Roaming tribes generally settled down in regions where nature was bountiful and responsive to the needs of man.
The early nomadic tribes in search of pasture lands made the fertile valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Yellow River, and the Yang Tse their homelands and, as a result of conquest and enslavement of the weaker tribes, established the earliest of States known to history. It was in these valleys that civilisation took its birth and kingdoms and empires flourished.
These States were manned by hereditary monarchs who combined in themselves political and religious power. Law was what religion sanctioned and the king permitted. The subjects knew nothing about their rights and liberty. They were only recipients of orders and respectful submission to orders was their first and last duty. Gettell says that the Oriental States “represented to their people only the slave driver and the tax collector.”
image Source : i.ytimg.com
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The earliest States were essentially power and property States, built on wealth and military force. They attracted the jealousy of the nomadic tribes beyond or of each other, and had little stability, the conqueror being conquered in his turn.
Sometimes, the breakup came from within through the revolt of some subordinate official, who either made his province into an independent State or actually overthrew and replaced his sovereign lord. “Expansion by annexation, then disruption and reconstitution, either from within or by conquest from the outside,” remarks Solatu, “were the normal process that marked those early empires.”
It must not, of course, be assumed that those States were primitive and barbarous. Most people know about the scientific knowledge of the Babylonians and Egyptians, their division of time, and their mathematical calculations. The code of Hammurabi regulated every aspect of life and revealed the existence of a highly organised, prosperous society, with a carefully worked out hierarchy of functions.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The Sumerians are said to have established the systems of rotation of office, annual appointments and election by secret ballot. The Aryans were familiar with the institutions of constitutional monarchy, bicameralism, the office of the Speaker and various other devices necessary for a representative form of government.