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with kin and with non-kin extended families forming them (Chipirova 1988: 7).
65 Crafts in villages have always been completely subordinated to the organization of
agricultural production and has not demanded the existence of any specific craft unit.
66 On the distinguishing between the family and community ancestors by the Binis see
Roese and Bondarenko 2003: 42–43.
67 The oral tradition refers the appearance of the first “craft guilds” to a much more distant
time by attributing their establishment to the second Ogiso Ere (Egharevba 1960: 2).
68 On these premises many universalistically, or better to say excessively Eurocentricly,
thinking scholars refuse to recognize Benin City as a “true” city (see Bondarenko 1995a: 97–98).
Contrary to this viewpoint, I regard as more productive the ideas of Braudel (1986–1992/1969–
1979: I, 537–539) and especially of Eisenstadt and Shacher (1987) who wrote about the variety of
civilizational types of the city. Its specificity in precolonial Africa consisted in indivisibility of the
city from the village and impossibility to be even imagined outside the community organization
framework (Bondarenko 1997c: 46–56). The autochthonous African city, including Benin City,
and the village should be discussed as not opposing each other but rather mutually complementary
(Bondarenko 1995a: 97–98; 1996e). Ancient and medieval European cities were also tightly
connected with agriculture but while there the cities were based on the nuclear family (neighbor)
communities and individualized plough agriculture, in Africa, including Benin, the socio-economic
background was formed by the extended family communities and collective hoe agriculture.
69 As well as conditionality of the very singling out of subsystems in an archaic culture,
including African (see, e.g., Crawley 1953/1902; Uya 1984: 2; Romanov 1991: 65–66; Bondarenko
1993b: 185; 1995a: 20–23, 278).
70 The only exception is South America for which an extremely weak positive correlation
between the size of the family and the community organization’s heterarchy was attested
(Phi = 0.02).
71 It is noteworthy that among other, non-human, primates the role of kinship ties is
also higher in homoarchically than heterarchically organized associations (Thierry 1990;
Butovskaya 1993; 1994: 14–16, 45; 2000; Butovskaya and Fajnberg 1993: 25–90).
72 In his review of the second edition of Murray’s Early Greece (1993) Karpjuk (1994:
193,194) points out that “in the author’s opinion, the reason for the appearance of tyrannical
regimes in Archaic Greece was the demos’ need in leaders for the struggle with aristocracy, who
due to this acquired such great importance in this transitional period”, and then remarks that
“Murray’s viewpoint on the reasons of appearance and social roots of tyranny is quite traditional.”
73 Note that Grinin’s attempt to avoid professional full-time administration as a state’s
feature sine qua non disavows his own definition of the state given elsewhere (1997: 20; 2000b:
190) in which this point is present.
74 To what the appearance of linear dialectics just in ancient Greece is the best testimony.
75 On the evolution during the 20 th century of Benin students’ views on the extent of the
Oba’s power from recognition of the Oba as a “despot” in the direction of the position represented
in this book (and other publications of the present author) and on this position’s being grounded in
the sources, see Bondarenko 1991a).