True Left

“Eastern” Group-Oriented and “Western” Individualizing Chiefdoms

My view is that an aristocratic egalitarian ethos still permeated the complex and paramount chiefdoms of Late Bronze Age Europe. Scholars have long debated the character and evolution of the chieftaincy (Earle 1989). As I pointed out above, not long ago chiefs were seen as “public servants” who collected surpluses and redistributed them for the common good. Now they are generally viewed as self-seeking aggrandizers (a sociobiological perspective) or as exploiters who inherited their position (a Marxist perspective). Interestingly enough, on the basis of his research on prehistoric Europe, and his knowledge of chiefdoms across the world, Colin Renfrew (1974) developed two basic models of chief-like societies as reflecting either “group-oriented” or “individualizing” interests. In the former, he noted, there was less lavish display of personal wealth and greater emphasis on collective activities and group rituals to integrate the population, with the chief acting as the coordinator and host of ceremonies. In individualizing chiefdoms, there was greater emphasis on personal status and prestige, with a more marked (or, I would say, conspicuous) disparity between the elite and the commoners. There was also less communal and public construction, as the chief and his retinue of warriors were the focus of attention (and, I would add, the units of production consisted of small individual farmsteads).

Scholars soon began to consider the possibility that these two types of chiefdoms indicated two evolutionary trajectories evolving from the tribal “big man” societies. Kristiansen (1991) carefully differentiated these two types of social organization, not as mutually exclusive, but as ideal types, which in actual historical contexts might consist of combined characteristics. Focusing on the economic relations of these two types, he specified that individualizing chiefdoms were dominated by “wealth finance” or “prestige goods economies, whereas collective chiefdoms were dominated by “staple finance” and tributary systems. Staple finance chiefdoms were regulated by “vertical relations of production and exchange” in the sense that chiefly authorities obtained their sources of income by extracting staple goods from the commoners to finance public works, pay the personnel attached to the chief, and trade with other chiefdoms. Wealth finance chiefdoms were characterized by “horizontal relations” whereby chiefs obtained their income by controlling exchange networks, supplies of resources, and decentralized units of farming communities. Kristiansen noted (16– 27) that prestige goods economies were mostly linked to segmentary or pastoral societies, while staple economies were linked to collective, territorial, and agricultural societies.

It is worth recalling here Eric Jones observation, in The European Miracle, that the origins of medieval Europe’s mixed farming economy lay in the prehistoric pastoral societies that originated from the steppes. “Europeanness”, Jones ventured to say, stemmed from a decentralized, aggressive pastoral economy that arrived from the steppes to be “molded by the forests” of Europe and was thus transformed into a pastoral-agrarian mixed economy, “with a landscape of farmsteads” (2003: 12–13). He contrasted the “open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming” in Europe to the more centralized, hydraulic river systems of the East, with their mass levies of conscripted peasant labor and authoritarian rule. He further noted that Europe in the 2nd millennium was dominated by warrior elites at the same time that it consisted of farming families which “met in free assemblies with a council and elected their chief ” (12). Jones also made reference to a transition in Europe from early Neolithic settlements based on communal systems of full villages, to a system, from the end of the 5th millennium BC, based on extended families living in 100 feet long houses, to a new system, by the end of the 3rd millennium, based on smaller houses, to a society, by the middle of the 2nd millennium, based on nuclear families. Kristiansen’s dates are different, and more accurately based, but he too noted that during the Late Bronze Age (1000–500 BC) houses became smaller and more numerous at each settlement (1991: 28).

