Ancient Society

Contents

1. Preface 10 min 10

   After a dedication and epigraphs from Horace, Whitney and Kaines, Morgan states his premises. Mankind is vastly old, began at the bottom of the scale, and progressed everywhere through the same stages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation. That progress can be traced along four parallel lines: inventions and discoveries, the idea of government (the gens, phratry and tribe), the family with its systems of kinship, and property. Because the American Indian tribes represented three stages at once, he argues, Americans have a special duty to record their institutions before they disappear.

2. I.1 Ethnical Periods 33 min 16

   Morgan sets out his method and his framework. Mankind rose from savagery through barbarism to civilisation by slowly accumulating experience. That rise shows in inventions and above all in institutions grown from a few “germs of thought”. All government follows one of two plans: a society based on persons and the gens, or a state based on territory and property. Rejecting the Danish ages of stone, bronze and iron, he proposes seven ethnical periods marked by fire and fish, the bow, pottery, domestic animals or irrigation, iron, and the phonetic alphabet. He places living peoples on this ladder as models of the ancestors of the Aryans.

3. I.2 Arts of Subsistence 22 min 13

   Progress, Morgan argues, followed the enlargement of the food supply. He distinguishes five successive arts of subsistence: wild fruits and roots, fish (with fire), cultivated plants, meat and milk from domestic animals, and the unlimited subsistence of plough agriculture. Unequal natural endowments made the hemispheres diverge: maize in America, herds in the Old World. He then defines in advance five forms of the family, the consanguine, punaluan, syndyasmian (pairing), patriarchal and monogamian, to be treated in Part III.

4. I.3 Ratio of Human Progress 34 min 33

   Morgan works backward through the periods, stripping away the achievements of each: modern inventions, the institutions of Greece and Rome, the Homeric inventory of upper barbarism, and so down to fire and gesture language. Because each gain becomes a means to further gains, progress runs in a “geometrical ratio”. The early periods were therefore the longest, and he assigns at least 60,000 of an assumed 100,000 years to savagery. Smelting iron was “the event of events”. The Aryan and Semitic families led the way, and the American Indians advanced remarkably on their own.

5. II.1 Organization of Society upon the Basis of Sex 29 min 10

   Opening Part II on government, Morgan describes the Kamilaroi of New South Wales, whom he takes for the oldest known form of society. Besides six gentes with descent through women, they are divided into four male and four female classes. A man of one class may marry only a woman of a fixed other class, which Morgan reads as group marriage. He argues that the gens grew up inside this sex-based system and was slowly overthrowing it. Institutions develop through unconscious reforms, he concludes, from a few germs of thought guided by the brain’s natural logic.

6. II.2 The Iroquois Gens 1 h 2 min 28

   Morgan defines the gens: a body of kin descending in one line from a common ancestor, originally through women. He holds that gentes, phratries and tribes organised ancient society everywhere before the state. He takes the Seneca-Iroquois as the standard case and lists the ten rights and duties of the gens. Its members elect and depose their sachem and chiefs and must marry outside the gens. They inherit from one another, help and avenge one another, name and adopt members, share religious rites and a burial place, and meet in a democratic council. Members were free and equal: “liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated”.

7. II.3 The Iroquois Phratry 35 min 9

   The phratry is a brotherhood of related gentes, usually the segments of one original gens. Morgan traces it in Athens and in the Roman curia, then among the Iroquois tribes, whose gentes are grouped in two phratries of “brother” and “cousin” gentes. The Iroquois phratry had no government of its own but played social and religious roles: ball games, seating in council, settling murders, funerals, medicine lodges and confirming elected sachems. He finds phratries among the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Mohegan and Tlingit, completing the series of gens, phratry, tribe and confederacy in America.

8. II.4 The Iroquois Tribe 45 min 16

   Morgan explains how Indian tribes multiply. Population outgrows a favoured food source, emigrant bands settle at a distance, their dialects drift apart, and the bands become independent tribes. He illustrates the process with the Missouri tribes and the Lake Superior Algonkins. He then lists a tribe’s attributes: territory and name, dialect, the right to invest and depose chiefs, religion, a supreme council and sometimes a head-chief. The tribal council, open to orators and to women’s spokesmen, is for him a representative democracy. The chapter closes with three stages of government (council; council and general; council, assembly and general) and the principle that a state rests on territory, not kinship.

9. II.5 The Iroquois Confederacy 1 h 7 min 73

   The Iroquois League is Morgan’s model of a confederacy grown from kindred tribes. He recounts its traditional founding by Hiawatha and Deganawida around 1400–1450 and summarises its constitution in ten propositions. There were fifty hereditary sachemships filled by election within gentes, a general council voting by nations and requiring unanimity, no chief executive, and two equal war-chiefs. He describes the civil and mourning councils, the wampum records and the bond of common gentes across the five nations. He then argues that the office of general is the germ of the king and president, that monarchy is incompatible with gentile institutions, and that the League was essentially democratic.

