Istwa Nou

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.

If steeply unequal societies were emerging in several regions at once, a question follows. Did the subordination of women arrive with them everywhere? Comparative ethnographic evidence from Africa south of the Sahara, from Native American societies and from Oceania says it did not. In many of those societies each sex held authority over its own sphere of social and economic activity, and the views of women, senior women in particular, had to be weighed in community decisions. Across the long middle belt of Eurasia the record reads differently. There female subordination does seem to arrive early in nearly every society that developed strong stratification. That correlation has been treated as a law of social development. It is the behaviour of one region. The places where the correlation breaks down are exactly the places Western scholarship left out when it built its theory of what complexity does to women, which is how a regional habit came to be reported as a human universal.