But this is a far as Kristiansen goes in analyzing the “individualizing” features of European chiefdoms. While his ideas on long term evolutionary trends prove interesting, he paid no attention to the character of aristocratic rule and the nature of individuated farmsteads. He also offered no comparative case studies of “group-oriented” chiefdoms. Rather, he tried to explain the evolutionary dynamics of Europe’s chiefdoms using Wallerstein’s word-system approach. This approach brought some insights on the historical cycles of evolution and devolution of chiefdoms, and the manner by which chiefly power was dependent on the control of prestige networks linked to “global” networks – networks which were susceptible to economic and political fluctuations across a wide space. In a subsequent full length book, Europe before History (1998), Kristiansen went on to write in detail about chiefdoms but without taking on the Indo-European question, and stating instead that “the Indo-Europeans [as an object of study] have been replaced by autonomous social and economic” processes. He even went so far as to say that he wanted to avoid any notion of “a special European identity” (16)! 38

Another crucial environmental feature of Europe’s unique relationship to the world’s highway is that the Pontic steppe actually forms part of what is known as the “great European plain” which stretches without interruption for over 2,400 miles from the Urals to the Atlantic; and since the Ural mountains are no real barriers, this plain is therefore connected to the entire extension of the steppe that stretches to China.14 Overall the peoples who settled on the plains were not well protected by natural limits; they had to learn to be aggressive, stay aggressive, or be threatened by the constant movement and migration of nomadic tribes (Davies: 47–54).

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The economy reflected in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary includes Neolithic farming but not as a primary component; in the Volga-Ural steppe, and also in the western steppe, there are reasons to exclude agriculture as the main component, as contrasted to the importance of stockbreeding (Mallory: 217). One already encounters, in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, words associated not only with the original Neolithic Revolution but with what Andrew Sherratt has termed the “Secondary Products Revolution” (Sherratt 1981). According to Sherrat, this revolution occurred during 3500–3000 and refers to the efficient exploitation of the “secondary products” of domestic animals, dairy products (butter, milk, and cheese), textiles (wool), as well as the harnessing of animals to wheeled vehicles, the use of yokes and ploughs, and the domestication and riding of horses. Sherratt believes that this “secondary revolution” resulted from diffusions from the Near East. For their part, M. Zvelebil and K. Zvelebil (1990) see a strong link between the dispersal of Indo-Europeans during 4800–2500 BC and the arrival and consolidation of the “Secondary Products Revolution.” Anthony accepts the idea (74) that there was a “Secondary Products Revolution,” but rejects Sherratt’s thesis that it originated in the Near East. He argues that dairying, horse domestication, and horse riding first appeared in the steppes, and that wool sheep and wagons were diff used conjointly across the Near East and Europe between 3500–3000 BC.

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By putting more emphasis on hybridization, Mallory softens Gimbutas’s vision of a purely warlike pastoral people imposing its culture and causing the “collapse” of what she believes was a more sophisticated Neolithic-Copper Age culture of formerly settled farmers of Balkan origin. Nevertheless, Mallory is clear that “what was sporadically attested prior to 3000 BC swelled during the third millennium to provide unequivocal evidence for a movement of population from the Pontic-Steppe into the Balkans” (239). Kurgan burials now show up in Romania, Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia and provide us with substantial evidence for the introduction of the domestic horse, larger woolly sheep, and possibly wheeled vehicles. Although Mallory does not frame these claims in terms of an Indo-European expansion, Drews has noted that, by the end of the third millennium, the people of the Tripolye Culture, forming the eastern fringe of the Balkan- Danube farming cultures (long in close contact with the world of the nomadic steppe herders) had turned from hoe agriculture to stockraising. He has also observed that, in the period between 2000 and 1700 BC, about one-fifth of the animal bones found in Tripolye Culture sites are horse bones, “a fairly high figure for a region outside the open steppe” (Drews: 80).

