Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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1998: 26–27). However, even there “it is possible… that the ancient
Egyptian peasantry, which for the most part seems to have continued to live in
traditional villages long after the Old Kingdom, may have preserved significant
aspects of communal social life…” (Trigger 1985: 59). Besides, “… probably
in some respect whole Egypt was considered as a community with the pharaoh
as its leader, and as not a neighbor [community] but a kin one…” (Diakonoff
and Jakobson 1998: 27; see also McNeill 1963: 72). Though in my opinion the
presence or absence of bureaucracy is a proper indicator of state or non-state
nature of a society, the very prospects for its political organization’s becoming
bureaucratic may arise not from the presence or absence of the community but
from its essentially communal or non-communal foundations. The situation
when the family, lineage, and community organization influences directly the
form and nature of supralocal institutions was reversed with the rise of the state
which tends to encompass all the spheres of social life including such an
important one as family relations (Trigger 2003: 194, 271, 274; see also, e.g.,
Schoenbrun 1999: 143–145; Crest 2002: 351–352, 353).
2. Heterarchic local-institution-matrix (super)complex societies
So, a heterarchic community-matrix-based complex (middle-range) or
supercomplex society with higher probability can appear in the milieu of the
small-family (neighbor) communities, also heterarchic in their nature
(Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000c; see also Blanton 1995; Bondarenko 1998d;
2000c; 2004b). As well as homoarchic cultures (see section 4 below), the
societies of the heterarchic macrotype have varied considerably in their
particular types (see Ehrenreich et al. 1995; Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000a:
155–251). Among examples of the socio-cultural and political complexity
based on the heterarchic neighbor community matrix one of the most vivid is
given by the ancient Greek polis. It is noteworthy that as a socio-political
model the polis was known far beyond antiquity, both in the chronological and
geographic respects (Korotayev 1995c; Bondarenko 1998d). The polis also
shows that no state can be based on the community matrix of any kind: just
because no community permits the existence of bureaucracy, the polis was lack
of it either, and hence was not state (e.g., Berent 2000a; 2000b. Joyce Marcus
and Gary Feinman [1998: 8] remark correctly that “… many Aegean specialists
do not believe the polis was a state at all…”). Even tyranny never changed this
situation and in fact, served a temporal means for further strengthening of those
fundamental heterarchic features of the polis when they were challenged this or
that way. Not by chance tyrannies were not long-lived and left the historical
stage as soon as they fulfilled their mission (e.g., Andrewes 1956; Mossй 1969;
Vliet 1987; Tumans 2002: 285–369). 72 Indeed, in some cases, Athens being
most important, those were just tyrants who paved the way from aristocratic
political regime “to government by the demos, democracy” (Finley 1981: 104).
Democracy as the political regime that exemplifies “the ideal