Grain Stores and the First Taxes

A society can be rich without being taxable. Groups that lived on fish, game and roots produced plenty in a good season, but the surplus was scattered, perishable and impossible to measure. There was nothing for an official to count, and nothing that would keep long enough to be worth collecting.

Cereals changed that. A grain harvest ripens at a known time, comes off the field in a single operation, and then sits in a store where it can be measured with a jar. Each of those features is convenient for the farmer, and each is more convenient still for anyone who wishes to take a share. The earliest written records from several regions are not poems or laws but lists of quantities received.

This suggests that the order usually assumed may be reversed. Rather than states arising and then finding something to tax, it may be that the only places where a state could arise at all were places where the food supply was already visible and storable. Tubers, which stay in the ground until they are wanted, support large populations without ever producing a heap that can be assessed, and the regions that relied on them did not develop the same institutions.