Levka"Ancient societies reveal surprising global history of democracy
A new international study has challenged long-held assumptions about the origins and history of democratic practices.
Researchers, including Professor Dan Lawrence of our Archaeology Department, found that shared and inclusive governance was far more widespread in ancient societies than once believed.
Their work draws on evidence from 40 cases across 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas over the last 5,000 years.
Together, the findings show that many communities found ways to limit the power of rulers and give a voice to ordinary people.
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By combining information from architecture, artwork, inscriptions, and signs of wealth, the researchers developed an ‘autocracy index’.
This placed each society along a spectrum from highly autocratic to strongly collective, or democratic.
Their findings challenge the longheld idea that Athens and Republican Rome were the only true democracies of the ancient world.
In fact, several societies from Asia and the Americas showed similar levels of shared governance.
One of the most important insights was that the size of a society’s population did not determine how power was organised.
Instead, societies became more autocratic when key sources of wealth could be controlled by leaders, such as mining or war plunder.
Those funded by broad taxes on agricultural products or community labour tended to distribute power more evenly.
The study also reveals that societies with more inclusive systems of governance had lower economic inequality."
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