THE ARISING · History & Ideas
Did Conquest Make Early States Grow Faster the Bigger They Got? A Testable Idea Borrowed From Planet Formation
Our research desk proposes that captured farmland gave early states more than proportional power to conquer again, the way growing planets sweep up matter faster. The analogy is real; the archaeology has not been done.
Hypothesis, not an archaeological finding: the analogy below motivates a proposed analysis. Neither the planetary paper nor Carneiro's historical theory validates the forecast.
Farming made the first cities possible. It also made something new to seize: stored grain and the people who grew it. Our research desk asks whether each conquest made the next one disproportionately easier, so that the biggest early states pulled away from their neighbors on a curve, not a straight line.
Our desk draws an analogy between planetary accumulation and political expansion. It is a proposed way to frame a test, not evidence that the same mechanism governs both.
Young planets grow by pulling in material. Their gravity bends the paths of passing bodies, so a bigger body collects more than its size alone would suggest. In some runaway-growth models, larger bodies grow faster relative to their mass. That runaway later gives way to slower "oligarchic" growth as large bodies stir up their neighborhoods.
The political version: conquered cultivators and stored food feed more soldiers, longer campaigns and more expeditions at once. If that made each gain larger than the last, the strongest states would widen their lead. The desk is careful to say it is not claiming gravity governs human choices; it is borrowing a shape of growth.
Warfare is central to Robert Carneiro's 1970 Science theory of state origins. The original paper's opening pages discuss coercion and accelerating aggregation of villages. We checked those pages and its indexed abstract, not the complete paper. This is historical theory, not a universal law established by the proposed analysis.
Our desk's proposed test is specific; novelty has not been established. It asks not just whether conquest built states, but whether conquest returned more than proportionally to what a state already held, and whether that edge faded as reachable independent neighbors ran out. That fading phase mirrors the planetary switch from runaway to oligarchic growth.
The desk also cites George Wetherill and Glen Stewart's 1989 study of planetesimal swarms. NASA's record and abstract confirm the paper and its conditional runaway-growth modeling; the full paper was not available there.
Use an archaeological settlement survey of southern Mesopotamia. Set rules in advance for grouping sites, estimating farmed territory and handling uncertain dates. Reconstruct territory over time, then compare a proportional-growth model with a greater-than-proportional one, allowing for travel distance and available neighbors. Hold back part of the data to test predictions.
Both features must appear: faster growth for larger states, then slowing as targets disappear. Settlement growth alone does not prove conquest, so destruction layers, fortifications and administrative change must supply separate evidence. No calibrated probability is assigned. The two signatures are proposed criteria, not results already found in archaeological data.
This is history, not medicine. But the reasoning pattern is one our readers meet constantly in health and markets. A compounding story (bigger begets bigger) is seductive, and it is easy to mistake a talented leader or a single innovation for a structural law.
The desk's own guardrail is the useful habit: demand two linked signatures, not one. Fast growth alone could be a great general. Slowing alone could be rebellion. Both together, tied to resources and remaining opportunities, could support the mechanism, but alternative explanations would still need testing.
• The weak link is logistics. Resistance, transport and occupation could absorb the entire captured surplus, leaving no compounding gain. • Dating is coarse. Settlement surveys rarely resolve decades, and the mechanism plays out over generations. • Analogy is not evidence. Planet growth supplies a hypothesis shape, nothing more.
• Preregistered analyses of Mesopotamian survey data comparing proportional and accelerating growth. • Independent evidence of conquest, such as destruction layers, matched to territorial change. • The desk's own deadline: a test of this forecast by October 7, 2031.