Let us go back to what we are told about where the origin of the developed world we know today really got its start—Sumeria.

Let us assume a framing of historical events that prioritizes 1) the view that pragmatic rational actors are driven by what we would intuitively believe to be self-interest, growth, and betterment (ie a normal person in the ancient world is plainly looking at the facts as they appear to them and making the best conceivable commercial decisions); 2) Tabula Rasa (ie most everyone holds more-or-less the same base assumptions, with some better environments giving some people a bit more of an edge); and 3) that the modern mainstream historical presentation of materialist conditions and commerce are more-or-less accurate (ie a site like Wikipedia is basically rendering a correct version of facts related to the subject region).

With this in mind, let us consider what life may have been like in the earliest versions of Sumeria. For starters, I would imagine this to be a post-caveman world, but still a pre-military world, meaning that people have emerged from their caves in order to travel to get food and establish trade networks but that there has been no conceivable need by any party as of yet to dedicate their time to create a military (largely because everyone is basically just a poor nomad traveler who is most concerned with finding food to eat and that they have just begun to learn that trade can help to facilitate this process).

So we have some wandering people who are mainly hunters and they move around and such. Over time though, they may settle in different places across the Middle East and surrounding regions, paying attention to areas with fresh water (eg those along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) as well as the various land-water borders with the ocean.

At some point in time, some people discover agriculture—either organically or through conversations with other nomads who come from other places who have already discovered agriculture—and realize that they can grow crops, and decide to grow crops in the alluvial lands of Sumeria.

To summarize, we largely probably start with hunters (& shepherds), maybe some very light trade (but with nomads moving randomly, you can’t necessarily rely on the fact that you’re going to run into another nomad tribe with something to trade, so the ability to trade is likely minimal and random, at best), and now you’ve got this emergent new occupation of farmers…so basically 2 professions at this point: 1) the hunter-shepherd, and 2) the farmer.

As time goes on, we can imagine these occupations give rise to a locality of sorts, farmers and hunters trading with each other for crops vs meats, and with certain surpluses achieved, new industries give rise that allow for more local trade…all the while giving hunter-shepherds less reason to be randomly nomadic and greater reason to basically circulate in proximity to the nearby settlement.

As surpluses grow further, writing & mapping systems likely emerge, and here we likely have the origins of formalized international trade. With these new industries, wood gets cultivated, the expedition & cartography cottage industries emerge, and therefore we now see people making and using ships to go along waterways.

This is where I’d like to point out the unique geography of Sumer that I’m sure all kinds of historians have pointed out in the past. In addition to having very fertile lands next to two major freshwater rivers, it is conveniently positioned as the causeway for what would best be described as the trade routes between the “East” and “West”, especially due to its proximity to what we refer to today as ‘the Persian Gulf’.

I mean, think about that—as soon as cartography, ships, and the different settlements were discovered across India that held various gems and spices and whatnot, it was off to the races. On the one hand, you could send caravans across the land to go from Sumer to India and take like 200 days, OR you could use ships and go the distance in a fraction of the time (and not have to worry about bandits, logistical supply chain stuff etc).

The choice must’ve been obvious when it got to that point in time where ship travel was feasible. So at this point in time, we see the rise of another major occupation: that of the maritime trader.

So to summarize, although there are other ancillary occupations out there at this point in time, one could argue (and that’s what I’m doing) that there are really 3 core occupations on which society is based: 1) the hunter-shepherd, 2) the farmer; 3) the maritime trader.

Like, just to drive this point home, the introduction of maritime trade must’ve been revolutionary, very, very analogous to how agriculture was revolutionary to when there were only hunter-shepherds…but now with the introduction of maritime trade, not only are we now dealing in the world of surpluses, which are highly enriched by trade, but we’re also dealing in a sort of trade that is no longer random and restricted to certain items, but now expansive, simple, unlimited, and highly valued/prized.

Whereas the emergence of the farmer class was still anancistic in nature, the emergence of the maritime trader class opened the door to the concept of luxury, and with the unabated indulgence of luxury, the concept of being profligate. Some would even go so far as to use the word greed in description of this newfound phenomena from this new bedrock class, but I am wary of this word because— in my personal belief—it is far more emotionally-charged than generally useful.

So settlements grow into full-blown city-states and into nation-states over time. We have these 3 bedrock occupational classes that are all undoubtedly growing at some pace, but—as we can suspect— the maritime traders begin far out-pacing the other two bedrock occupational classes as far as both income and knowledge goes.

