MINDLESS MUSINGS

Before the rise of the first great empires there must have been an era of nothing larger than a great village. Some sliver of time before towns became a thing. Nothing but a spectrum going from hunter gatherers and/or nomadic tribes through fledgling farming communities and peaking with a scattering of big ass villages. I have no evidence to back this up of course.

When I write hunter gatherer I am referring to one type of nomadic tribe. I highly doubt these smaller clans would tie themselves down to one particular spot. It’s not like they had deeds and titles. Not much action here? Time to move on. After successive generations they end up with a kind of migration pattern in which they follow the game and find the best places to survive the weather conditions.

After farming became a thing there would have emerged tribes of mobile pastoralists. Obviously, you can’t move your corn plantation, but many chose to keep their cattle on the move. Using their generational knowledge and literally moving to greener pastures when the time came. Eventually this would progress to moving them from village to village for trading.

Each lifestyle would have their own unique pros and cons. For instance:

• Nomads travel light and have fewer numbers
  • They can quickly head to safer ground if disaster strikes
    • But they are more exposed and vulnerable
• Villagers spend a lot of time in one area and have much more members
  • They can build defences and have strength in numbers
    • But if disaster strikes, they must try and defend what they have worked so hard for. Even if they bite the bullet and flee, they would be much slower.

Call me a dreamer; but I like to imagine this as the time before war. Of course there was conflict (humans remember), but there was nothing people were so jealous of that they were willing to go all in with a ferocious fight to the death. There would have been rivalries and revenge attacks, a lot stemming from theft (that would shockingly include women and children I’m told), and there would have been atrocities committed in rage or to send a warning. However, without hard and fast property there was less incentive for out and out war – a blood feud might come close I suppose.

Certainly, it would be important to let it be known your tribe won’t be fucked with – this was the literal law of the jungle after all. I reckon this is where a lot of the cannibalism and headhunting shit came from. Don’t mess with that mob they’re fucken bonkers! There wasn’t strict border enforcement outside of the more inhospitable villages, but there sure as hell was suspicion and fear of outsiders even among travelling tribes.

Sadly, the tribes who were too trusting didn’t last that long unless they got themselves really secluded. All the rest were either the original villains or had been burned enough times to know you need to watch your collective asses out here.

During this early stage I am suggesting that the OG pillagers would have been nomads. They didn’t invent it, but I suspect they were the first to make it an actual tribal mission statement: “why toil when you can take?”. Lessons passed down to the young’uns would have been things like:

• Travel light, travel fast
• Take what you need and move on
• Don’t get weighed down with want (that’s one I thought of for the wiser plunderer)
• Don’t be predictable
• Stealth is good for your health

You get the idea. They probably had it printed on a tea towel or something and passed it from father to son. Not a bad rort in a time with no law and order. Of course, these raiders were small potatoes compared to the wholesale annihilation and subjugation that was to come, but villainy must start somewhere. These guys will be remembered by history as petty criminals in comparison to the warlords of the future (their future, not ours).

“Kill one man, and you’re a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

Jean Rostand

The only other nomadic variety I can think of (besides vagabonds) would be the wandering entertainers and bullshit artists. Singers, musicians and storytellers along with soothsayers and all types of magicians and mystics who didn’t want to do ‘real’ work and didn’t have the stomach for crime. Travelling merchants probably didn’t find a market until there were actual marketplaces.

That’s my segue to the next level before empire (in my imagination that is). Towns. These differ from villages in that the community is not inherently connected. In my neatly delineated presumption this is where all the wanderers come together and combine their various skillsets to try and create a ‘village’ without a ruler – or something like that.