Abstract
While International Relations scholars have recently excavated a number of systems previously unstudied by the discipline, few have discussed the emergence of fully-fledged systems in prehistory. Fully-fledged system have continuous multilinear (between more than two units at the time) and multidimensional (more than one institution in evidence) interaction at its core. Drawing mainly on extant archaeological research, we examine the European Bronze Age. We find that Indo-European in-migrating herders during the third millennium BCE established patron-led polities based on the steppe practices of the clients’ oath to his patron and the patron’s feast. A third practice, the guest/host relationships between patrons, anchored Europe’s first regional inter-polity systems. We also find that, due to an increase in interaction capacity caused by better boat building, horse-transport and the emergence of new technologies that made possible warfare at a distance, there systems were harbingers of a European-wide system of what we call Central Site Polities. We conclude that European inter-polity systems hail from the Bronze Age and suggest that the practices on which these systems rested are still, mutatis mutanda, with us. Further work on possible genealogical ties between the Central Site System and subsequent European systems awaits.
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Notes
Given that the beginnings of what we call the Bronze Age obviously depends on when bronze arrived, and that the end of the system coincides with the so-called Bronze-age collapse around 1200 that had an aftermath in southern Europe that is not yet very well understood, we refrain from giving more exact dates.
Note that our claim here is limited to the factual. Scrutiny of the often accompanying claim, that there exist genealogical ties between a possible Bronze-Age system in what we now call Europe and the Europe of today, would warrant treatment of possible historical and cultural continuity that would require other source material and other methods than those on which we draw in the following.
An alternative possibility would have been to begin with a lexical definition of the state as a human group consisting of a territory, people and an administration. In an IR context, this is the traditional Realist tack. Realists use it to downplay or even erase historical variability between types of states and states systems. When the aim is to specify change over time, which it is here, such a tack is a dead end.
It should also be noted that Baltic amber from the Bronze Age has also been found further afield, as in the shipwreck located off Uluburun at the southern Anatolian coast and in western Anatolia (Bryce 2006: 122).
Mention should be made here of a political context for the 1990s debates. In 1994, after the end of the Cold War, and in parallel to EU accession negotiations with new Central and Eastern European members, the Council of Europe launched a three-year campaign that pointed to the Bronze Age as the gestation period for Europe. A kick-off exhibition at the British Museum (Identity 1994) was followed by exhibitions with titles like ‘Gods and Heroes of the European Bronze Age—Europe at the Time of Ulysses’ as well as publications with names like The Bronze Age—the First Golden Age of Europe (Lowenthal 1995; Jensen 1999; Gröhn 2004: 171–87; Hølleland 2008: 57–64).
Along the Atlantic Coast, in the Balkans, at the Iron gates of the Danube are typical areas (e.g. Bailey and Spikins 2008). Household or house societies represent an extremely stable form of social organization but one with a limited potential for wide reaching and complex organization between the different households. There are examples of household systems that organized up to 20 000 people in single cities (Müller et al. 2018; Graeber & Wengrow 2022).]
Kristiansen et al. (2017) suggest that the migration was facilitated by the weakening of segmentary systems due to an outbreak of the Black Plague, but Furholt (2021) doubts whether their identification of yersina pestis in human aDNA is in and of itself enough to document that plague is in evidence.
The Balkans seem to have been named millennia later by another wave of mounted migrants, Turks, in which case it would translate as ‘swampy forests’. ‘Pontic’ as an adjective derived from the Latin name Pontus Euxinus, that is, the steppe north of the Black Sea. While there was a long tradition of speculation that this was indeed the Proto-Indo-European ‘Urheimat’ or ‘ancestral home’, the definite confirmation that this was so came only recently, as technology to decode ancient DNA became available.
Gold and copper, for instance the Varna-culture located in Present-day Bulgaria; Renfrew 1978.
Indo-European was an oral language, and so we have no direct knowledge of it. Since languages evolve according to specific laws, however, linguists may infer lexicon and grammar by comparing its daughter languages and infer back. Words established in this way are marked with an asterisk (Mallory 1989).
The presence of a tell does not give indications of social organisation in and of itself, it is only evidence for stable occupation and a building tradition that produces a lot of debris as the houses age and collapse. Recently, criticism has been raised from empirical and principal points of view against any presupposition that tell societies were necessarily hierarchical or governed by centralized powers (see discussion in Graeber and Wengrow 2022). Evidence from Bulgaria and the northern shores of the Black Sea are for instance interpreted as societies with little social differentiation (e.g. Cunliffe 2008:142). However, there is also evidence that some of these Balkan societies were hierarchical organised. The graves from the archaeologically famous Varna cemetery in present-day Bulgaria from the middle of the fifth millennium, has clear indications of well-developed hierarchical status differences with very rich elite burials. The tell settlements in the area have however little evidence of social stratification.
This is the so-called Piora Oscillation.
Note the striking isomorphism of what Indo-Europeanists call comparative method and what Durkheim wrote about comparative method some 125 years ago: ‘To explain a social institution belonging to a given species, one will compare its different forms, not only among peoples of that species but in all preceding species as well […] one cannot explain a social fact of any complexity except by following its complete development through all social species. Comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts’ (Durkheim 1950: 138–9)
For a particularly incisive discussion of linguistic imitation of Indo-European speakers by a segmentary polity see Anthony (2006).
Note, however, that we do have some archaeological findings that testify to massacres on the village level as well as mutilation of corpses and cannibalism already in the above-mentioned proto-system of house polities.
While this is an established viewpoint in archaeology, O’Connell (1989: 26) is representative of historians in seeing administration by government as an additional prerequisite for organised war to exist.
The palace and the general pattern for structuring a polity around it reached Greece from Mesopotamia via Hittite Anatolia (Bryce 2006). In both cases, the forerunners were patron-led polities.
So-called, since it is from our vantage point that it is ‘dark’; given the weakening of central powers, there were fewer scribes and other administrators around. The resulting decline in elite source material, notably narrative sources, means that we know less about what was going on. However, it does not necessarily follow that things were necessarily ‘darker’ for most people who were living at the time (Scott 2017).
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Acknowledgements
We should like to thank Morten Skumsrud Andersen, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Jakub Godzimirski, Kristin M. Haugevik, Dag Hessen, Patrick Jackson, Halvard Leira, Lene Melheim, Cecilie Basberg Neumann, Elana Wilson Rowe, Ole Jacob Sending, Jason Sharman, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Julie Wilhelmsen, Einar Wigen, Michael C. Williams, Ayse Zarakol and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.
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Neumann, I.B., Glørstad, H. How old are the first European inter-polity systems? The case for the Bronze Age. J Int Relat Dev 27, 1–24 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-023-00316-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-023-00316-z