social classes at TL1

[whswhs]

In my current GURPS campaign, the PCs have just gotten back to their home port, and one of them is ready to look for a wife. Relative social standing is going to be important in the search.

Portus Argenti's cultural models include elements from ancient Sumer, the Roman Republic, and Regency England (that being a mercantile and capitalist culture that's familiar to the players); the overall society is TL1, but the race, nixies, are adapted to rivers and swamps and get into trade readily. I'd like to come up with estimates of how the city population is distributed among the different Status values, in rough fractions. I could handwave it, but this is a community where people know all sorts of arcane things. Does anyone have a sense for the distribution of wealth and of standards of living in, say, the ancient Near East, Egypt, Crete, or similar societies?

[AlexanderHowl]

Completely different societies, and each is going to have its own particularities about population distributions, though there are generalities. TL1 city-states are probably going to have a rural population of 90% supporting an urban population of 10%. City-state households are probably going to be 10% Status -2, 80% Status -1, 9% Status 0, and 1% Status 1+. Every Status level above 1 is going to be one-tenth as common as the preceeding Status, meaning that a city-state would have to have a total population of 100,000 households to have a ruler with Status 4 and a population of 1,000,000 households to have a ruler with Status 5 (more authoritarian societies will have rulers with up to two levels of Status higher, though they pay for it by greatly reducing the status of everyone else).

For example, a Status 7 person spends $60,000,000 per month to support their status, the equivalent of 100,000 Status 0 households. In order to pay for that level of opulence, a city-state of 1 million households would have to reduce 400,000 Status -1 households to Status-2 households, increasing the number of Status-2 households from 10% to 50%. Half of the population would be beggars or slaves while the household of the ruler would appear opulent beyond imagination.

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Half of the population would be beggars or slaves while the household of the ruler would appear opulent beyond imagination.

Never much cared for that sort of thing. Just because one person is more successful than usual doesn’t mean other people have to be correspondingly less successful.

I will say that what constitutes the day to day work of a TL-1 Status 3 noble is drastically different than what constitutes the day of his TL-3 counterpart.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

City-state households are probably going to be 10% Status -2, 80% Status -1, 9% Status 0, and 1% Status 1+. Every Status level above 1 is going to be one-tenth as common as the preceeding Status...

As a rule of thumb, this may be a good starting point, but was the relative distribution of wealth and influence as such homogeneous across cultures, or even within them? I have what can only be described as a dilettante's knowledge of Ancient Greece, but (for instance) surely the distribution of the middle classes was different in Sparta than that of Rome or Thebes.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In my current GURPS campaign, the PCs have just gotten back to their home port, and one of them is ready to look for a wife. Relative social standing is going to be important in the search.

Portus Argenti's cultural models include elements from ancient Sumer, the Roman Republic, and Regency England (that being a mercantile and capitalist culture that's familiar to the players); the overall society is TL1, but the race, nixies, are adapted to rivers and swamps and get into trade readily. I'd like to come up with estimates of how the city population is distributed among the different Status values, in rough fractions. I could handwave it, but this is a community where people know all sorts of arcane things. Does anyone have a sense for the distribution of wealth and of standards of living in, say, the ancient Near East, Egypt, Crete, or similar societies?

Ok ... estimates for classical Athens are not too hard to come by (Athens could support a few hundred trireme-captains, about a thousand horsemen, tens of thousands of hoplites and a similar or greater number of light-armed and rowers out of a population on the order of 300,000). The Old Babylonian social structure was the free men (awīlū), half-free poor (muškēnu), and slaves (waradū) and like in Athens they were euphemistic about how some citizens were a lot freer than others. I don't think they cared how you made your money, in the way that Greek aristocrats looked down on people whose capital was invested in slaves or ships rather than land.

There are definitely low-tech societies with more inequality than others: it is usually thought that the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean increased inequality, because by Cicero's day plenty of people in Italy were richer than kings (there are private houses in Pompeii bigger than the Macedonian palaces).

[smurf]

I thought Ancient Rome was TL2?

From my understanding TL0 would be a society of little or no real social status because wealth is only what you can carry.

Since the Neolithic revolutions and move from Scavenger Gatherers and to the slash and burn agriculture is where social differences become solidified.

About 6,000 years ago there was the development of writing, ie laws and customs as well as who owes or owns what. This would be where TL1 really takes off. Possibly the rise of Antiquity and the slave states (a society that relies up slaves for the means of production) is where TL2 begins.

The next big social leap is the end of Antiquity to the Feudal society (a contentious term to some). None the less Feudal society is TL3 for the first part but the introduction of financial city states around 14th to 16th Centuries would be the beginning of the staggering of TL4 and onwards the rate of uneven development would continue. Regency England (George 3) era would be TL5, most notably a capitalist state (incidentally the OED puts the term 'working class into the 1823 dictionary).

As for the question on inequalities in Antiquity there are 2 good books at least:

G._E._M._de_Ste._Croix wrote on Class in Ancient Greece

Perry_Anderson and his work from Antiquity to Feudalism.

Both look as social structures in region of antiquity you are looking at.

[Polydamas]

Flipping through my notes on Jac Janssen's book on New Kingdom Deir el Medina, it looks like the overseers and scribes got paid about 50% more than the ordinary diggers and painters, who in turn were better off than the donkey-drivers, water-carriers, wood-cutters, fishers gardeners, etc. The overseers seem to have been able to boss the ordinary workers around and collect favours.

It would probably be fair to treat the ordinary tomb workers and their families as Average and Status 0, the menial workers as Struggling or Poor and Status -1, and the scribes and overseers as Comfortable or better and Status 1. Maybe one scribe or overseer to ten tomb workers to 10 or 20 menial workers? That might overstate the size of the middle but Janssen is vague about the population of the village.

[AlexanderHowl]

Rome is TL2, so it is capable of larger organizations and larger inequalities of wealth than a TL1 city-state (Classical Athens is also TL2). Since TL2 starts around 1200 BC, the applicable Western examples are the Mycenean civilization, the New Kingdom of Egypt, and not much else familiar to the public. Even Babylon was a TL2 civilization.

[AlexanderHowl]

Since TL2 starts at 1200 BC, the vast majority of our historical examples of ancient civilizations are actually going to be classical civilizations. The petty kingdoms of Greece of the Trojan War are probably a good example of a typical kingdom of the time. While the Greeks could send 1,000 ships, each kingdom could probably only afford an average of a dozen ships with an average of a dozen people each, and they probably kept only one at a time at Troy (reducing the number of people supported from 12,000 to 1,000).

[whswhs]

The mention of Rome, like that of Regency England, was not intended to suggest that I was going for a culture at that TL; they were reference points for the idea of "this is a commercial, urban society." The Urbes Septemplex are TL1. (They have a Latin name because I adopted the convention that all geographic names were Latin, rather than making up names for peoples and places in a couple of dozen invented languages, following the example of names on the Lunar map. They're not meant to be a lot like Rome.)