Some contemporary scholars enjoy making sarcastic remarks against the old notion of a “massive violent spread of Indo-European storm-troopers.” What really happened was far more significant in its consequences: not a single invasion but a continuous, long-term intrusion by a highly mobile and warlike people.15 The Indo-Europeanization of the Balkans was thus a persistent process of arrivals of new migrants from the Pontic-Caspian region in such a way that the Balkans would then work as a “staging area” for further intrusions into Anatolia, Greece, and north-western Europe. It was on occasion a straight military takeover but also a gradual intrusive movement led not by plain farmers but by riders on horses supported by a flexible (and healthier) pastoral economy. The fact that this economy was more nutritious explains why the “physical anthropology of the deceased [in the new Kurgan-style burial mounds] speaks of a population that was more robust-appearing with males averaging up to 10 centimeters taller than the native Eneolithic [Balkan] population” (Mallory: 240).

Anthony’s recent research findings (225–59) reinforce the general view I have adopted here regarding the intrusive nature of the arrival of Indo-European speakers into the Balkans starting about 4200 BC. He starts with the Sredni Stog culture which began in the Pontic-Steppes around 4400 and which lasted until about 3400. He notes that this culture is the “earliest” one to have been linked with Kurgan burials or single mound graves, which emphasized the achievements of individuals. Kelekna thinks that the Sredni Stog was the first society to exploit horses on a “regular basis” (2009: 32). An Indo-European culture which emerged from this one was the Suvorovo-Novo culture of about 4200- 3900, which was the first one to migrate from the Dnieper steppes into the northern edges of the Danube Delta. According to Anthony, the movements of these peoples were not only into Europe but also eastwards. He thus detects, from about 3800 BC onwards, a migration into the north Caucasus, which he associates with “ostentatious chiefs” displaying gold-covered clothing and great quantities of bronze weapons in their burials. This movement has come to be identified archeologically as the Maikop culture, dated to about 3700-3500 BC. It is believed that this culture existed as a conduit between the steppes and the urban cultures of the Near East, with wagons entering into the steppes through it, and horses moving out into the south from it.

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It should be noted here that the Proto-Indo-European lexicon was rich with words for domesticated animals in addition to the horse: cow, ox, bull, sheep, ram, lamb, goat, dog, as well as words for ducks and pigs. There are also words for coagulated or sour milk, butter, and curds (Fortson: 37). Diakonoff believes (1990: 57) that the Indo-European economy, as it was located in the Balkans and the Danube basin (which he thinks was the original homeland of the Indo- Europeans) “must have been an economy based on high grade agriculture and animal breeding, which supplied milk and meat food for the population in relative plenty.” By contrast, he reminds us that “the mass of Sumerians and Akkadians had no meat or milk in their daily diet.” Anthony writes that pastoralism at large “produced plenty of food – the average nomad probably ate better than the average agricultural peasant in medieval China or Europe” (460).

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Though I will return to this question again later, I shall now briefly clarify that the communities of Old Europe were already “ranked” societies in which, as I mentioned in chapter one, the successful self-interested strategies pursued by aggrandizing individuals brought about differentials in household wealth. The Yamnaya horizon and the Corded Ware, on the other hand, were chief-like societies with a higher degree of differentiation between commoner and elite populations. It is worth contrasting the mobility of the Indo-Europeans with what Sherratt sees as the “constrained” and “small-scale of activity” of the farming communities of Old Europe, whose “efforts were often narrowly focused on fixed points within the world which they had created” (200). The extension of the Corded Ware complex brought “wider networks of social interaction” and greater opportunities to “independent segments of society” for the exchange of goods and livestock. Indeed, older Proto-Indo-European languages typically drew a distinction between movable and immovable wealth; in several languages “moveable wealth” became specifically the word for livestock (Fortson: 19). Mallory thinks that the success of Indo-European languages over the numerically superior languages of Old Europeans was possibly due to the greater vitality and potential for growth of the pastoral economy. He envisions a scenario in which the native population became bilingual, speaking the Indo-European language in the market place or at ceremonial centers in order to obtain better access to goods, status, ritual, and security. The paths to social and material success, and the transmission of this success to future generations, lay in the pastoral way of life and the technology and nutrients associated with the “secondary products revolution” (259). Similarly, Anthony emphasizes the institution of patron/client relations promoted by aristocratic Indo-European speakers promoted within their expanding territories. Chieftains were strong believers in the sanctity of verbal contracts bound by oaths. These contracts permitted Indo-European speakers to incorporate outsiders (who came to assimilate Indo-European dialects) as clients who enjoyed rights of protection in exchange for their services. Anthony also emphasizes the creation of mutual obligations of “hospitality” between “guests” and “hosts” as another way of incorporating outsiders into the Indo-European speaking and pastoral network (303, 341–42).