Let us imagine how this development is playing out in a settlement alongside the Tigris or Euphrates river. In the beginning of this newfound concept of maritime trade, the farmers and the hunter-shepherds would largely do their thing, ply their trade, and occasionally say ‘hello’ to the irregular trader that frequented their settlement. Over time, there would be sort of congenial trade relationships that would rise up and the the hunter-shepherd and the farmer would be happy to see their friendly visitor maritime trader come aboard their shores to wonder what kind of new stories and wares they would have to supply today.

Now fast forward 20 years. Due to the extreme wealth found by maritime trading between Sumer and the settlements along the coast of West India, word catches on and more and more people opt-in to that occupation due to the potential opportunity that exists. The occupational market becomes increasingly saturated on the seas, but not until the incumbent maritime traders—the first ones to get in the industry and learn what’s what—had already made their fortunes and had invested their profits into the ship-building industry and other trades that were orthogonal to their core profession. As profits surged and as they began overseeing more personnel, they could begin outsourcing their day-to-day operational responsibilities to, say, competent captains on the sea and with other roles within their enterprise.

At some point in time, they would likely install agents / emissaries to be the ones to now engage with and trade with the hunter-shepherds and the farmers. Gone are the days when they would be chitchatting about the intricacies of ocean currents and West Indian settlement politics with the Sumerian hunter-shepherds and farmers—now they have scale and an enterprise to run that is only increasing in size along the Tigris and Euphrates, and so-much-so that they need representatives to trade with these professions rather than doing it themselves.

Now, naturally, as someone in one of those professions—as a hunter-shepherd or farmer—watching someone you once knew far outpace you and no longer spend time with you as you apparently are just treading water is certain to conjure up from within certain feelings of distress, resentment, and jealousy. I mean, after all, you just watched your whole world change before you, and the world that you are presented with now is one where you are now more relatively displaced than you were before.

It is my belief that it is from this feeling of displacement that germinated the seed that would evolve to become the concept of the military and standing armies.

At some point in time, you probably had some maritime economic agent aboard one of these trading vessels that felt slighted enough that he wasn’t able to capture the returns that the owner of the maritime fleet was raking in, and so held a certain level of jealousy as he performed his tasks whilst on the ship. On a routine trip to one of the trading outposts alongside the Tigris River one day, perhaps he gets to talking with one of the hunter-shepherds and farmers who he’s traded with (as part of his duties) many times before. In this conversation, he expresses a little bit of his frustration, and the hunter-shepherd and farmer, in kind, share similar sentiments. And from here we can imagine the birth of the first guilds amongst hunter-shepherds, farmers, and the trade representatives—between themselves as a sort mutual understanding that the fleet owner is the one really growing at an exorbitant rate and far outpacing what they themselves are able to capture...but also that, through this conversation between the three of them, they would each go back to their peers of their given trade and discuss the interesting development in the conversation that they just had.

From this, we can imagine the rise of the earliest versions of both inter- and intra-occupational guilds, the proto-unions of sorts.

And how, might you ask, would these occupational guilds manifest and be represented? Well, by a shared symbol common to all who were familiar with the matter, and this shared symbol would likely evolve into what would be referred to as ‘one of the gods’.

So, in my view, ‘the gods’ first originated as a need for the various displaced professions and underlings to collectivize and establish some basic worker protections and a larger cut of the revenues. Since they had greater access to the settlements and the food supply, they would likely be the ones to create festivals “in the name of the gods” and give fun festivities for the people of settlement in return for the people of the settlement (ie the other trades like leatherworking, metalworking etc, and all their wives and such) recognizing and appreciating these guilds that they have set up.

As this concept grew to establish norms along these lines, certainly the fleet owners must’ve learned pretty quickly that this will be costing them some money that they otherwise wouldn’t have preferred to pay out. Maybe some were a little more accepting of the rise in populist undercurrents more than others.

The fleet owners who were most unhappy with the current developments likely were trying to figure out ways to essentially dismantle these guilds, given that these guilds had now grown to establish ‘temples’ that required a certain amount of tribute (some of which to now be paid by the fleet owners) in order to engage in business in the locality.

