Traditional Civilizations (Part II)

In traditional civilization, a specialization also appears.

Food producers provided the crops and domesticated meats that full time craftsmen and tradesmen: millers, bakers, brewers, batchers, tanners, weavers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, metalworkers, jewelers, stonecutters and so on.

Craft turn into art as great art styles are born.

In politics, monarchs make use of kinship: Dynasties are founded by leaders or priests, others as war leaders, seizing power by force of arms.

In addition, monarchs usually employ tax collectors, district administrators and engineers public works.

Royal bureaucracies appear, usually defined as an extension of the monarch’s household.

The state commissions traders to travel abroad – another type of full time specialists. Market places emerge as the places for “administered trade” between civilized royal governments and tribal peoples.

Tribesman usually exchange raw material for fine handcrafted goods.

Yet while urban elites and high cultures of the arts, literature religion, and philosophy may flourish in cities, folk cultures of local knowledge develop along side them in the peasant villages of farmers ad in isolated fastnesses of herding nomads on the fringes of states domains.

Peasants may turn inward and encapsulated themselves in sectarian versions of their former urban culture.

Others, especially herdsmen, may resist the urban state by force of arms, sometimes even conquering the center and founding new dynasties.

In sum, the institutions that have now emerged inside the community form of either green or nucleated, walled cities with associated peasant hamlets and villages are.

• A state cult organized by full time priests around shrines officially recognized by the dynamic state.

• The extension of the fraternity-age-grade principle to recruit enormous armies for conquest and defense.

• A variety of tradesmen and craftsmen, often organized fraternally into guilds, performing all manner of services and handcrafting all of goods.

• The extension of the monarch’s household to form a bureaucracy, divided into bureaus of war (army), public works, and tax collecting/local administration.

• The extension of kinship to royal dynasties, with lineage as the ideology of legitimacy for rule.

• The beginning of officially organized long distance trade and the possibility of marketplaces for moving goods locally. Most goods, however, continue to move as tribute and offerings to be distributed by royal and priestly rituals to bureaucrats, soldiers and ordinary citizens, who in traditional societies are better terms “subject” and “cultists”.
Traditional Civilizations (Part II)