Diakonoff disagrees with the notion that there was a “collision” or a “clash” between the Indo-Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and Old Europe. He prefers the quieter, less shocking term “language contacts” (1990: 53). There is no doubt that Gimbutas’s vision of the Indo-Europeanization of Old Europe in terms of three massive waves of invasions by violent and patriarchal peoples is faulty insofar as it ignores demographic and economic processes of gradual infiltration and displacement.16 The successful spread of Indo-European languages cannot be disassociated from the “secondary products revolution” and the mobility of a pastoral life. But it would be just as simplistic (and naïve) to presume that horse-riding warriors were akin to modern-day language teachers.

The spread of Indo-Europeans further westwards is associated with the “Bell-Beaker” handless drinking cups between 2800–1800 BC, which is said to stand “for a whole new way of life” in the areas where this culture appeared, from Scotland to Sicily (Sherratt: 2001b: 250). This Bell-Beaker phenomenon was really an innovative continuation into other parts of Europe of the Corded Ware transformation which had began in Europe after 3000 BC and which had brought about a “breakdown of traditional” native ways of life and the “emergence of more mobile ways of life.” There are strong similarities between early Bell-Beakers and the Corded Ware culture. The following words from Sherratt are worth citing at length:

Like the Corded Ware vessels, these pots [Bell-Beakers] were also typically placed in single male burials, often accompanied by weaponry and covered by a circular mound. They thus represent a diaspora of continental north-west European practices among largely alien populations, carrying the aggressive, individualizing ideology of this area to new parts of Europe. Whereas Corded Ware beakers were usually buried with stone battleaxes, Bell-Beakers are generally found with other weapons: daggers, and archery equipment such as triangular barbed-flint arrowheads and wrist guards of fine stone…This martial image was perhaps completed by leather jerkins and later by woven fabrics, held by a belt with an ornamental stone bone ring to secure it…Early Bell- Beakers display the cords and thongs that distinguished their Corded Ware predecessors; perhaps the later zone ornament, too, is significant, for the Greek word zone means a belt, and the elite of Greek warriors are still evzones, ‘the well-belted ones’, while black belts still symbolize prowess in the martial arts. The imagery of third-millennium Europe was replete with such symbols, and Bell-Beaker graves expressed the warrior values appropriate to a more mobile and opportunistic way of life (2001b: 252).

The Corded Ware culture, which had been expanding during the earlier 3rd millennium in central and northern Europe, makes a “relatively sudden appearance” on the western edge of Europe in the new but familiar form of Bell-Beakers later during the 3rd and 2nd millennium. This expansion – typified in the spread of a culture of drinking, feasting, and horses – is equally disruptive of the native archaic societies as were the prior expansions by Indo-Europeans. Sherratt also observes a “profound change in attitudes” suggested by more colorful woolen clothing replacing the older garments of skin and linen, new finery and jewelry, new dress fashions, weapons with decorative elements, extra “ostentation on the part of particular individuals” (2001b: 254–56, my italics). Meanwhile, later forms of Corded Ware continued to spread on the North European Plain and Scandinavia, while the Bell-Beakers continued to spread during the 2nd millennium, sometimes through gradual diffusion and adaptation and sometimes through “prolonged struggle” with older cultures – into Ireland, Brittany, the Alpine region, Languedoc, Spain, Portugal, Corsica, Sicily and Sardinia.

