SOCIAL AND CLASS RELATIONS
The social structure of the earliest civilizations shows hierarchies and a concentration of power among certain elites. There were few matriarchal societies in the ancient world; most were patriarchal and polygamous among the wealthy social classes. As civilizations developed and expanded, their social structures often had to be modified. Sometimes this resulted in a decentralization of power, even on rare occasions, as in ancient Greece, in democracy. At other times changes were forced by foreign invasions.
Egypt. The apex of Egyptian society was the pharaoh since he (or more precisely, his “house” or the institution that he incarnated) stood as the intermediary between the world of gods and of human beings. The pharaoh’s main duty was to maintain maat, an apotheosized state of cosmic balance or justice for his whole realm. Pharaoh owned vast tracts of land and sometimes vied with priests for con- trol and status. His office was hereditary and dynastic. History records one woman, Hatshepsut, who served as regent for more than 20 years until the son of the previous pharaoh could assume power.
When the Nile failed and Egyptian life was disrupted, the ruling dynasty lost credibility and provincial administrators, the priestly class, or foreigners intervened, resulting in the installing of a new dynasty. One group of outsiders who seized power sometime around 1600 b.c.e. was the Hyksos, a Semitic people. However, by 1300 b.c.e. a native dynasty had returned to power, and the outsiders were expelled. The conservative nature of Egyptian society, reinforced by the regularity of the Nile and the insularity of the land, made for few social and class changes in its long history.
India. Plentiful artifacts and architectural remains from the Indus River civilization survive but so far the writing has not been deciphered. The Indo-Europeans brought social and class changes when they settled in northern India around 1500 b.c.e. Their hierarchic and warlike society can be seen in the mythology narrated in their Sanskrit scripture, the Vedas. Their class structure and suppression of native peoples resulted in the imposition of the caste system that dominates Indian society to this day. Although the Indo-Europeans did not settle in southern India, they nevertheless influenced the darker-skinned Dravidian people there, who also adopted the caste system. Aryan religion was modified around 500 b.c.e. by new concepts introduced by the Upanishads and by new protest religions called Buddhism and Jainism. After reaching its maximum influence from the reign of Emperor Ashoka (c. 280 b.c.e.) to the Gupta dynasty (c. 350 c.e.), Buddhism largely faded from Indian society but spread to China and Southeast Asia.
China. Rulers of the Shang dynasty (c. 1700–1100 b.c.e.) established themselves as the sole intermediary between the human world and the spirit world, as did its successor, the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (c. 1100–256 b.c.e.). Zhou rulers relied on a network of feudal relations to extend the Chinese empire and claimed their right to rule under the concept called “mandate of heaven.” This was a double-edged sword as heaven rewarded virtuous rulers and punished unjust ones through giving the people the right to revolt.
The decline of Zhou power and centuries of civil wars culminated in the unification of China under the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. The Qin unified their conquest through the imposition of absolute government power, under an ideology called Legalism. The brief experiment with Legalism made the next dynasty, Han, turn to Confucianism. Confucian society divided the people into four non- hereditary social classes: the scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Confucians taught that the family was the center of society. It remained China’s official ideology from the second century b.c.e. to the 20th century c.e.
Preliterate nomads along its northern frontier confronted the sedentary Chinese civilization. The most formidable among them from the late Zhou to the post-Han era were called the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), whose defeat by the Han rulers after c. 100 b.c.e. led to the opening of the Silk Road that would link China with India, Central Asia, Persia, and Rome. In addition to the exchange of economic goods, Buddhism and some Western ideas entered China via this commercial route.
Classical Greece. For all the democratic reforms attributed to the ancient Greeks, only Athens and its allies accepted this form of “equality under the law,” and even then the rights were brief in duration and limited to male citizens. Because of the stubborn autonomy that each city-state claimed for itself, it is hard to sum up Greek social and class relationships. In general, Greeks despised kings, prized local identities, often quarreled among themselves, and nonetheless cooperated in matters of athletic competition. They also agreed about the superiority of the Greek language, religion, and commerce compared with those of other peoples. They rarely mixed with non-Greek “barbarians.” Non-Greek slaves, who did the work too undignified for Greeks to do, were grudgingly accepted. Family and marriage were valued because survival depended on having enough children so that the next generation would protect the city with an army and take care of the citizens in old age.
Rome. Early Rome overturned its Etruscan kings and became a republic dominated by a group of men who made decisions for all the citizens. These leaders were called senators, and they came from an aristocratic class called the patricians. Commoners (or plebeians) owned small plots of land and were full citizens of the early republic, but their role in government was limited to veto power of plebiscites and election of their own spokesmen, called tribunes. Class struggles led to civil wars and the disintegration of republican institutions.