So we have these fleet owners sitting on a whole bunch of money that they’ve acquired from their trade empires that they’ve then reinvested in other guild industries and as well as have enriched some public officials as well with to help maintain their dominance in these industries…and these fleet owners are up against the wall now that we’ve seen this massive wave of essentially trade unionism sweep up and down the Tigris and Euphrates that would seek to limit the amount of profits that they can command—what are these fleet owners to do?

Well one thing they certainly would do is grow further to new regions up along these rivers as well as in other locations geographically, essentially setting up colonies where they could and where it made sense for them to do so.

But some of them, I’d wager, also went a different route and did something unique and effectively leveraged their respective networks across their settlements along the rivers and in other places as well and basically turned them into an international intelligence agency.

Now theoretically, they were already an informal intelligence agency that was just working directly for the fleet owners themselves, but they were really just bound to each other through purely economic quid pro quo contracts. But I think what the fleet owners realized was that, just as their workers and these other bedrock professions had united the townspeople under functional guilds with a mystical character as a representative of it, so too could the fleet owners do the same thing and basically further build upon on the concept of a ‘religion’ and of the concept of ‘monarchy’ and essentially actualize the concept of uniting all of these separate city-states under one banner.

Now why would the fleet owner want to put all of these city-states under one banner?

Because each of ‘the gods’ that the people of each respective city-state establish is in service to that particular city-state. Eliminate that city-state’s autonomy and you eliminate their gods, which eliminates their identity as a guild—thus increasing its likelihood for disbandment. Should it get disbanded, then all of the worker protections would go with it.

This strategy for eliminating these guilds came in the form of a military despot, one who would come from a far away enough away land, be well-trained & organized enough, but also be well-acquainted enough with the prevailing trade guilds’ customs and iconography to be able to gain public opinion when serving as a mouthpiece for the fleet owners. This military despot would likely be a poor enough / lower nobility trade partner on the borderlands who the fleet owner would promise a certain title, lore, protection, and promise of wealth for so long as they achieve what the fleet owner is looking to achieve.

It is my belief that this is how someone like Sargon of Akkad came about, and later how someone like Akenhaten came about in Egypt, where it was likely some proto-corporate interest of sorts that brought his rise to power.

In the case of Sargon of Akkad, history dictates that he swept through all of the Sumerian city-states, uniting them under one banner to create the first national empire of history. While possible that he did this on his own through his own intuition, this is where my ‘conspiratorial lens of history’ (as represented above) diverges from the ‘accidental lens of history’ in that I believe that it is very rare for military leaders to (all 3) be remembered for ‘their valor’ in textbooks, to see great success in conquests & governance, and to not be financed from behind the scenes from greater mercantile “powers that be”. Beyond militaristic horse-warrior-culture steppe tribes like that of Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun, I would be very skeptical of this phenomena occurring in areas where there are more formalized areas of settlement at any point in history (exceptions maybe being severe resource scarcity of sorts, but even then they likely wouldn’t be governing those cities afterwards—they’d just be pillaging them).

To me, both the Sargon of Akkad story and the Akhenaten story reek of effectively establishment corporate business owners of sorts that have seen ‘the guilds of the gods’ dampen their stranglehold over their society in which they run the local company towns now finally seeing an opportunity to collectivize a certain portion of wealth derived from their plurality market share in select staple capital goods industries and deploy that wealth to bring a despot to power that panders to vanity and excess so as to undermine the guilds and effectively do away with consumer protections, perhaps first by initiating rhetoric, and sometimes just through military might alone. Similar arguments can be made with how Egyptian naval interests and Greek shipping guilds utilized the Eleusian Mystery Schools and Oracle at Delphi to reroute trade routes from India to go through Egypt rather than through Persia and the Levant, or how Christianity was created with Paul of Tarsus as a Roman agent to see a similar end.

While all of the ‘facts’ aren’t always 100% in the clear and where intentions and a complete understanding of the big picture can sometimes remain murky at best, I believe it to be unwise to abrogate critical thinking to the enticing simplicity of ‘narratives of heroism’ that often bank on certain foundational truisms and retelling of core events that aren’t necessarily accurate. While looking at history as someone that’s not an archaeologist relies on us to assume certain depictions of civilian life as ‘a peer-reviewed accurate portrayal of circumstances’, when you get into discussions of military regimes and secret societies, it is my core belief that, with few exceptions: it is the embedded mercantile economic interests that spawn and puppet the military that has been drawn and retooled from their previous tenure as part of the mercantile interests’ private security teams.

