4 Chapter Onethe flow of tax and rent payments in the regions through which it
marched. Quite the contrary: it was the regular flow of such income,
concentrated into storage magazines along the army’s route of march,
that immunized the local populations against destructive exposure to
plunder. The mutual benefit of such a system of regulated exactions as
compared to Sargon’s system of predation is obvious. The king and his
army secured a surer supply of food and could march farther and
arrive at the scene of battle in better condition than if they had
stopped to plunder along the way. The peasant populations, likewise,
by handing over a more or less fixed portion of their harvest to tax and
rent collectors, escaped sporadic destitution and risk of starvation.
However difficult it may have been to make such payments—and the
condition of the peasantry in ancient empires can be assumed to have
approached the minimum required for biological survival—the
superior predictability and regularity of taxes and rents made Xerxes’
imperial system preferable to Sargon’s unrestrained pillage, even
though pillage could occur only at intervals of several years, whereas
taxes and rents were exacted annually. Hence, even though levying
taxes and rents pitted the interests of rulers and landlords against
those of the peasant producers, both parties had a real interest in
substituting such regulated exactions for plundering.
The development of tax and rent systems in other ancient empires is
less vividly attested in surviving documents than is the case in the
Middle East. Nevertheless, it is clear that similar imperial, bureau
cratic systems arose in ancient China, in India, and presently also in
the Mediterranean world with the rise of Rome. Amerindian civiliza
tions, too, though at a remove in time, developed comparable admin
istrative systems for transferring agricultural surplus into the hands of
the agents of a distant ruler, who used the food and other goods that
thus came under his control for warfare or for worship, as he and his
close advisers determined.
It is worth pointing out that warfare was not always preeminent.
Rulers sometimes preferred to organize elaborate religious cere
monies and grandiose construction enterprises instead of devoting
their resources to the maintenance of armies. In ancient Egypt, where
geographic conditions made the task of border defense relatively sim
ple, pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty mobilized the manpower of the
country to build pyramids—one per reign—whose remarkable size
attests the vast number of workers they were able to summon to the
task. Even in war-torn Mesopotamia, temple-building competed with
military operations as a consumer of tax income. And in other ages