Matrilineal, matrilocal systems allowed for the relatively easy in-marriage of men from other groups, because the men could not claim immediate control over their wives’ property. This became particularly important in places where men traveled long distances for trade or settlement. For example, Austronesian men sailed large outrigger canoes west across the Indian Ocean from southern Borneo and other parts of contemporary Indonesia to the east coast of Africa between about 100 CE and 700 CE, bringing with them food crops, including bananas, coconuts, and sugar cane, which began to be cultivated in Africa. They also appear to have intermarried with local women, as, judging by genetic evidence, the people who began to settle the large and previously uninhabited island of Madagascar off the East African coast shortly after this have ancestry that is about half Austronesian and half East African. The Malagasy language spoken on Madagascar is an Austronesian language similar to those spoken on Borneo, and the material culture on the island combined Austronesian and African elements. Although we do not know definitively that this means East African groups were matrilineal, similar examples of in-marrying men from more recent periods in other places suggests this is likely. Wherever it occurred, in-marriage of outside men facilitated trade and cultural exchange, thus providing a good example of the way in which family structure shaped society beyond the household.
Matrilineal inheritance systems and bridewealth made some family relationships stronger, but they also created problems. Just as patrilineal inheritance could lead to tensions, so could brideservice. Men objected to the influence of their wives’ families, and, in areas where wives moved to their husband’s households, intentionally chose wives who came from far away, which also lessened the degree to which their sons could rely on their maternal uncles. Conflict between fathers and sons was exacerbated by polygyny and bridewealth, as families had to decide whether their resources would best be spent acquiring a first wife for a son or another wife for the father. Some scholars have seen this generational conflict as a source for harsh initiation rituals that unmarried young men often had to undergo; only those who had gone through such rituals would be allowed to marry and join the ranks of fully adult men.
Some groups in Africa and the Americas had bilateral inheritance. Among many peoples living in the Andean region, for example, lines of descent appear to have been reckoned through both sexes, with girls inheriting access to resources such as land, water, and animals through their mothers, and boys through their fathers. In other groups with bilateral inheritance, only men inherited, but they did so from both their fathers and their mothers’ brothers.
Some form of divorce or marital separation appears to have been widely available. In later periods, among matrilocal groups in North America, a man who wished to divorce simply left his wife’s house, while a woman put her husband’s belongings outside her family’s house, indicating she wished him to leave; the children in both cases stayed with the mother and her family. Among some groups divorce was frowned upon after children had been born, however, or because it would involve complicated financial transactions, such as the return of bridewealth.
Descriptions of family relationships in the vast parts of the world outside of states and empires in the ancient period must remain tentative, which is also true for the majority of people who lived inside states. Written records tell us little about the families or personal relationships of people who owned no property, and even less about the families of people who were themselves property. As families or as individuals, lower-status people generally appear in the records only when for some reason they were not fulfilling their obligations to their higher-ups: when drought or floods destroyed agricultural surpluses; when famine or epidemics slowed the stream of migrants into cities; when they rebelled or fled.
2.5 Pottery effigy jar of a mother and child, from the Moche culture that flourished on the coast of Peru from about 100 CE to about 800 CE. Moche ceramics served as funerary offerings in burials, but were also used in households for everyday purposes, where they communicated cultural values.
Social hierarchies and caste
The written records produced by cities and states reflect the concerns of those at the top of the social heap, and among these was the maintenance of that hierarchy itself. States generated new patterns of social inequality, expanding on those that emerged in agricultural villages, and often codifying these in written law. In early Roman history, for example, the most significant social division was that between the hereditary ruling group of families known as patricians and the free common people known as plebeians. Philosophical and religious texts discussed these hierarchies, justifying them with reference to the gods or to nature.
Among the most complex and enduring of these social hierarchies was the system that developed in South Asia after the mid second century BCE. In the earliest sources the Sanskrit term varna (“color”) was used to identify social categories, but Portuguese traders later called them casta from their own word for hereditary social divisions, and this became the English word caste. The caste system originated during the millennium from 1500 to 500 BCE, in which people who called themselves Aryans (from “noble” in Sanskrit) came to dominate northern India politically and culturally. They created a body of sacred works, epics, hymns, philosophical treatises, and ritual texts called the Vedas, from which this period draws its name—the Vedic Age—and which serve as the primary source of information about this era. The traditional view is that the Aryans came into India from the north using the superior military technology of chariots and bronze weaponry, and conquered the indigenous tribal population. Although archaeological evidence for the Aryan invasion is slim, this is the story told in the Vedas, which present their leaders as heroic figures aided by priests and warriors, who became the two highest castes, the Brahmin and the Kshatriya. Merchants formed the third caste (Vaishya) and peasants, laborers, and conquered peoples the fourth and largest caste (shudra). The Vedas portray this system as created by the gods, who divided the original cosmic being into four parts corresponding to parts of the body; this gave caste divisions religious sanctions. As elsewhere in the ancient world, in the Aryan kingdoms priests supported the expanding power of rulers, who in return confirmed the superior status of the Brahmins as ritual specialists whose ceremonies could assure divine favor.
