The Dawn of Everything – Ch 8: The First Urbanites; Cities Without Kings

Renowned anthropologist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality — and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

This is a biweekly book discussion group on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. The book is available in multiple formats and languages. We cover one chapter per meeting.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"?

The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

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For this meeting, please read Chapter Eight: “Imaginary Cities: Eurasia’s first urbanites — in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China — and how they built cities without kings.” We will discuss all 51 pages of this chapter,

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

Please read Chapter Eight, book pages 276-327 (first edition, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Page numbers may vary in different editions and formats.)

You can find the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXXaVEwZ-cIc37Y0Z9ujEcK3_X2Jpmnh/view?usp=sharing

Or purchase it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0771049846/

The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 276-304): “In which we first take on the notorious issues of ‘scale’ — In which we set the scene broadly for a world of cities, and speculate as to why they first arose — On ‘mega-cities,’ and how archaeological findings in Ukraine are overturning conventional wisdom on the origins of cities” — Map: Nebelivka: a prehistoric ‘mega-site’ in the Ukrainian forest steppe.

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 304-327): “On Mesopotamia, and ‘not-so-primitive’ democracy — In which we describe how (written) history, and probably (oral) epic too, began: with big councils in the cities, and small kingdoms in the hills — In which we consider whether the Indus civilization was an example of caste before kingship — Concerning an apparent case of ‘urban revolution’ in Chinese prehistory.”