Peace (5 page)

The earliest mode of subsistence based on the home base social structure, gathering, laid the foundations of two features integral to future peace and peacemaking: conscientiousness and language-use. With gathering, humans stopped eating on the spot with whoever happened to be participating in the expedition; instead, we began making premeditated decisions to take others into consideration, to be patient and self-restrained, because we consciously had secure enough relationships to make the trade-offs worthwhile. Gathering could only be effective if information was shared, which is why both linguistic communication and the larger brain size language-use requires are considered its derivations. The symbolic systems used later in peacemaking were thus not add-ons to peaceful human behavior, but extensions of it. Synthesizing scavenging and tool-making, early hunting economies were usually mixed with gathering. This hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence is unique to our species, represents 99 percent of our existence so far, and so may be “the single most important factor in the emergence of mankind,” as well as in the evolution of peace.
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Some of the earliest evidence of hunting was found in Boxgrove, England, where about 500,000 years ago hunters trapped many large game animals between a watering hole and a cliff, where they were finally killed. Violence aside, these tactics display at least two other elements essential to ensuing peace and peacemaking: planning and organization. The choice between using such tactics for food or against other humans was based on bio-genetic and cultural imperatives of survival, and our existence attests to the choice made more often.

Planning and organization were also necessary in the emergence of agricultural modes of subsistence, such as the seasonal growing of crops and the herding of domesticated animals, which only began roughly 10,000 years ago. Early agriculture advanced two other traits central to the evolution of peace: stable surpluses and the effective management they require. Regular use of coercive force becomes part of the structure of human societies only after the advent of agriculture and its cultural characteristics. But this statement should not be mistaken for saying that agriculture is the origin of warfare. On the contrary, like hunter-gatherers before them, prehistoric agriculturally based societies most likely lacked the time, resources and leadership necessary to sustain or withstand extended modern warlike endeavors. By making food surpluses more stable than hunting and gathering alone, agriculture facilitated rather than impeded subsistence peace among prehistoric and modern humans. It is thus both plausible and probable that prehistoric subsistence societies were as predominantly peaceful. Standing armies and police organizations only make their appearance about 5000 years ago, when irrigation
and trade intensified agricultural practices. But the former would not have been possible or necessary had not the latter led to a material abundance permitting settlements tens to thousands times greater than home bases – the first cities, states and civilizations, on which more below.

Given the dearth of records of human social life in prehistoric times, the cultural profiles of certain contemporary societies may in hindsight provide the “widest window on the largest part of our species' history,” and that of the prehistory of peace.
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Without projecting backwards, anthropological studies of peace substantiate the claim that simple societies are or at least can be, more peaceful than complex ones and thus have a lot to teach them. One of the uncommon but astonishing features of such societies is that peaceful cultural imperatives such as altruism coupled with propitious ecological conditions have made them as close to totally non-violent as societies may probably ever be. The Tasaday of the Philippines, for example, are said to have no weapons and no words for anger, murder, war or enemy. For this reason, their way of life has been interpreted as reflecting the “elemental pacific qualities of human nature,” in Sponsel's words.
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Of course, violence breaks out in all simple societies, but malevolence aside the intent behind its use generally tends to be to restore peace. To this end, another striking feature common among simple societies is
counter-dominant behavior
, by which individuals whose self-interested, bio-genetic imperatives outproportion their pro-social, cultural imperatives are systematically shunned and stripped of their prerogatives. Among the implication of these exemplars is that while peace as a state and peacemaking as a process can transcend cultural contingencies and diversities, they are also immanently within them.

To prevent the necessity of counter-dominant behavior, the enculturation process of the Semai, considered the best-documented case of a pacific simple society, includes children learning to become peaceful through the games they play. Rituals and ceremonies also play vital roles in keeping the balance between the benefits of partnership and drawbacks of domination. Facing their abolition by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, the chief of the Hokianga of New Zealand was quoted as saying that ritual feasts “have many times been the means of keeping the peace between us, and may be of service again.”
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Early in the twentieth century, the Murngin of Australia continued to practice
makarata
, or what an anthropologist describes as “ceremonial peacemaking fights” in which aggression was condoned as a means of releasing anger and restoring peace.
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When hierarchical social structures are present in pacific simple societies, practices such as the doubling of political roles and places are typically in place to counterbalance the dangers of their abuse. The widespread Polynesian practice of chiefs acting simultaneously as the agents of war and as dispensers of peace fits this model, as do
concepts of sanctuary and asylum in chief-designated locations for native Hawaiian peoples, places and timeframes of absolution for transgressors. This body of anthropological research also supports Eibl-Eibesfeldt's conclusion to his monumental ethological study of humanity: “war, defined as strategically planned, destructive group aggression, is a product of cultural evolution. Therefore, it can be overcome culturally.”
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Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations

The roles peace and peacemaking played in the ancient cultures that arose around the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have just begun to be unraveled. It is not only peace that is lost in war in what is now Iraq, where the first historic cities, states and civilizations emerged
c
. 3500 BCE, but history itself. At the threshold of history, peace is still to be grasped as evolving, though in an even more cyclical sense than in prehistory. Changing conditions and participants – actively recorded for the first known time – shaped peace and peacemaking, which in turn altered conditions and participants, and so on. Studying the history of peace in this evolutionary way reveals as much about the origins of civilizations as their ongoing traits. Such a comprehensive perspective on Mesopotamian (“between rivers”) peace practices can be drawn from the French historians of the Annales School. Integrating geography, social sciences and historiography, they saw warfare as only one of many factors contributing to the overall makeup of an era (
sic
), focusing instead on long-term structural and cultural changes. This perspective is valuable in exploring the transformation from geographically isolated, culturally homogenous home bases and villages to economically interconnected, culturally heterogeneous cities that sponsored states and made possible
civilized peace
: an ideal, a means to an end and an end in itself. Inasmuch, civilized peace was concurrently the
raison d'être
of Mesopotamian states as well as the prerequisite and underlying motive for their wars.

