Hugh Nibley

The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State

IN THE study of ancient statecraft one is constantly running across references to a gadget that seems so minor and so mechanical that its great importance is easily overlooked as a key to the nature and origin of empire. It is the contention of this paper that the marked arrow supplies decisive evidence for describing the process by which hunters were able to impose a system of government on the world. The marked arrow not only supports the growing suspicion that the peasant societies of the great river valleys became conquering empires by virtue of a discipline forced on them from without,1 but goes on to show how such a transformation could take place. Whereas only farmers possess the industry and stability necessary to sustain a great state, the marked arrow indicates that it was nomad hunters of the steppe, with their expansive and aggressive ways, who first brought such a state into existence. Both elements, expansion and stability, must be combined if real empire-not a mere adding of fields to fields on the one hand, or the quick plunder of a continent on the other, but a program and technique of permanent, universal rule-is to be achieved. The present study undertakes to show how by using marked arrows in a peculiar way prehistoric hunters solved the problem of exercising dominion over vast and scattered areas, and then applied the same solution to the more difficult problem of welding peasant and nomad cultures into some sort of union, resulting in the great centralized state of historic times. Three basic questions only will be treated: what the marked arrow was, how it worked in exercising its control over the loosely-knit and widely-ranging tribes of the steppes, and how those tribes used it to coerce the unwilling tillers of the soil to cooperate in bringing forth the great state.