Militaries are created, not born…and the best militaries require a complex system of contracts, logistics, and psyops in order for it stay organized and dominant.

Now, as a quick aside to go back to these three bedrock professions of hunter-shepherd, farmer, and maritime trader, it’s interesting to see that discourse emerged, that we see into Biblical history, that favored shepherds over farmers. If you think about it, it’s kind of interesting that this discussion gets brought up so much in this region through the story of ‘Inanna Prefers The Farmer’, in which the core goddess of Sumeria chooses to marry the shepherd over the farmer despite her initial impulse to prefer the farmer, as well as through the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible where Cain the farmer kills his brother Abel the shepherd because he’s mad that Abel has gained more favor due to his profession.

These are two major landmark stories for the region that litigate the debate over whether shepherds or farmers are preferred, and it’s my belief that the subtext of what has gone on here is that the fleet owners & their enterprises have effectively, over time, come to make deals with the shepherd-hunters against the farmers (both of which groups’ power has waned relative to the fleet owners) because the farmers pose as a greater rival threat to the fleet owners’ economic interests due to having networks within the settlement itself. The hunter-shepherds, thus also being nomads, serve as solid itinerant agents to preach “the good word” of the interests of the fleet owners. Them being hunters, having experience killing, having experience knowing how to “rally a herd”, and them being always on the move, make them the creme-de-la-creme when it comes to being low-level sentry mercenary special forces of the fleet owners when the situation calls for it. Having the ability to send messages, present subterfuge, and kill when necessary would be a highly sought-after skillset of incumbent industry owners who can’t always operate in the most lawful ways to meet their ends. So whereas, it’s likely the farmers who uphold the norms of the guilds within a given settlement, the shepherd-hunters in their love for the wilderness and being on the road, are more susceptible for working for either or both sides as needed—being a double-agent, contract worker, or isolated anarchist as they see fit.

With this mental model in mind, I want to fast-forward in time far ahead to the three political ideology distinctions that came about from the French Revolution that we see in our politics to this day—there is the left (progressives), the center (moderates), and the right (conservatives).

Now, based on what I’ve sort of presented thus far, I think we can map each of the groups from Ancient Sumeria pretty cleanly onto each of the political ideology distinctions. For the left, much in the same way we had the farmers of the Ancient World establishing guilds to protect themselves from the mercantile interest conniving of the fleet owners, so we too have people in US politics that value trade unions, consumer protections, workers’ rights, collectivization etc. On the right, we have people who live in the rural borderlands areas of each city, work in law enforcement, and essentially are contract mercenaries who work for much richer interests who provide promise of freedom and some cash to do their bidding when they need something done. Finally, we have the center, which is the most powerful faction that holds alot of the cards. They represent the corporate interests of modern-day and would be comparable to the fleet owners of Ancient Sumeria, where they had first-mover advantage and seek to maintain and press their advantage as they see fit.

There’s a lot here, and I want to tie all this up. In summary, these are some key points that I want to drive home:

The Power-Behind-The-Throne for any given Thalassocracy is not to be underestimated.
Maritime shipping is where money is made, and the owners here go onto take over other companies in other industries that aren’t so keen in understanding the power of maritime shipping lanes over lower speed foot- or automobile-travel.
Psyops spawn from someone who has cultivated enough wealth and knowledge that they can press their sustained advantage in information asymmetry against those without such resources.
Psyops are largely designed to marshal a militarized force or to convince a militarized force upon a course of actions that would benefit incumbent Thalassocratic corporate interests.
The three political ideology distinctions may have been officially normalized in the midst of the French Revolution, but the dynamic existed since the dawn of recorded commercial civilization.
Military despots are brought to power by Thalassocratic corporate interests to destroy the guilds (and to destroy the representation for any given city that’s not part of the Imperial Core).
If you don’t have first-mover advantage in an economic niche, some combination of skill advancement toward high proficiency combined with entry into a formal or informal guild will yield highest returns.

To close this out, politics is the game of the unseen ultra-rich, and the military is simply private security at-scale. Sustained raw power is dependent on logistical networks which are dependent on the hidden force appointed to the post for their nonpareil reputation in economical achievement that marshals the parapolitical.

If there’s an overarching moral lesson to be provided by all of this it’s that advancement occurs by following this model at the tiers with which you can muster, and that freedom becomes less illusory at each milestone of such advancement.

cilix

cilix