This document discusses the historical development of governments from primitive societies to early civilizations like Sumer. It describes how the rise of agriculture and the need to coordinate irrigation led to the emergence of centralized authority and monarchy in early Sumerian cities to manage water distribution. As these cities developed further, political and social hierarchies became more complex, with specialized roles emerging for priests, warriors, farmers and tax collectors. Military leadership also became an important part of kingship as the cities engaged in conflicts over resources and territory. The patterns set in early civilizations like Sumer were influential and spread with them as trade carried aspects of their civilizations and forms of government to other societies.

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Government
WRITTEN BY:
Hugh Brogan
LAST UPDATED:
5-3-2017 See Article History
RELATED TOPICS
Government, the political system by which a country
or community is administered and regulated.
Most of the key words commonly used to describe
governments—words such as monarchy, oligarchy,
and democracy—are of Greek or Roman origin. They
have been current for more than 2,000 years and
have not yet exhausted their usefulness. This
suggests that humankind has not altered very much
since they were coined; however, such verbal and
psychological uniformity must not be allowed
to hide the enormous changes in society and politics
that have occurred. The earliest analyticaluse of the
term monarchy occurred in ancient Athens, in
the dialoguesof Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE), but even in
Plato’s time the term was not self-explanatory. There
was a king in Macedonia and a king in Persia, but the
two societies, and therefore their institutions, were

2. radically different. To give real meaning to the
word monarchy in those two instances, it would be
necessary to investigate their actual political and
historical contexts. Any general account of monarchy
required then, and requires today, an inquiry as to
what circumstances have predisposed societies to
adopt monarchy and what have led them to reject it.
So it is with all political terms.

Queen Elizabeth II reading a speech from the throne
at the state opening of Parliament, 1958.

3. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
This article discusses the historical development of
governments, primarily in the societies of the West.
(See also political science; political system; state.)
Primitive Government
Agricultural society
So long as humans were few, there was hardly any
government. The division of function between ruler
and ruled occurred only, if at all, within the family. The
largest social groups, whether tribes or villages, were
little more than loose associations of families, in which
every elder or family head had an equal voice.
Chieftains, if any, had strictly limited powers; some
tribes did without chieftains altogether. This
prepolitical form of social organization may still be
found in some regions of the world, such as the
Amazonian jungle in South America or the upper Nile
River valley in Africa.
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 human being
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 unitary system

4. The rise of agriculture began to change that state of
affairs. In the land of Sumer (in what is now Iraq) the
invention of irrigation necessitated grander
arrangements. Control of the flow of water down the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers had to be coordinated by
a central authority, so that fields could be watered
downstream as well as farther up. It became
necessary also to devise a calendar, so as to know
when the spring floods might be expected. As those
skills evolved, society evolved with them. In early
Sumer, it is reasonable to assume, the heads of the
first cities, which were little more than enlarged
villages, only gradually assumed the special attributes
of monarchy—the rule of one—and the village council
only gradually undertook a division of labour, so that
some specialized as priests and others as warriors,
farmers, or taxgatherers (key figures in every civilized
society). As organization grew more complex, so did
religion: an elaborate system of worship seemed
necessary to propitiate the quite elaborate family of
gods who, it was hoped, would protect the city from
attack, from natural disaster, and from
any questioning of the political arrangements deemed
necessary by the ruler group.
Unfortunately—but, given human nature, inevitably—
the young cities of Sumer quarrelled over the
distribution of the rivers’ water, and their wealth
excited the greed of nomads outside the still
comparatively small area of civilization (a word
deriving from the Latin word for city, civitas). War,
perhaps the most potent of all forces of historical

5. change, announced its arrival, and military leadership
became at least as important an element of kingship
as divine sanction. It was to remain so throughout the
long history of monarchy: whenever kings have
neglected their military duties, they have endangered
their thrones. The wars of Sumer also laid bare
another imperative of monarchy—the drive for empire,
arising from the need to defend and define frontiers
by extending them and the need to find new means to
pay for troops and weapons, whether by the plunder
of an enemy or by the conquest of new lands, or both.
The spread of civilization
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7. The history of Old World monarchy, and indeed of
civilization, was to consist largely of variations on the
patterns mentioned above for four or five millennia.
Trade contacts carried the principles of civilization to
Egypt and to India (China, like the pre-Columbian
societies of the Americas, seems to have evolved
independently).And everywhere, once the social
order was established, the problem of defending it
became paramount. Although the broad zone of
civilization spread steadily, so that by the reign of the
Roman emperor Trajan (98–117 CE) there was a
continuous band of civilized societies from Britain to
the China Sea, it was always at risk from
the barbarian nomads who roamed the great
steppelands of central Eurasia. These nomads had
retained the loose and simple institutions of primitive
societies, but they had in other ways evolved as
rapidly and successfully as the cities themselves (and
partly under the cities’ influence). The steppe was
horse country, and, armed with bows and arrows, the
barbarians of all epochs were marvelously swift and
deadly light cavalry. They fought constantly among
themselves for pasturage, and the losers were forever
being driven west, south, and east, where they often
overcame any defenses that the farms and cities of
civilization could muster against them.