The one percent and the ninety-nine percent in ancient cities

What was the level of social inequality in ancient cities? Were these places of luxury and misery, where wealthy elite neighborhoods were separated from squalid slums? Or did the economic activity of cities help everyone achieve a reasonable quality of life? For a number of reasons, it is difficult to answer these questions clearly and simply. Ancient cities varied greatly in their extent and nature of social inequality. Furthermore, there have been very few rigorous analyses of inequality in individual ancient cities, and even fewer comparisons among cities in different regions and in different time periods.

I've been working on this topic lately, and here are some thoughts on ways we can look at ancient inequality. I'll outline two perspectives on wealth inequality in ancient cities. One focuses on elite-commoner differences, and the other on quantifying the level or extent of inequality (irrespective of social class).

View 1: Elite-Commoner Differences

Bruce Trigger's (2003) massive volume, Understanding Ancient Civilizations, is probably the best book about ancient urban societies. In chapter 8, he points out features of inequality shared by many or most ancient states. First, the most important social division was between a small elite class and the mass of commoners:

“Usually this involved distinguishing an upper class, free commoners, and slaves. Since slaves, if any, tended to be few, the bulk of the population was divided into two groups: upper class and commoners.” (p.145)
 
Second:

“Inequality was regarded as a normal condition and injustice as a personal misfortune or even as an individual’s just deserts rather than as a social evil ... The general pervasiveness of inequality ensured that its legitimacy went unquestioned.” (p. 142)

Some archaeologists have suggested that in a few ancient cities there was a "middle class" of people better-off than most commoners, but not at the level of the elite. My answer to this idea is both yes and no. First, the negative reply. Given the limitations of archaeological data, it is rarely possible to show the clear presence of a middle group between the elite and the commoners. We need quantitative data to discuss this issue, and I haven't seen anyone who claims to have found an ancient "middle class" show the quantitative data to substantiate their claim.

Second, my positive reply is not precisely an agreement for the existence of a middle class. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that in any given case, inequality was much more complex and multi-stranded than a simple two-class model allows. Frannie Berdan and I explore this in a paper now under review (Smith & Berdan n.d.), where we apply Charles Tilly's (1998) model of "durable inequality" to the Aztecs. We use ethnohistoric data than archaeological data, and we find a variety of separate, yet linked, systems of inequality operating at various levels of Aztec society. There isn't a clear "middle class," but there are many more wealth and power categories than just the nobility and the commoners.

Commoner house and noble house at Cuexcomate

While that paper reveals a complex system of social inequality, my own archaeological data point pretty clearly to two very distinct social classes, elite and commoner. At Cuexcomate and other Aztec sites in the state of Morelos, commoner houses averaged around 25 square meters in size. Noble's houses were in the range of 400-500 square meters (with no "middle class" houses in the middle!), and royal palaces were over 6,000 square meters (Smith 2008:117). The houses of commoners and nobles were radically different, and there is no "middle" category of house size between the small commoner houses and the large noble residences. I presented these data many years ago (Smith 1992), but I am now writing a paper with my former student, Jan Olson, that shows how the people who lived in these two categories of residence used different kind of artifacts (Olson & Smith n.d.).

For Aztec society, both the archaeology and the ethnohistory describe the presence and importance of two major social classes, nobles and commoners. But the greater detail of the ethnohistory shows that this class distinction is only one part of a more complex and widespread system of durable social inequality.

View 2: Quantifying Inequality

How do ancient levels of inequality compare to the modern world? The elite-commoner perspective on ancient inequality isn't much help here. We don't have a hereditary nobility in the U.S. today, but we certainly have a significant level of (increasing) social inequality. One of the main techniques for comparing inequality levels is the Gini index. This measures the concentration of wealth (or income) among the members of a population. If everyone had an equal share of the wealth, the Gini index would be zero. If one person owned ALL of the wealth, the index would be 1.0. The Gini index in the U.S. today is between 0.4 and 0.5, depending on how it is calculated. The blue map shows the Gini indices for U.S. states.

Gini index for U.S. states today

The Gini index is very easy to calculate. The problem is getting a complete coverage of the population. If you can measure all of the houses in a settlement, and then assume that house size is a measure of wealth, it is possible to calculate the Gini index for that settlement. I just submitted paper to a journal, with several students, that calculates Gini indices for a number of Precolumbian communities in central Mexico (Smith et al. n.d.). I had published one set of these data years ago (Smith 1992), but for this paper we recalculated the house areas and also calculated the volume of the architecture for each structure. Nor surprisingly, the sites I mention above, with lots of small commoner houses and one or two large noble residences, have moderately high levels of inequality (Gini indices around 0.45). And a small village without any large houses has a very low Gini index (surprise, surprise), close to 0.10.

Inequality at an Aztec town (Cuexcomate) and village settlement

The Lorenz curve is a graphical presentation of the Gini index. If the distribution is equal (Gini=0), then the graph will lie along the diagonal. The greater the inequality, the more the graph of wealth will drop below the diagonal. In addition to getting a number of measures from Aztec sites in Morelos, we also calculate a Gini index for Teotihuacan, the huge Classic period urban center. We were quite surprised by the result, but I'm going to leave you guessing here.....

Teotihuacan: How much inequality?

The study of wealth inequality in ancient cities is only just beginning. We need far more studies of the sizes of houses, the value of possessions, the types of grave goods, and other archaeological measure of wealth. And we need to devise and adapt more methods, like the Gini index, to explore such data. Ancient cities were not all the same. Some were more egalitarian in their distribution of wealth, while others were sharply divided with extremely wealthy nobles sharing the city with indigent paupers. Inequality was clearly a significant part of the Wide Urban World.

References:

Milanovic, Branko  (2011)  The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. Basic Books, New York.

