Ancient Society
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Ancient Society is a book written by Lewis H. Morgan published in 1877. In this book, Morgan developed his famous theory of the three stages of human progress, i.e., from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Friedrich Engels based his Origin of the Family on this book.
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[edit] The concept of progress
The dominant idea of Lewis' thought is that of progress.[1] It is to be conceived as a career of social states arranged in a scale on which mankind has worked their way up from the bottom. Progress is historically true of the entire human family, but not uniformly. Different branches of the family have evidenced human advancement to different conditions. The scale nevertheless is universal, or substantially the same in kind, with deviations from uniformity ... produced by special causes. Morgan hopes therefore to discern the principal stages of human development.[2]
Progress is to be apprehended in Morgan partly through analogy. It is an ascent to human supremacy on the earth. The prime analogate is an individual working his way up in society; that is, Morgan, who was well read in classics, relies on the Roman cursus honorum, rising through the ranks, which became the basis of the English ideas of career and working your way up, to which he blends in the rationalist idea of a scala, or ladder, of life. The idea of growth or development is also borrowed from individuals. A society has a life like that of an individual, which develops and grows.
The analogy, however, is given an anthropological twist and introduces the comparative method then coming into vogue in other fields. Lewis resorts to units called ethna, by which he means inventions, discoveries and domestic institutions. The ethna are compared and judged higher or lower on the scale, pair by pair. Morgan's ethna appear to comprise at least some of Edward Burnett Tylor's cultural objects. Morgan mentions Tylor a number of times in the book. Morgan's standard of higher or lower is not clearly expressed. By higher he appears to mean whatever contributes better to control over the environment, victory over competitors, and spread of population. He does not mention Charles Darwin.
[edit] The lines of progress
The substitutions of ethna better than the previous follow several lines of progress.
| No. | Line | Ethna |
|---|---|---|
| I | Subsistence | The arts of subsistence[3] are
|
| II | Government | |
| III | Language | The origin of language is:[4]
|
| IV | The Family | The forms of family are[6]
|
| V | Religion | |
| VI | House Life and Architecture | |
| VII | Property |
[edit] The ethnical periods
Morgan rejects the Age of Stone, of Bronze, of Iron as being insufficient characterizations of progress. They overlap and refer only to implements.[7] Based on the lines of progress he distinguishes ethnical periods, which each have a distinct culture and a particular mode of life and do not overlap in a region. He does admit to exceptions and a difficulty of determining exact borders between periods. Scientific archaeology did not exist in Morgan's time; he therefore cannot use stratigraphy or scientific dating, but bases his arguments on linguistic and historical speculation.
| Period | Subperiod | Ethna |
|---|---|---|
| Savagery: Natural Subsistence, at least 60,000 years. |
Lower | First distinction of man from the other animals. Fruits and Roots, tropical or subtropical habitats, at least partial tree-dwelling, gesture language, intelligence, Consanguine Family. |
| Middle | Fish Subsistence, Use of Fire, spread of man worldwide along shorelines[8], monosyllabic language, Punaluan Family. | |
| Upper | Weapons: bow and arrow, club, spear; addition of game to diet, cannibalism, syllabical language, Syndyasmian Family, organization into gentes, phratries and tribes, worship of the elements. | |
| Barbarism: Cultivation, Domestication, 35,000 years.[9] |
Lower | Horticulture: maize, bean, squash, tobacco; art of pottery, tribal confederacy, finger weaving, blow-gun, village stockade, tribal games, element worship, Great Spirit, formation of Aryan and Semitic families. |
| Middle | Domestication of animals among the Semitic and Aryan families: goat, sheep, pig, horse, ass, cow, dog; milk, making bronze, irrigation, great joint tenement houses in the nature of fortresses. | |
| Upper | Cultivation of cereals and plants by the Aryans,[10] smelting iron ore, poetry, mythology, walled cities, wheeled vehicles, metallic armor and weapons (bronze and iron), the forge, potter's wheel, grain mill, loom weaving, forging, monogamian family, individual property, municipal life, popular assembly.[11] | |
| Civilization: Field Agriculture, 5000 years. |
Ancient | Plow with an iron point, iron implements, animal power, unlimited subsistence, phonetic alphabet, writing, Arabic numerals, the military art, the city, commerce, coinage, the state, founded upon territory and upon property, the bridge, arch, crane, water-wheel, sewer. |
| Mediaeval | Gothic architecture, feudal aristocracy with hereditary titles of rank, hierarchy under the headship of a pope.[12] | |
| Modern | Telegraph, coal gas, spinning-jenny, power loom, steam engine, telescope, printing, canal lock, compass, gunpowder, photography, modern science, religious freedom, public schools, representative democracy, classes, different types of law. |
[edit] Notes
- ^ This article places words and phrases quoted from Morgan in Italics, rather than quotes, for the reader's visual convenience.
- ^ Chapter 1, initial
- ^ Chapter 2.
- ^ Morgan has little to say of language and does not consider it an important part of his classification, but what little there is can be found in Chapter 3.
- ^ Morgan admits to a deficit in knowledge of language development, which he does not think important. His brief scheme is in fact speculative only. Languages of the far east, which appear to westerners to be "monosyllabic", use tonal morphemes, missing from Indo-European and Semitic languages. One syllable in different tones has different meanings. No language today is considered more primitive than any other; early stages of language are totally unknown and must have disappeared in remote prehistory. Gestural language still is considered the original form of symbolic communication.
- ^ Chapter 2, end.
- ^ Since Morgan the traditional terms have prevailed, but they have been expanded to mean many of the things Morgan meant. Morgan's Savagery and Barbarism are roughly equivalent to Braidwood's food gathering and food production. Over the span of time Morgan's choice of words proved too prejudicial for common use. In today's society, calling peoples "savages" and "barbarians" would cause international incidents. In Morgan's time, Africa was still being mined for slaves and the tribesmen of which he spoke did not then own casinos and other business enterprises, drive automobiles, fly airplanes and watch television.
- ^ Morgan adduces this spread from the presence of stone tools along the shorelines, but their uses seem to have escaped him, as he tags the period as devoid of huntsmen.
- ^ 20,000 for Lower; 15,000 for Middle and Upper together.
- ^ Morgan uses Aryan to mean Indo-European daughter language speakers, including Greek, Latin, English, etc. Vere Gordon Childe was perhaps the last of the moderns to use the term in that sense. By Semites Morgan meant about what scholars mean today. Although Morgan seems to view the Aryans primarily and the Semites secondarily as the innovators of civilization, there is no sign of the "master race" of the mid-twentieth century CE.
- ^ For this list Morgan intended the Homeric poems as a guide. The existence of the Late Bronze Age was then little suspected; Morgan means therefore what today is called the early Iron Age. Ancient civilization is classical Greece and Rome.
- ^ Morgan has little to say about the mediaeval period. It can be found in Chapter 3.
[edit] External links
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