10. II.6 Gentes in Other Tribes of the Ganowánian Family 1 h 12 min 60

    Morgan surveys the clan organisation of North and South American peoples group by group: Iroquoian, Dakotan, Gulf, Pawnee, Algonkian, Athapascan, Northwest Coast, Shoshonean, and the Pueblo and Maya village peoples. For each he gives clan names and rules of descent, marriage and inheritance. Where descent runs in the male line, he argues it was recently changed from the female line under property, missionary or American pressure, and where clans are missing he infers decay. Choctaw and Menominee testimony shows growing property clashing with gentile inheritance. He concludes that the gens was universal among American peoples and traces it, through group marriage, to a common origin of mankind.

11. II.7 The Aztec Confederacy 1 h 7 min 50

    Morgan rejects the “Aztec empire” of the Spanish chroniclers and later historians. What Cortés found, he argues, was a confederacy of three Nahuatl-speaking tribes formed about 1426. It had a council of chiefs and an elected war-chief, so it was a military democracy, not a monarchy. He minimises its territory and population and reads the four quarters of Tenochtitlan and their communal lands as phratries and gentes. He makes Montezuma a deposable general rather than a king and explains succession from brother to brother or uncle to nephew by female descent. Modern scholarship accepts his critique of feudal terminology but not his denial of empire and class.

12. II.8 The Grecian Gens 48 min 25

    Morgan turns to the Greeks, who in the historical period were moving from a society organised through kin groups to one organised by territory and property. Drawing heavily on Grote, he lists ten attributes of the Athenian gens, from common rites and burial to the election of chiefs, and argues that they match the Iroquois clan in a later, patrilineal form. Against Grote and Niebuhr he insists that the family was never the unit of the gens, and that its members had real, if remote, common descent.

13. II.9 The Grecian Phratry, Tribe and Nation 49 min 28

    The chapter covers the higher levels of Greek gentile society. The phratry was a religious brotherhood of related gentes; the tribe united several phratries speaking one dialect; the nation was a coalescence of tribes. Government had three powers: a council of chiefs, an assembly of the people and a basileus. Morgan argues at length that the basileus was an elected general with priestly and judicial duties, not a king, and calls the Homeric constitution a “military democracy”, from which Athenian democracy grew.

14. II.10 The Institution of Grecian Political Society 49 min 22

    Morgan traces how Athens replaced gentile with political society. Theseus united Attica and created classes cutting across the gentes; the basileus gave way to elected archons; Solon, facing debt slavery, made property the basis of political rights and brought freemen without a gens into the assembly. The decisive step came with Cleisthenes in 509 BC, who made the territorial deme, with its own officers and self-government, the unit of the state. Morgan holds that Athenian democracy itself was inherited from the gentes, not invented by these reformers.

15. II.11 The Roman Gens 49 min 54

    The Roman gens is examined through the Latin writers. Morgan reviews the definitions of a gentilis by Cicero, Festus and Varro, shows that descent was in the male line, and lists nine attributes: rights of inheritance under the Twelve Tables, common burial and rites, the duty to marry outside the gens, common lands, mutual help, the gentile name, adoption, and probably the election of chiefs. He argues against Niebuhr that gentiles were really related, and that Roman society, like the Greek, was democratic in its foundations.

16. II.12 The Roman Curia, Tribe and Populus 52 min 37

    The chapter describes the higher levels of early Roman society: ten gentes to a curia, ten curiae to a tribe, and three tribes forming the Populus Romanus, a symmetry Morgan attributes to Romulus's regrouping of existing kin groups. The government had a senate representing the gentes, the comitia curiata as the sovereign assembly, and the rex as elected general and priest. Morgan blames the senate's hereditary patrician rank for Rome's later aristocratic course, and closes by noting that the system was still personal, not territorial.

17. II.13 The Institution of Roman Political Society 46 min 44

    Morgan describes how Rome passed from gentile to political society. The plebeians, free and propertied but outside the gentes, had no share in government. Morgan argues that the patricians were descendants of senators, not the whole populus. Servius Tullius, imitating Solon, replaced the gentes with five property classes voting by centuries, an assembly in which the rich held the majority, a census and four territorial city wards. Morgan condemns the result as a government of property over numbers. He closes with a tribute to the gens as the source of senate, assembly and democracy, and a forecast that democracy will again become universal.

18. II.14 Change of Descent from the Female to the Male Line 32 min 19

    Morgan argues that the Greek and Latin gentes once traced descent through women. The change to the male line needed only an agreement that future children follow the father, and the motive was property: herds and land owned by men whose children could not inherit under the old rule. As evidence he cites Herodotus on the Lycians, Etruscan monuments, Bachofen’s collection of “mother-right”, the noble hundred families of the Locrians, Athenian marriages between paternal half-siblings, and the legend of the Danaids fleeing marriage with their cousins.

19. II.15 Gentes in Other Tribes of the Human Family 52 min 47

    A survey of the gens beyond Greece and Rome. The Scottish clan is Morgan’s best surviving example, broken up by the British government after 1745. Caesar and Tacitus suggest gentile remains among the early Germans, giving way to the mark. Morgan finds exogamous clans in Nepal, India, Siberia and China, reads the Hebrew tribes of Numbers as gentes, phratries and tribes, and cites African and Australian evidence, but finds no gens in Polynesia. He concludes that the gens was once nearly universal and probably had a single origin.

