Social Stratification & Early Religion

For most of human existence, nobody was rich. Nobody was poor. Nobody gave orders, and nobody followed them, at least not permanently. As we saw in Lesson 4, hunter-gatherer bands enforced a fierce egalitarianism through mockery, ostracism, and the simple option of walking away.

Agriculture destroyed that world.

It did so not through some dramatic seizure of power but through a quiet, structural mechanism: Food or resources produced beyond what is needed for immediate consumption. Agricultural surplus was the foundation of social complexity — it allowed some people to stop farming and specialize as priests, soldiers, craftspeople, or rulers. But surplus also enabled accumulation, hoarding, and inequality, because whoever controlled the surplus controlled the community.. When farmers produced more food than they needed to survive, that extra grain had to go somewhere. It had to be stored, protected, and distributed. Whoever controlled those decisions gained a new kind of power, one that had never existed in human societies before.