От славы рода до двора монарха: Размышления о циклических моделях и исторической реальности
From the glory of the clan to the court of the monarch: Reflections on cyclic models and historical reality

Summary/Abstract: One of the main challenges in studying antiquity stems from the difficulties, which researchers encounter when attempting to describe both preliterate and state-based societies in a single context. In Soviet historiography, the distinction between the two was exacerbated by the de facto attachment of the emergence of statehood to social processes and class formation. In practice, however, the focus was usually not on documenting class society in the sources, but on the emergence of an apparatus and written documentation. Chiefdom theory has provided a significant breakthrough toward resolving this impasse. This article proposes two complementary cyclical models — the internal development model and the external interaction model — to describe the socio-political and cultural-civilizational development of both preliterate and state-based societies. The first «clan-state» model (phases 0–9) is based on the idea of the evolution of governance in any growing society, from archaic monarchy to aristocratic oligarchy and then, through a series of social cataclysms, to democracy, ochlocracy, and tyranny. This inevitably leads to a crisis of the traditional value system and the need to establish effective supra-communal authority. If, at this point, society is familiar with an information-recording system, the formation of an apparatus leads to the emergence of state and, eventually, bureaucratic structures. The latter, despite their initial apparent effectiveness, inevitably tend to lose their functional meaning with time, which predetermines the early or late collapse of the entire system. But in the absence of information-recording systems, society continues to exist in a pre-state form until its dissolution. The second «center-periphery» model (stages a–f) describes the external relations of this society with its periphery, based on trade and colonial expansion from the Center to Periphery. This creates a field of informational attraction for peripheral societies toward the cultural center, which sooner or later leads to migration from the Periphery to the Center. However, the migration leads not only to a decline of the level of culture in the Center but also to the spread of certain elements of this culture to the Periphery. Under favorable circumstances, a new cultural center is formed and a new development cycle begins. Understanding of the state as an apparatus of governance and coercion, composed of professional specialists using a specific system of information recording, we can see that the emergence of statehood is not rigidly tied to any particular phase or stage of the proposed models. This is particularly true for secondary statehood, which arises in the Periphery under the strong influence or import of political technologies from a neighboring state of the Center. Accordingly, in the absence of the assimilation of imported technologies, society continues to exist in the form of a chiefdom (complex or super-complex) until either special conditions arise for the internal emergence of a system of recording information and the formation of a state apparatus (primary civilizations), or until a collapse of the society and its disintegration occurs.

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