As Rome acquired land outside the Italian peninsula, two changes occurred that affected Roman society: First, the patrician class benefited because successful wars increased its wealth and power; second, the old system of running Roman politics failed to cope with the new empire’s demands. The plebeians abandoned their small farms and moved to the city for economic opportunities. Rome’s leaders were increasingly compelled to provide “bread and circuses” to keep the unemployed citizens content. Popular disenchantment with the new arrangements and the leaders’ tendency to foment civil war motivated the likes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to experiment with new forms of government. Though the office of Caesar (a term that came to mean both emperor and demigod) proved popular, there was still an undercurrent of discontent from classes as diverse as the original patricians of the Republic days and newly acquired slaves, numbering up to one-third of the city’s population. Spartacus led a throng of disgruntled slaves in 73 b.c.e., requiring eight legions to quash the uprising. Julius Caesar, the hero of the new imperial age, was murdered in the Senate by old guard Republicans on the Ides of March, 44 b.c.e.
The Caesars adapted by expanding the opportunities for citizenship and by giving slaves and freedmen opportunities to gain wealth and improve their status. However, there is no evidence that wealth disparities diminished over the whole imperial period. The steady rise of inadequacies of the Roman religion led to the spread of Christianity among all ranks for Roman society.
The Americas. Mesoamerican and Andean peoples became more hierarchical and stratified as urbanization increased. Birth, lineage, and occupation determined one’s place in these civilizations. The overall class structure was pyramidal with the ruler and nobility on top, followed by a priestly class, a warrior class, merchants and traders, artisans and crafts workers, then agriculturalists, with servants and slaves on the bottom. The whole schema was cemented together by a mythology that resembled that of Shang China or pharaonic Egypt: The gods approved of the elites as guardians of the secret lore concerning such things as astronomy, calendrical calculations, and ritual, which enabled them to stay in power. While there is some evidence of lower- class discontent, the preponderance of evidence indicates that wars, invasions, and ecological bottlenecks—not internal class conflicts—were primarily responsible for the decline of classic Mesoamerican civilizations.
Literary Classics and Monasteries. The ability to read and write was considered almost magical by potentate and peasant alike in the ancient world. This fascination with the written text explains why those ancient religions that survived are scripture based. Reading and writing became particularly useful as cities and civilizations required more complex administration and organization. At first, writing was complicated and unwieldy (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese pictographs), and few could master the thousands of symbols in each written language. As a result certain societies honored the scholarly class or compelled their administrators to pass literacy tests (such as in China under the influence of Confucianism, beginning in the Han dynasty). In the New World only the Maya devised a written language utilizing a system of 800 glyphs.
Some ancient scripts evolved and became syllabic or hybrids of pictures and sounds (such as Mesopotamian cuneiform), which reduced the number of symbols from thousands to hundreds.
When Ugarit reduced its symbols to 30, cuneiform became the standard script in the Near East for laws and literature. The Phoenicians were important because they perfected the alphabet letters to represent sounds. Soon the Greeks added vowels, and the alphabet as we know it was invented. The alphabet was simple enough that many could learn it and gain access to literature and history and thus power. Israel gave an institutional place to the prophet as a critic of the ruling king and priest, and the prophet’s critique—once it was written down—became a powerful statement to future generations about the limits of power. Greece flourished in the fifth century b.c.e. in the arts and sciences because it too encouraged literacy among its people.
In many civilizations monastic societies were seen as separate from the secular society. The roots for Western monasticism came from Anthony of the Desert (late 300s c.e.) and the “Desert Fathers and Mothers” of Egypt (300–500 c.e.), indicating Eastern Christian influence on the Latin Church. Benedict (c. 500 c.e.) is called the father of the monastic movement in the West. His rule came at a critical time for Western civilization, because various barbarian tribes had broken through the frontiers and were destroying cities and institutions, yet the empire had taken few measures to preserve its manifold cultural heritage. The monasteries of Benedict and his followers provided an alternate society, a counterculture with its own meritocracy and value system. By the end of the period it was the monasteries that powerfully preserved culture and encouraged progress: They showed hospitality to displaced refugees, they developed and retaught agricultural techniques, they recopied precious manuscripts, and they eventually returned to recivilize the people that were once were proud Roman citizens. The only Western library of the sixth century c.e. that functioned after Rome’s decline was Benedict’s at Vivarium. Similarly, Hindus and Buddhists honored monastic institutions as well as individual ascetics.
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