McNeill and the Indo-European Roots of the West’s Warrior Ethos

There are some instances in which McNeill slows down his lively narrative in The Rise of the West (1963) to reflect on the unique characteristics of the West (539, 545, 569. 598). On one of these occasions he asserts in definite terms that no other civilization “ever approached” the “restless instability” of the West (539). To what source did he attribute this restiveness? McNeill poses this question only once, and he does so in the context of his effort to understand why Europeans went on to explore and conquer the world after 1500. He thus writes of Europe’s “deep-rooted pugnacity and recklessness,” adding that the roots of this pugnacity – “the incredible courage, daring, and brutality of Cortez and Pizarro” – lay in the “Bronze Age barbarian” past. What Bronze barbarian past?

The barbarian inheritance – both from the remote Bronze Age invasions of the second millennium BC and from the more immediate Germanic, Scandinavian, and steppe invasion from the first millennium AD. – made European society more thoroughly warlike than any other civilized society of the globe, excepting the Japanese (539).

(570). When we dig further back into this historical account, we find the following revealing observations. First, that the bronze-wielding barbarians who came into Europe “by about 1700 BC” spoke Indo-European languages. Second, that these Indo-European speakers were a “warrior culture” which came from the steppes and reached the “westernmost confines of Europe,” where they established themselves “as an aristocracy” of conquerors over and against the “peaceful megalith-builders of the Atlantic coast” (103). He writes:

The spread of these warrior cultures brought a great revolution to European life. In place of peaceful villagers and remote hunters and fishers, Europe was now dominated by warlike barbarians, familiar with bronze metallurgy. In this linguistic sense, Europe was Europeanized, since the speech of the warrior peoples eventually supplanted the earlier languages of the Continent. In a profounder sense, too, the warrior ethos of the Bronze Age gave European society a distinctive and enduring bias. Europeans came to be warlike, valuing individual prowess more highly than any other civilized people….[T]he style of life befitting warrior herdsmen of the western steppe have remained a basic part of the European inheritance down to the present day (103–04, my italics).

McNeill notes a few more characteristics about the steppe peoples. Most significantly they domesticated horses about 3000 BC, first using them for food, and later, during the second millennium, harnessing them to light, two-wheel chariots for warfare. He also notes that their pastoral way of life “involved a social tradition combining intense admiration for individual prowess with a political organization under authoritative tribal chieftains” (105). But this is as far as he goes in tracing the unique cultural restlessness of the West. He would not address this topic again. In fact, as we saw in chapter one, his current position is that we should do away with the very idea of a civilization that can be identified as “Western.”

I have listen to all Indian languages including Gondi & tribal. All Indian languages have amazing softness except two Punjabi & Urdu. Punjabi never sounded sweet to ear. It must be barbarians language from remnants of Kushan, Shake, Hunas mixed with Indian grammars.

Chinese sources describe the Guìshuāng (貴霜, Old Chinese: *kuj-s raŋ), i.e. the Kushans, as one of the five aristocratic tribes of the Yuezhi.[37]

The Yuezhi (Chinese: 月氏; pinyin: Yuèzhī, Ròuzhī or Rùzhī; Wade–Giles: Yüeh4-chih1, Jou4-chih1 or Ju4-chih1;) were an ancient people first described in Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu in 176 BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups migrating in different directions: the Greater Yuezhi (Dà Yuèzhī 大月氏) and Lesser Yuezhi (Xiǎo Yuèzhī 小月氏). This started a complex domino effect that radiated in all directions and, in the process, set the course of history for much of Asia for centuries to come.[13]

संजय अ. राजगुरु, एक श्री हरी का उपासक!
@SnjyRajguru
Youth in North Indian have this inferiority complex. The abusive, male authoritative & double meaning nature of Punjabi language make it popular among Youth of Hindi speaking state

Neo vedics seethe too much on 'ooga booga' they need to be shown the mirror.

This was a cult of a semi barbaric bronze age peoples

Yes, these elements slowly disappeared, and most would agree for good.

As the outlook changed, so did the rest