Of Emperors and Undergraduates

It’s a beautiful, warm summer afternoon; and I’m outside with a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s book Mao: The Unknown Story in my lap. I’m looking at Figure 46, which they’ve captioned “Mao’s Bedroom,” and given this description: “Mao liked to rule from bed, often summoning his colleagues from their own beds in the middle of the night. Chairs for his Politburo were set out at the foot of his huge book-strewn bed, on which he also romped with his numerous girlfriends. ” Most of the written record—most of history—reads something like that. There is an exhibit in London this summer at the Hampton Court Palace Royal Chamber, where kings of England made primi ministri in regis cubiculo, or prime ministers of their royal bedchambers, out of their Grooms of the Stool—the emptiers of their chamberpots, who doubled as their pimps. Even better: More than a millennium before Henry VIII, a praepositus sacri cubiculi, or governor of the sacred bedchamber, ran the Roman Empire; and other eunuchs—or bedkeepers—managed the emperors’ properties, bodyguards, and armies and looked after the emperors’ slave harems. But those traditions are older, and longer, in China. Under the Ming emperors, after 1368, Beijing held an estimated 70,000 eunuchs, with another 30,000 scattered all over the empire, who herded thousands of women into imperial palaces, where they kept records of the pregnancies, pregnancy sicknesses, menstruations, and spontaneous abortions of the emperors’ Forbidden City women (Betzig, 2014a). H. sapiens is an adaptable species; and our reproductive variances reflect that, across time and space. In some societies—like our own society—egalitarianism and monogamy are the rule. But in other societies—like the vast majority of societies in the ethnographic, archaeological and historical records—greater political and reproductive skew prevail. Collectors of data in the modern West, both inside and outside of the United States, are likely to find weaker evidence of reproductive variance and its effects. But collectors of data on other contemporary societies—from Latin America, to North Africa, to parts of Asia including China—are likely to find less reproductive egalitarianism, and a less egalitarian distribution of wealth. Ditto for collectors of data with more time depth. As history recedes into archaeology, and archaeology recedes into ethnography, there is less and less evidence of inequality—political, economic, or demographic. But the biases are greater than in modern North American cultures, in almost every case. Over the vast majority of the 5,000to 10,000-year period of history, there has been consistent, strong evidence of reproductive variance among men. In the first books of history, written into the Hebrew Bible, Solomon famously collected 1,000 women; and less famously, he had 88 or more grandchildren by his son and successor (“my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions”), Rehoboam. In Egypt, Rameses II, who was probably the Exodus pharaoh, was crowned in his father’s harem (“he furnished me with a female household, a royal harem, identical to the beautiful women of the palace”), and left space in his huge Valley of the Kings tomb for some of his 49 sons. In India, Ashoka, the “Sorrowless” emperor, who covered his empire with Rock Edicts about right moral conduct (“kindness, generosity, truthfulness, purity, gentleness and goodness increase among the people”) won his throne over the bodies of 100 brothers. And in China, a Y-chromosome linkage, found in roughly 1 in 200 of all late-20th-century men, has been arguably passed down by the male descendants of Mongol emperor (“For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise”) Kublai Khan (Betzig, 2012, 2013; Zerjal, 2003). Even before history, there was inequality. And some of it shows up in the archaeological record. As early as 100,000 years ago in southern Africa, and after around 50,000 years ago in the Mediterranean Basin, groups of H sapiens left behind grinding and pounding stones, storage facilities, hearths, graves, body ornaments, and Venus figurines—all signs of a more sedentary life. On rivers and tributaries across Asia, in more than 1,000 Upper Paleolithic sites bordered by the Ural Mountains to the east and the Carpathian Mountains to the west,