The high status of Brahmins was further affirmed in the Upanishads, cosmological texts composed between 750 and 500 BCE in which the universe was understood to be an endlessly repeating cycle in which souls were reincarnated through a continual process of rebirth known as samsara. Actions performed in one’s life—known as karma—determined one’s status in the next life, with good deeds leading to higher status and bad deeds to lower. The ultimate goal of life was to escape this relentless cycle of birth and rebirth and achieve moksha, a state of liberation, bliss, and awareness in which one achieved union with the ultimate unchanging reality that is the source of the universe, called brahman.
Originally, true spirituality could only be achieved through strict asceticism and was open only to men in the Brahmin caste, but by the third century BCE the quest for brahman was increasingly understood to include personal devotion to one or more of the many gods and goddesses who were manifestations of brahman. Personal gods could be honored through devotional practices such as saying prayers, singing hymns, dancing, presenting offerings, and making pilgrimages, and also by living an honorable life in one’s own situation, what became known as dharma, a Sanskrit word with many shades of meaning, involving piety, moral law, ethics, order, duty, mutual understanding, justice, and peace. Prosperity and pleasure were legitimate aspects of dharma, for all the deities were sexually active and generally very attractive. The family was dharma’s central setting; all men and women were expected to marry, with sexual pleasure, fulfilling religious obligations, and having children regarded as the three purposes of marriage. These moral and spiritual teachings, later termed Hinduism, were widely appealing because they offered direct contact w
ith the gods and guidance for everyday life. They validated the caste system and provided a source of social stability, but because devotion to one god did not mean rejection of others, they also allowed for the incorporation of new deities, doctrines, and rites. Following rules of behavior and performing ceremonies associated with one’s caste and favored god might lead to being born in a higher caste in the next life, while not following them could result in social ostracism or even death.
Skin color may have played a role in the origins of caste—Aryan epics describe those who opposed them as dark-skinned savages—but function in society was the key source of differentiations. Thus attitudes toward certain types of work underlay them: memorizing religious texts and engaging in intellectual debates was honored work, while farming or making things with one’s hands were demeaning. Over time, occupational and geographic distinctions were elaborated into an increasingly complex system of thousands of hereditary sub-castes known as jati—which literally means “births”— each understood to have a common identity and ancestors, and with roles, rituals, and status prescribed by custom and tradition. As new occupations developed because of technological change or cultural interactions, or as groups migrated in or invaded, new jati were created for them or older ones redefined, so the system was both stable and flexible. Scholars debate the limits of this flexibility, and other aspects of the caste system, at different historical points; some argue that British rule in India in the nineteenth century made the system far more rigid and authoritative than it had been earlier because it codified the system in writing, while others stress that unwritten norms can be just as powerful, or perhaps even more so, than written law.
Certain tasks were regarded as beneath the dignity of even the lowest sub-group within the shudra caste, and those who did them were viewed as outside of the caste system, a social classification that developed into the notion that certain groups were “untouchable” because they were impure. That designation became a circular one: untouchables were scorned because their occupations polluted them, but certain occupations polluted all who did them.
Notions of purity and pollution shaped relations between castes and jati as well—members of some groups came to avoid eating with one another, walking near one another, and, most importantly, marrying one another. Over generations, this endogamy reinforced ties within the group, as members increasingly shared common ancestors in reality as well as tradition. (The 1950 Indian Constitution officially prohibited discrimination based on caste, and since then India has taken various affirmative action measures to improve the status of historically discriminated groups, which in turn have led to charges of reverse discrimination. The power of caste in contemporary Indian society is a sharply disputed political issue, although most commentators agree that it has become less important in urban areas but that marital endogamy remains the norm.) Elements of Indian caste divisions spread to Nepal and Sri Lanka, where they blended with indigenous social stratifications into distinct systems.