Olson, Jan Marie and Michael E. Smith  (n.d.)  Material Expressions of Wealth and Social Class at Aztec-Period Sites in Morelos, Mexico ( ms. in preparation).

Smith, Michael E.  (1992)  Archaeological Research at Aztec-Period Rural Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Volume 1, Excavations and Architecture / Investigaciones arqueológicas en sitios rurales de la época Azteca en Morelos, Tomo 1, excavaciones y arquitectura. Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology vol. 4. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

Smith, Michael E.  (2008)  Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Smith, Michael E. and Frances F. Berdan  (n.d.)  Durable Inequality in Aztec Society. Paper under review at a journal.

Smith, Michael E., Timothy Dennehy, April Kamp-Whittaker, Emily Colon and Rachel Harkness  (n.d.)  Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities.Paper under review at a journal.

Tilly, Charles  (1998)  Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Trigger, Bruce G.  (2003)  Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge University Press, New York.

What are universal urban features?

1.Walled neighborhoods in Chang'an

What characteristics are shared by all cities, from the earliest to today, and around the world? Many of the features shared by all cities are not exclusive to cities or urban settlements. Things like housing, big buildings, wide streets, or social diversity are often found in villages and other non-urban settlements. Three features of cities seem to be true universals. By this I mean features that (1) are found in all known cities; (2) are often absent in non-urban settlements; and (3) have a major impact on life in cities. These three features are neighborhoods, urban services, and elites. There may be others that I haven't considered; let me know if you have ideas for non-trivial urban universals.

2. Neighborhoods (clusters) at La Joyanca

(1) Neighborhoods

For years I've been telling my classes that neighborhoods are one of the few urban universals. Figure 1 here shows the walled neighborhoods at the Chinese Tang city of Chang'an. Recent research of our urban group here at Arizona State University, has been targeting the neighborhood at cities through time. Archaeologists have woken up to the importance of urban neighborhoods, and this has become an active area of fieldwork and analysis; see the new book, The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial unit in Mesoamerican Cities. The clusters of houses at Classic Maya sites were neighborhoods; figure 2 here shows one example, the city of La Joyanca (from the chapter by Eva Lemmonier) Even semi-urban settlements have neighborhoods - see my post on this.

3. Bhaktapur neighborhood plaza

4. Model of a Bkaktapur shrine

Neighborhoods are often focused on key features such as a plaza, a water-source, or a temple. In the Nepalese city of Bhaktapur, for example, neighborhoods are formed around open plazas, often with water sources (fig.3). In addition, each neighborhood has one or more shrines. Our urban project has a small exhibit in the Museum of Anthropology at ASU, and the museum folks created a nice model of one of the Bhaktapur neighborhood shrines (fig. 4). Central features like this give neighborhoods a central focus for people to gather and interact on a daily basis.

(2) Urban Services

The next research project of our urban group is a study of urban services in premodern cities. In background reading for this project it occurred to me that urban services are another urban universal. When people live together in cities, they cannot take care of all of their basic social needs in the same way that rural people in villages can, and they also take on new needs that must be met in the city. Someone has to provide basic services, which include infrastructure (water, roads), education, commercial outlets, ritual, and places to gather. In modern cities, governments provide most of the urban services, but in medieval cities many services came from guilds, church groups, and private citizens. How does this work in premodern cities? And how are services affected by elites and inequalities? These are the basic questions we will be studying over the next few years. I will talk about our project in a future post (click here for some preliminary information). For now, I will just mention some basic services and how they intersect with neighborhoods.

5. Neighborhood temple in Calixtlahuaca

We are studying urban services through their facilities -- the places where they are provided. For the comparative study we have singled out three services that occur in most cities: markets/shops; temples; and assembly spaces. The small plazas and shrines of Bhaktapur are examples of neighborhood-level services in that city. Neighborhood-level service facilities can be widely distributed in cities, and typically there are many of them. But cities also have higher-level service facilities - that is, facilities that are larger and serve more people, and there are fewer of these features. Thus in Mesoamerican cities, there are often many small temples, distributed around the city (fig. 5), while there are only a few large central temples (fig. 6).

6. High-order temple at Palenque

7. Central plaza at Copan

Also, many cities have numerous small neighborhood plazas (fig. 3), but only one or two large, central plazas (fig. 7). For more information on our upcoming study of premodern urban services, click here.

(3) Elites

8. Medieval noble and beggar

My third candidate for an urban universal is elites. My claim is that in any society that has both cities and elites (that is, most complex, state-level societies), some or all of the elites will live in the city. There may also be rural-based elites, or elites who maintain multiple residences, but some elites will live in the city, and they will exert an influence over the lives of the non-elites. This is important, because in ancient societies, typically 5% or less of the population were in the elite class, and the small number of elite families had a disproportionate influence on urban life in cities. This claim also applies to modern cities, although the system of inequality and elites is radically different in contemporary western societies compared to premodern societies.

9. Elite and commoner house at Cuexcomate

Exactly how did urban elites influence city life in the past? There is probably variation among cities and areas, and this is one question we will investigate in our project. One very preliminary finding, from a small sample of cities, suggests that elite residences had better access to service facilities than commoner houses (surprise, surprise). But commoners living in the same neighborhoods as those elite residences had no advantages (in the distance they had to walk to get services).

While elites played important roles in ancient cities and societies, there has been surprisingly little comparative research on elites around the globe. Archaeologists usually identify elites by the size of their houses (fig. 9), and as the excavation and analysis of houses moves forward around the globe, we will learn more about ancient elites and their roles in cities.

Are there other urban universals beyond neighborhoods, urban services, and elites? Let me know if you have any suggestions. There is still a lot to learn about cities throughout history in the wide, urban world.