Istwa Nou

On the coast of Peru, the Norte Chico society took shape from about 3600 BCE, the same window in which the Qustul state was forming in Nubia and the first states of Upper Egypt were emerging. Its monumental building began late in that millennium and the society ran on for centuries as a contemporary of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt. Large stone warehouses in its towns show an elite able to direct labour and hold valued goods, with cotton apparently the prize commodity. Religious structures indicate that ritual was part of governing, as it was in Nubia from the fifth millennium and in Upper Egypt by the fourth. The Norte Chico wove cotton and grew sweet potatoes, maize, beans and squash, two of those crops domesticated in Mesoamerica and reaching Peru by exchange. Neither side of the world knew the other existed. Given enough food and enough people in one place, human societies keep producing the same institutions. The question worth asking is why the story gets told as though only a few places managed it.

Dense early populations with hereditary rulers, priestly control of ritual and the beginnings of towns cluster along river valleys. Rivers laid down richer soil and supplied water for irrigation in dry country, which let far more people live in one place than the surrounding land could carry. Norte Chico in Peru fits the pattern. So do Qustul and late predynastic Egypt. Crowding those numbers together sharpened competition for land and water, and the competition fed unequal access to wealth, which fed unequal access to power. Ehret draws the lesson plainly. These valleys supplied the material conditions for the first oppressive and steeply unequal societies, and he declines to call them civilisations without qualification. The irrigation that fed the population also concentrated authority in whoever controlled the sluices. The conditions that produced monuments produced the organised extraction of other people's labour. Anyone admiring the pyramids is admiring both halves of that arrangement.