When you picture the beginnings of democracy, you likely think of men draped in linen togas gathered in marble columned buildings.
But the origin story of democracy is being rewritten, thanks to a new study on ancient societies.
Looking at evidence from 31 ancient societies around the globe — including Europe, Asia and the Americas — researchers uncovered evidence of a deep, global history of shared governance.
“People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome,” said Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center. “But our research shows that many societies around the world developed ways to limit the power of rulers and give ordinary people a voice.”
To accomplish this, the researchers — including co-author Keith Kintigh, an archaeologist and professor emeritus from Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change — developed a quantitative framework to assess whether a society operated through an autocratic or shared governance system.
The study looked at data such as buildings, artwork, how societies were financed, important rituals, signs of wealth inequality and administrative systems. Using these and other indicators, the researchers developed an “autocracy index.” The index scored each indicator and placed them into a graph measuring if the society scored more democratic (i.e. collective governance with shared responsibility for decision-making) or autocratic systems (i.e. one person or a small group holding the power).
What the researchers found was a diverse range of governance systems, including evidence that collective governance — or democracy — wasn’t created in ancient Greece or republican Rome, as is so often assumed.
“For more than a century, while acknowledging some variation, there has been a tacit reliance on an evolutionary sequence of societal development in which hunter-gatherers have a more collective form of governance, so-called ‘civilizations’ with more concentration of power,” Kintigh said. “This synthetic research shows a real diversity in the development of different modes of governance in what were previously classified as bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states.”
Researchers examined 40 cases from 31 different political units across Europe, North America and Asia, spanning thousands of years. These societies all had different methods of recordkeeping, and not all of them left behind written records. So the team had to find different ways to infer what the governments in these historical contexts were like.
“I think the use of space is very telling,” Feinman said. “When you find urban areas with broad, open spaces, or when you see public buildings that have wide spaces where people can get together and exchange information, those societies tend to be more democratic.”
Working through their data, the team found that Maya societies like Tikal or Copán scored more like an autocracy, while the Teotihuacan scored more as collective governance. TeotihuacanArchaeologists from Arizona State University have been conducting research at Teotihuacan for over 50 years in collaboration with Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change is home to the Teotihuacan Research Laboratory, which manages an on-site research facility in San Juan Teotihuacan, Edo. de México. was an immense city that flourished in the highlands of central Mexico, near modern Mexico City, from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 650. It was one of the largest ancient cities anywhere in the world, with approximately 80,000 people living in the city.
As seen with the Teotihuacan example, researchers found that population size and the number of political levels did not account for whether a society would be autocratic, which challenges the established idea that demographic and political scale naturally leads to strong rulers.
What led to societies leaning more one way or the other?
“The strongest factor shaping how much power rulers held was how they financed their authority,” Feinman said.
If the society leaned on external financing, such as the control of resources, slave labor or trade routes, this tended to lean toward a more autocratic society. If the financing was more internal, through taxation of the population for instance, this showed a strong correlation with a society distributing the power and shared governance.
The study also shows that societies with more inclusive political systems generally had lower levels of economic inequality. This was measured by the distribution of home sizes, access to rare goods and burial practices.
“These findings challenge the idea that autocracy and great inequality are natural or inevitable outcomes of complexity or growth,” Feinman said. “History shows that people across the world have created inclusive political systems — even under difficult conditions.”
According to Kintigh, there are lessons to be learned, not just about these ancient societies, but for today.
“With data and analyses of this sort, I think we can see that the present is not categorically distinct from the past,” Kintigh said. “With this sort of synthetic research, we can compare, for example, the long term sustainability of societies with different forms of governance, and also see that governance forms change through time, and not always in an autocratic direction.”
Sarah Klassen, who earned her PhD in anthropology from ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, was also a co-author on this study. She is currently a research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The study, “The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time,” was published today in Science Advances. Portions of this news story were adapted from a press release by the Field Museum.
