184 Early Agriculture
observed the city gates and walls of a Chinese capital, such as Peking, or who has
walked through the immense palace gates and squares of the Forbidden City to
enter its equally immense court buildings, ancestral temples and private residences
can fail to be awed by their monumental design.
Pyramids and dome-shaped tombs manifest most consistently the monumen-
tal style of hydraulic building. They achieve their aesthetic effect with a minimum
of ideas and a maximum of material. The pyramid is little more than a huge pile
of symmetrically arranged stones.
The property-based and increasingly individualistic society of ancient Greece
loosened up the massive architecture, which had emerged in the quasihydraulic
Mycenaean period.^108 During the later part of the first millennium BC, when Alex-
ander and his successors ruled the entire Near East, the architectural concepts of
Hellas transformed and refined the hydraulic style without, however, destroying its
monumental quality.
In Islamic architecture the two styles blended to create a third. The products
of this development were as spectacular in the western-most outpost of Islamic
culture – Moorish Spain – as they were in the great eastern centres: Cairo, Bagh-
dad, Bukhara, Samarkand and Istanbul. The Taj Mahal of Agra and kindred build-
ings show the same forces at work in India, a subcontinent which, before the
Islamic invasion, had evolved a rich monumental architecture of its own.
c. The institutional meaning
It hardly needs to be said that other agrarian civilizations also combined architec-
tural beauty with magnitude. But the hydraulic rulers differed from the secular
and priestly lords of the ancient and medieval West, first because their construc-
tional operations penetrated more spheres of life, and second because control over
the entire country’s labour power and material enabled them to attain much more
monumental results.
The scattered operations of rainfall farming did not involve the establishment
of national patterns of cooperation, as did hydraulic agriculture. The many man-
orial centres of Europe’s knighthood society gave rise to as many fortified residences
(castles); and their size was limited by the number of the attached serfs. The king,
being little more than the most important feudal lord, had to build his castles with
whatever labour force his personal domain provided.
The concentration of revenue in the regional or territorial centres of ecclesias-
tical authority permitted the creation of the largest individual medieval edifices:
churches, abbeys and cathedrals. It may be noted that these buildings were erected
by an institution which, in contrast to all other prominent Western bodies, com-
bined feudal with quasihydraulic patterns of organization and acquisition.
With regard to social control and natural resources, however, the master build-
ers of the hydraulic state had no equal in the nonhydraulic world. The modest
Tower of London and the dispersed castles of medieval Europe express the bal-
anced baronial society of the Magna Carta as clearly as the huge administrative
cities and colossal palaces, temples and tombs of Asia, Egypt and ancient America