Oriental Despotism

* Book: Karl Wittfogel. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. 1957.

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Discussion

Samo Burja:

"Historians and social theorists have proposed materialist explanations for the rise of civilization in the Near East—namely, the accumulation of economic surplus. The fertile alluvial soil deposited with the yearly floods by the Tigris and Euphrates provided abundant harvests. Similarly, historians link the reliable flooding of the Nile River to the rise of civilization in Egypt one thousand years later. These river systems, together with modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, are sometimes called the Fertile Crescent, so named because the region is thought to be a common cultural and technological area where early agriculture and civilization developed hand-in-hand. Göbekli Tepe lies in this region as well, though it predates evidence of agriculture. With the surplus of food provided by agriculture along these rivers also came the need to store grain and protect these stores against nomadic raiders, who wished to enjoy the fruits of agriculture without the toil. Eventually, population growth caught up to the carrying capacity of the regions, necessitating irrigation and river regulation to make more land arable. Waterworks are vast undertakings that rely on the coordination provided by a central government to organize the necessary labor. The ancient state was born.

This theory was furthest developed in Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power."

(https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-older-than-we-thought/)