Before the Beginning
To understand the cycle, we must begin before it began. Before agriculture. Before cities. Before surplus and storage and the concept of ownership that could be hoarded. We must begin with the ninety percent of human history that we have forgotten, because it contains the memory of what we lost.
For most of the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we lived in small bands—twenty to fifty individuals, nomadic or semi-nomadic, hunting and gathering, without permanent leaders, without accumulated property, without the divisions that would later tear us apart.
Archaeological evidence from sites like Dolni Vestonice (Czech Republic, 26,000 years ago) and Ohalo II (Israel, 23,000 years ago) reveals a pattern that would be unrecognizable to modern eyes: egalitarianism enforced not by law but by culture. Burials with equal grave goods. Communal dwellings without private spaces. Tool production distributed across age and gender lines, not specialized into classes.
The anthropologist Richard Lee, studying the !Kung San of the Kalahari in the 1960s (before their forced modernization), documented what he called "fierce egalitarianism." A skilled hunter who brought down a large animal was expected to mock his own catch, to claim it was worthless, to give it away freely. Accumulation was prevented by social pressure. Status was gained by generosity, not by hoarding.
This was not romantic primitivism. Life was hard. Infant mortality was high. Violence existed—intergroup conflict, domestic abuse, the universal human capacity for cruelty. But it was contained. Limited by scale. A band of thirty cannot sustain a permanent underclass. Everyone must know how to do everything, or the group dies. The chief is only chief until the hunt ends. The priest has no temple to maintain.
The concept of "private property" in the modern sense did not exist. Tools were personal, yes. Clothes. Weapons. But the land, the water, the game, the gathering grounds—these were common. Not in the legal sense of modern commons, which requires documentation and enforcement, but in the lived sense of *obviousness*. Of course the river belongs to everyone. Of course you share your catch. Of course you help build the shelter. What else would you do? Let your kin starve? Freeze? Die?
This was the original community. The true community. Sustained not by ideology but by necessity. By the reality that in a small group, your survival is literally dependent on everyone else's survival. The forgetting of this interdependence is the original sin of civilization, the first step on the path to the cliff.
The change began around 12,000 years ago, independently, in multiple locations. The Fertile Crescent. The Yangtze River valley. Mesoamerica. The Andes. New Guinea. Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Agricultural Revolution.
Not a revolution in the sense of sudden overthrow, but in the sense of slow transformation over generations. The domestication of wheat and barley in the Levant. Of rice in China. Of maize in Mexico. Of sorghum in Africa.
At first, it seemed like improvement. More food. More reliability. The ability to stay in one place, to build permanent shelters, to accumulate tools and pottery and the things that make life comfortable.
But agriculture created something new: surplus. More food than could be eaten immediately. Storage. The granary. The seed bank. The accumulated wealth that could be guarded, controlled, inherited.
And with surplus came the possibility of inequality.
The archaeological record shows it happening. At Abu Hureyra, in modern Syria, the settlement grew from a small village of hunter-gatherers (11,500 years ago) to a town of 3,000 people (9,000 years ago). The houses became differentiated. Some larger, with better materials, with storage rooms, with private spaces. Some smaller, cramped, shared.
The skeletons tell the story. The wealthy buried with jewelry, tools, food offerings. The poor buried with nothing. The evidence of malnutrition—dental defects, bone lesions, stunted growth—appearing in the lower-class skeletons while the upper-class skeletons grew taller, healthier, stronger.
This was the beginning of the forgetting.
The forgetting that we are all dependent on each other. The forgetting that the land does not belong to anyone. The forgetting that accumulation beyond need is pathology, not progress.
The first division: those who controlled the surplus, and those who produced it.
By 6,000 years ago, the pattern was established across multiple continents.
In Mesopotamia, the temple economies of Uruk and Eridu. Priests controlling the grain stores, employing the farmers, extracting tribute in the name of the gods. The invention of writing—not for literature, but for accounting. For tracking who owed what to whom. For enforcing debt.
In Egypt, the unification under Narmer, the first pharaoh. The divine right to rule based on control of the Nile's floodwaters, the surplus of grain, the labor of millions. The pyramids—monuments not just to the dead, but to the power of the living to command the labor of thousands, to concentrate wealth in death as in life.
