Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

2 .1
2.1
PERIODS IN THE
DEVELOPMENT AND
TYPOLOGY OF EARLY
STATES IN CENTRAL ASIA
Historico-legal and archaeological scholarship shows us that we
can only really begin to speak about the emergence of statehood when civilisations
have reached the point of sufficiently developed economies built-on irrigation-based
agriculture, metalworking, crafts and trade, with the latter initially based on barter
but subsequently on money and ingots. Further, such civilisations are characterised
by a differentiation of property ownership, with the formation of corresponding
social groups and classes and a complex social hierarchy with a monarch at the head,
a state-administrative apparatus, the right of inheritance, and a writing system, which
facilitated the drafting of all kinds of legal documents for the management of the state.
These are the main features, but by no means all of them, that characterised
the earliest forms of states in Lower Mesopotamia (Sumer and Akkad), Egypt and
the Eastern Mediterranean, which emerged at the end of the 4th millennium and
beginning of the 3rd millennium BC.
The first type of state entities to emerge were very ancient cities, serving as the
economic, political and religious centres of very small ‘states’ in terms of the territory
they occupied. Thus, an area of just 1,000 square kilometres in Lower Mesopotamia
had several city-states: Uruk, Larsa, Lagash and Ur, with Uruk and Lagash just 24
km apart. Later, as a result of invasion and conquest, such city-states were – often
forcibly – merged into one relatively large kingdom covering up to several hundred
square kilometres with an established system of despotic rule. These early kingdoms
eventually turned into monarchies, mostly through the violent subjugation of
neighbouring territories, sometimes occupying vast areas.
This logic of the development of states, when combined with particular conditions,
transformed some of them into vast global kingdoms or empires spanning several
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