces. Could you have the equivalent of a Brahmin society running the baths or in charge of ritual? People have speculated about this, you know, and that the highest point of civic life does seem to be a structure that may have been associated with washing and purity. So, you know, is there perhaps some germ already there of the later system of Varnas?

The caste system. Really, that's only attested thousands of years later. And if there was any form of organization like that, it wouldn't have included anything like the Chhatria cast. I mean, there's no evidence for this. Yeah, or sort of aristocracy and competitive. There's no evidence for any of that. So if there was an element of that, it would have been configured in a totally different way. As for slavery, you know, was it a feature of this society?

I don't see anything that suggests it, but of course that does raise this knotty. question of how we would identify slavery in the absence of written sources just from archaeology. So it brings us back in a way to some of those issues we started with. And what a neat way of doing this. Thank you so much. It really has been a history of everything. Thank you so much, David. So grateful to your expertise and also just for, you know, playing along with Charlton Heston, dipping into history. Listen, it's been wonderful. We will be back next week, our very special guest is Mary Beard, who is also doing a Charlton Heston act because we're going to be talking

about Spartacus this time. It's a Charlton Heston season. It's not Charlton Heston. It's Kirk Douglas. It's Kirk Douglas. I think it's very important to be factually accurate about these things, unlike Charlton Heston. But anyway, Mary Beard, bit of Kirk Douglas, in for your delectation and delight. See you next week.