20. III.1 The Ancient Family 41 min 11

    Part III opens with Morgan’s five forms of the family: consanguine, punaluan, syndyasmian (pairing), patriarchal and monogamian. Three of them, he argues, created lasting systems of kinship terms: the Malayan, the Turanian–Ganowánian and the Aryan. Because such systems change slowly and record actual relationships under past forms of marriage, they can be read as evidence of those forms. Classificatory systems belong to barbarous peoples, descriptive ones to civilised peoples. Monogamy, Morgan holds, arose from property and the inheritance of it.

21. III.2 The Consanguine Family 40 min 20

    Morgan uses the Hawaiian system of kinship terms, which sorts all relatives into five generational grades, to prove that a consanguine family once existed, founded on group marriage of brothers and sisters. He works through each relationship to show that such marriage would explain it. Further support comes from the customs that shocked the missionaries in Hawaii, the Chinese “Nine Grades of Relations” and Plato’s ideal republic. He concludes that the consanguine family points back to an earlier state of promiscuity, the starting point of human progress.

22. III.3 The Punaluan Family 53 min 20

    Morgan presents the punaluan family, in which a group of brothers shared wives and a group of sisters shared husbands, as the successor of the consanguine family once own brothers and sisters were barred from marrying. His evidence is the Hawaiian custom of punalua, classical reports from Caesar and Herodotus, and the right of an Indian husband to his wife's sisters. He derives the matrilineal gens from the group of sisters and their children. The core of the chapter explains the Turanian or Ganowanian system of kinship, shared by the Seneca-Iroquois and the Tamils, as a record of punaluan marriage.

23. III.4 The Syndyasmian and the Patriarchal Families 31 min 18

    Morgan describes the syndyasmian or pairing family of the American Indians: one man and one woman, married by arrangement of their mothers, free to separate, living in communal households with the children belonging to the mother. He credits the gens, the scarcity of wives and better subsistence with narrowing group marriage into pairs, and warns against reading his stages too rigidly. He then defines the patriarchal family of the Hebrews and Romans by the father's power over free and unfree dependants and their property, rather than by polygamy.

24. III.5 The Monogamian Family 53 min 29

    Morgan argues that the monogamian family is recent, appearing in the Upper Status of barbarism, and that the Latin word familia first meant a body of slaves. Surveying the Germans of Tacitus, the Homeric and Athenian Greeks and the Romans, he finds monogamy imposed on wives but not husbands, and names the transmission of property to legitimate children as its moving power. He traces the descriptive Aryan kinship system to monogamy, praises the Roman jurists' scheme of degrees, and predicts that the family must change as society changes, perhaps until the sexes are equal.

25. III.6 Sequence of Institutions Connected with the Family 25 min 15

    Morgan draws Part III together in a sixteen-member sequence of customs and institutions, from promiscuous intercourse through the consanguine, punaluan, syndyasmian and patriarchal families to monogamy, each form of the family leaving its trace in a system of kinship terms. He admits the order is partly hypothetical and treats promiscuity as an inference, not an observed state. Property and inheritance, he argues, produced monogamy and first created, then abolished, slavery. He closes by rejecting the theory that savages are degraded from an original civilization, by disputing Henry Maine's patriarchal origin of society, and by insisting on the great antiquity of mankind.

26. III.N Note: Mr. J. F. McLennan’s “Primitive Marriage” 51 min 9

    Added while the book was in press, this note answers J. F. McLennan, whose Studies in Ancient History had called Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity “utterly unscientific”. Morgan argues that McLennan's terms “exogamy” and “endogamy” confuse the gens with the tribe, since the clan marries out while the tribe marries in; that “kinship through females only” misdescribes a rule of descent within the gens; that Nair and Tibetan polyandry were exceptional and could never have been general; and that McLennan's view of classificatory terms as mere modes of address cannot explain systems so uniform across continents.

27. IV.1 The Three Rules of Inheritance 32 min 13

    Part IV opens by tying the growth of property to the progress of inventions in each ethnical period. In savagery property was slight, lands were held by the tribe, and the first great rule of inheritance kept a dead person's goods within the gens, so children took nothing from their father. In the Lower Status of barbarism, with gardens and cultivated land, Morgan finds the germ of the second rule, inheritance by agnatic kin, and notes Indian fathers' growing wish to leave property to their children. Among the Village Indians land remained in common and inheritance largely gentile.

28. IV.2 The Three Rules of Inheritance—Continued 34 min 27

    With iron came the Upper Status of barbarism: field agriculture, systematic slavery, individual ownership of land and herds, and the third great rule of inheritance, exclusively to the owner's children. Morgan traces it through the Mosaic law and the daughters of Zelophehad, Solon's laws on heiresses and wills, and the Twelve Tables, inferring that inheritance passed from gentiles to agnates to children. He notes the rise of aristocracy from property and office, closes with the famous warning that a “mere property career” is not mankind's final destiny, and ends with an argument for the unity of mankind's origin.