Religious and social practices associated with Hinduism spread into Southeast Asia as well, carried across the Indian Ocean by merchants and sailors on ships that generally originated in small coastal trading states along the Malay peninsula and the islands of Sumatra and Java. After about 100 CE Indian priests and officials traveled to Southeast Asia on Malay ships as well, where they married into powerful families and were appointed as advisers by rulers attempting to build up their authority on the Indian model. In these Indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia, including Langasuka, Funan, and Champa on the mainland and Taruma and Sunda on Java, imported traditions fused with local ones. Some groups understood themselves to be members of specific Indian castes, especially lineages within the warrior Kshatriyas, and huge stone temples were built to Hindu deities, but rituals also continued to indigenous gods and spirits, who retained their power over the rice harvest, daily life, and cosmic order. Among the Cham people in what is today southern Vietnam, inheritance was matrilineal, and women appear to have played a more active role in public life than they did in either China or India, a pattern that would continue in much of Southeast Asia. Other than among South Asian migrants, the impact of caste was limited, and locally created social hierarchies remained the most important.
Slavery and slave societies
Along with the distinctions between elites and commoners, and men and women, the most pervasive social distinction in the ancient world was that between slave and free. Sometimes, in fact, it was the only distinction. In the law code of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu everyone other than the king is divided into two groups, slave and free. In Sumeria and elsewhere, slavery clearly predated the growth of cities and the creation of written records, increased with urbanization, and increased even more with the development of the state. The coercive powers of states allowed owners to live safely amidst many slaves, and rulers sometimes used slaves in military, police, and administrative roles to enhance their power. Slavery was a recognized social status in the law codes of every state in the ancient world for which these survive, including those of Southwest Asia, Egypt, China, India, and the Mediterranean, and is evident from different sources in many other states as well. Slavery was also present in many tribal societies, including those of Central Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and many parts of Oceania. Slaves came from every ethnic group, and included captives of war, raids, piracy, and abductions, as well as people enslaved for debt, sold by their families, or who sold themselves into slavery because of extreme poverty. In some places slaves were largely from nearby areas, while in others organized slave trading existed across huge distances. Slaves were a major component of trade, and were used—along with horses, camels, oxen, donkeys, and mules—to carry other items of trade. Slave markets existed at many nodes in trading networks, which meant that war captives, criminals, and rebels could be sold away instead of killed or imprisoned.
The labor that slaves did was highly variable, and in most places slaves did every kind of work that free people did, often alongside them: they farmed small plots of land, carried out domestic work, produced goods for sale, worked for wages, cared for children, and so on. Gangs of slaves also mined silver and copper and quarried stone in conditions of extreme brutality. Slaves functioned as items of conspicuous consumption as well. Owning many slaves marked one as a person of wealth, particularly in status-conscious cities such as Alexandria, Rome, or Chang’an, while slaves from far away indicated that one was able to afford exotic luxury goods. The households of rulers had particularly large numbers of slaves, who could range from male slaves who had positions of power and influence as government officials and royal advisers to female slaves who wove cloth or bore and cared for the emperor’s children to slaves of both sexes who entertained, cooked, tended animals, and maintained the palace.
Slavery was thus diverse and flexible, but everywhere it depended on the communal recognition that some individuals owned others as property, which gave them the authority to sell and transport them, and to discipline them or otherwise control their behavior. Laws enforced the fact that slaves were property, but also viewed them as individuals able to act on their own and to engage in relationships with other individuals. This complexity was already there in the Code of Ur-Nammu, in which one provision lists selling a slave as the first option to pay off a debt, but another notes, “If a man’s slave-woman, comparing herself to her mistress, speaks insolently to her, her mouth shall be scoured with one quart of salt.” Similarly, in Hammurabi’s code slaves are property that is bought, sold, and inherited, but they are also sellers and buyers of property.
In most states in the ancient world, the proportion of slaves in the population was not very great and most work was carried out by persons who were legally free; even the Egyptian pyramids appear to have been built largely by wage laborers. This was also the case in South Asia and in Han China, where peasants who owned their own land or who farmed the same piece of rented land for generations were the vast majority of the populati
on. Land was generally divided equally among the sons, and as the population grew, the landholding of any one family shrank. Using iron tools and cattle-drawn plows if they could afford them, peasant families farmed these small plots intensively, with frequent weeding, cultivation, fertilizing, and thinning, to which women added weaving as a subsidiary activity that generated income to pay taxes and rents. Slavery was not conducive to intensive agriculture, and slaves may have constituted less than 1 percent of the booming population of Han China. The official Confucian social hierarchy placed peasants after scholar-bureaucrats in prestige, above artisans and merchants. Though this had little impact on the lives of actual peasants, it did mean that honor was accorded to agricultural labor and rural life in the abstract. More important for real people was the fact that because free peasants contributed both taxes and labor services to the state, the government made efforts to keep them productive, and it kept land taxes low.
A Concise History of the World Page 13