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As stated above, very early social organization almost certainly was some sort of extended family system, but could have varied as we now see in various animal groups.
By the time Homo Sapiens started to write and describe living arrangements, there were probably 45,000,000 of them, so obviously many of them were already living in very large social groups. These varied a lot in how they were structured. This can be seen in the earlier chapters on different groups: Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indian, Africans, Japanese, Aztecs, Europeans, etc. How these arrangements actually came to be, we can only guess at. I have already given short descriptions of how religion often played a major part in constructing, sustaining, and changing the organization in various groups. Some societies, such as the Greek, produced city states that were somewhat democratic, while other societies were very autocratic with kings having ultimate authority. Although the social systems varied a great deal, they all seemed to have some sort of class structure. Men were always classed as more important than women, except for a few individual cases. Almost all systems had slaves as the lowest group. Otherwise, there were often two or three groups of Homo Sapiens of varying importance. In many cases, there were religious leaders that varied in importance. Early on, in general, individuals, not in one’s own society, were either of a lower class or not even considered human and thus were often made slaves. |
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On the right is the Louvre stele (1792-1750 BC.) The images on top are Hammurabi and the Babylonian sun god, Shamash. Below are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text which include the Code of Hammurabi.
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