The identifying traits of Mesopotamian villages before 3500 BCE are their subsistence-level surpluses, economic autonomy, little differentiation between town and country, communal property, local gods and despotic rule. In contrast, the city of Mari's archives (fl. 2900–1750 BCE), for example, point to economically and politically interdependent centers characterized by overall material abundance due to irrigation; distinctions of class, occupation, place of origin, as well as public and private property; trade networks; organized religions; and shifting cooperative and defensive alliances. The meanings of peace and peacemaking at the cusp of village and city life are captured by its first known word in a written
Indo-European language, Hittite. In village contexts, making and maintaining peace meant to protect, guard and keep things or people safe as well as defending them against internal and external dangers, meanings equally applicable to the subsistence peace of home bases. In city contexts, however, peace and peacemaking took on the added meanings of being tolerant, observing agreements, laws and customs, keeping oaths and heeding advice, meanings which apply unevenly to home bases and villages, if at all.

The village-linked meanings of peace are predominantly reactive and protectionist; those specifically tied to cities, proactive and integrationist. A clear sign of this fundamental change in peace and peacemaking can be found in the earliest evidence of
urban imperatives for peace
in its Hittite sense, cylinder seals, the imprints of which were used to authenticate documents and reproduce standardized statements. Cylinder seals were unnecessary and unused in village life, in which verbal agreements between close relations were adequate to prevent and resolve conflicts. In cosmopolitan city life, however, written agreements tendered by cylinder seals were necessary tools in legitimizing and preserving ties between parties whose relationships were much less secure. That is, shared identities and interests of tight-knit village communities were sufficient to safeguard kin-group solidarity and non-kin affiliations, also essential to sustaining peaceful coexistence in cities. But the meanings of urban peace embodied in cylinder seals were crucial survival and subsistence strategies of Mesopotamian cities and their citizens insofar as they facilitated cooperation and averted war between individuals and groups with different identities and interests. Without these social and collective functions being expressed in a permanent way, fulfilled legitimately on previously agreed upon terms, it is doubtful that Mesopotamian cities could have borne the more abstract formations of states and civilizations.

A graphic entry point into the coterminous worlds of peace and war in Mesopotamia can be found in the earliest mosaic yet unearthed, set on a trapezoidal stone (presented on the following page). The archaeologists who discovered the mosaic while excavating graves in the Sumerian city of Ur identified it as a standard, carried like a banner before the state's army. This function explains the “war side” (above), in which donkey-drawn chariots charge over fallen enemies, spearmen in helmets and cloaks seize prisoners, and captives are brought before a centralized authority figure. By making clear what would happen to enemies if battles were won, or to allies if lost, this fearsome sight may have been part of “the earliest and crudest means to avoiding war,” deterrence: the prevention of aggression by threat of retaliation.
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The high value of the materials and workmanship involved suggests that the mosaic was emblematic of Sumerian economic and political prowess in
Mesopotamia at the time. Sumerians were, after all, the first to found cities like Ur, the cornerstones of Mesopotamian states, which were nearly always ruled by one male leader. Such a leader is symbolized by the centralized authority figure on the war side but conspicuously absent from the “peace side” (below), portraying a lively banquet with leisurely attendants serenaded by lyres, enjoying each other's company and the gifts of the rivers, such as grains, sheep, goats and fish. This pointed detail launches one of the oldest debates in peace studies, whether “war helps to make states, states make war, and therefore states are in part, and always must be, war machines.”
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Archaeologists since the mosaic's discovery have interpreted its function as the sound box of a musical instrument, a credible rationale for the peace side. Either as a centerpiece at a feast or a rallying point in battle, this reassuring sight and its possible sounds likely were a strong reminder of the shared experience and vision of the civilized peace Sumerians considered worth celebrating and fighting for.

The Mosaic of Ur,
c.
2650 BCE

The mosaic's mixed messages regarding the relationships between states, war, civilization and peace echo across two millennia of Mesopotamian history and beyond. Namely, that the constructive ideal of civilized peace, lived or striven for, may paradoxically be the only force capable of sustaining as well as counteracting the destructive actualities of state warfare. In any case, the mosaic's juxtaposition of state warfare and civilized peace is the earliest evidence of the two being put into close material and conceptual proximity, inaugurating one of the longest running analytical traditions in the history of peace. Like villages before them, “no city can exist if it does not draw on surpluses of food, and in most cases this comes from the surrounding land;” it was the hydraulic revolution of irrigation that converted the sporadic, subsistence-level surpluses of Mesopotamian villages into the material abundance needed to sustain their cities, states and civilizations.
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War was comparatively rare in Mesopotamia before the hydraulic revolution, and so the advent of irrigation tends to be seen as spurring integrations of military or police forces (a distinction which tended to be blurred) into local political systems, though only at minimal levels, when at all. But before two or more cities would go to war, other cities often attempted to diffuse the situation, resulting in unexpected unions between the cities concerned. If this juncture is taken as the starting point of regional state systems, as some historians of the period concur, then the peace-oriented concept of neutrality and role of moderator must be recognized as primary channels of intercity relations and statehood.