In the Indus Valley, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Grid-planned streets, sophisticated drainage systems, standardized weights and measures—achievements of organization built on the backs of laborers who lived in cramped quarters while the elite occupied the citadels.
In China, the Erlitou culture, the first dynasty. Bronze production controlled by the king, used for ritual weapons that demonstrated the monopoly on violence, the power to command death as well as life.
Everywhere, the same pattern. The concentration of surplus. The division into classes. The forgetting of the original community, replaced by the ideology of hierarchy. The priests who claimed to speak for the gods. The warriors who protected the surplus from outsiders and from the producers themselves. The kings who embodied the state, who were the state, who owned everything and everyone by right of birth.
And everywhere, the same rationalization. This is necessary. This is natural. This is the order of things. The gods demand it. The ancestors established it. The alternative is chaos, barbarism, the loss of all that has been built.
The forgetting was complete by the time anyone thought to write about it. The original community—the egalitarian band, the sharing of all things, the dependence on each other—was already myth. Already prehistory. Already lost.
But not entirely.
In every civilization, there have been those who remembered. Or who intuited what had been lost. The prophets who cried out against inequality. The philosophers who questioned the naturalness of hierarchy. The rebels who tried to restore the commons.
The Hebrew prophets—Amos, Isaiah, Micah—denouncing the wealthy who "sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals." Calling for justice, for the restoration of Jubilee, for the forgiveness of debts, for the return of the land to the people.
The Greek philosophers—Plato observing that the "city" (polis) was based on division of labor, on the exploitation of the many by the few, on the forgetting of the original equality. Aristotle justifying slavery as "natural," but acknowledging that some questioned it, that the memory persisted.
The Chinese sages—Confucius trying to restore harmony through proper relationships, but also Mozi calling for universal love, for the abolition of hierarchy, for the recognition that "when everyone is treated as one's own family, then there is no poverty, no inequality, no war."
The Buddha, born a prince, leaving his palace to seek liberation from suffering, teaching that attachment to wealth and status was the root of pain, that the path to enlightenment required letting go of the accumulation that civilization demanded.
They were voices in the wilderness. Marginalized, often persecuted, their teachings co-opted by the very hierarchies they criticized. But they prove that the memory persisted. That the forgetting was never total. That some always knew, always felt, that something had been lost.
The cycle had begun. And the resistance to the cycle had begun with it.
The wars started as soon as there was surplus to fight over.
The earliest recorded war—perhaps the first large-scale organized violence in human history—was the Battle of Uruk, around 5,000 years ago. Fought between the city of Uruk and the city of Kish over control of trade routes and agricultural land. Thousands of men on each side, armed with bronze weapons, fighting in formation, killing each other so that their kings could control more surplus, accumulate more wealth, build bigger monuments.
The archaeological evidence shows what the records don't: the mass graves, the skeletons with weapon trauma, the destroyed villages, the refugees. The human cost of the forgetting.
And the pattern was set. War as the continuation of class struggle by other means. The wealthy sending the poor to die for the interests of the wealthy. The ideology of patriotism, of glory, of honor, masking the reality of plunder, of resource extraction, of the defense of hierarchy against those who would challenge it.
The Sumerian city-states waged war on each other for 2,000 years. Egypt conquered Nubia for gold and slaves. The Akkadian Empire rose and fell in violence. Babylon. Assyria. The Hittites. The Mycenaeans. The Shang Dynasty in China. The Olmecs in Mexico.
Every empire the same. Conquest to seize surplus. Organization to extract it efficiently. Hierarchy to maintain control. Ideology to justify the violence. And eventually, collapse when the extraction became unsustainable, when the poor could no longer be squeezed, when the ecology could no longer support the concentration, when the wars became too costly, when the forgetting was complete and the society had lost the knowledge of how to live without exploitation.
The cycle turned. The cliff approached. The fall came.
And then the rebuilding. The new city on the ruins of the old. The new king claiming to restore order. The new priests claiming to speak for the gods. The new rationalization that *this time* would be different. That *this* empire would last. That this hierarchy was natural, necessary, just.
The forgetting continued.