UC Riverside

Cliodynamics

Title
Seshat: The Global History Databank

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qx38718

Journal
Cliodynamics, 6(1)

Authors
Turchin, Peter
Brennan, Rob
Currie, Thomas
et al.

Publication Date
2015

DOI
10.21237/C7clio6127917

Supplemental Material
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qx38718#supplemental

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University of California
 Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution

Seshat: The Global History Databank

Peter Turchin,1,2 Rob Brennan,3 Thomas E. Currie,4 Kevin C. Feeney,3
Pieter François,5,6 Daniel Hoyer,2 J. G. Manning,7 Arkadiusz
Marciniak,8,9 Daniel Mullins,2,6 Alessio Palmisano,4 Peter
Peregrine,10,11 Edward A. L. Turner,5 Harvey Whitehouse6
1University of Connecticut
2The Evolution Institute
3Trinity College Dublin
4University of Exeter
5University of Hertfordshire
6University of Oxford
7Yale University
8Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań)
9Flinders University (Adelaide)
10Lawrence University
11Santa Fe Institute

Abstract
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not
been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible
for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and
historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms
were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized
societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale
societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in
wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today?
Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their
populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this
article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of
historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History
Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow
us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies
evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much
in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needs.

Corresponding author’s e-mail: peter.turchin@uconn.edu

Citation: Turchin, Peter et al. 2015. Seshat: The Global History Databank. Cliodynamics 6: 77–
107.
 Turchin et al.: The Seshat Databank. Cliodynamics 6:1 (2015)

Introduction
In 1919, the American archaeologist and historian James Henry Breasted, who held
the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States (and, in 1928,
became President of the American Historical Association), issued a call for action:
Here, then, is a large and comprehensive task—the systematic
collection of the facts from the monuments, from the written records,
and from the physical habitat, and the organization of these facts into
a great body of historical archives. The scattered fragments of man's
story have never been brought together by anyone. Yet they must be
brought together by some efficient organization and collected under
one roof before the historian can draw out of them and reveal to
modern man the story of his own career. The most important missing
chapters in that story, the ones which will reveal to us the earliest
transition from the savagery of the prehistoric hunter to the social
and ethical development of the earliest civilized communities of our
own cultural ancestors—these are the lost chapters of the human
career which such a body of organized materials from the Near East
will enable us to recover (Breasted 1919).
Today, almost a century since Breasted wrote these words, his grand vision
remains unfulfilled. The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies,
held collectively by thousands of historians and archaeologists, has not been
systematically organized. This knowledge is scattered across heterogeneous
databases, innumerable books, publications in academic journals, and reports in
the ‘grey’ literature, as well as notes in the private archives of scholars. Much of it
is not even written, but resides in the heads of various experts and is permanently
lost when they pass away.
The store of knowledge about past societies is now much more immense than
it was in 1919, but it remains inaccessible for answering Big Questions about us
and our societies, such as the one formulated by Breasted. Translating his question
into more modern terms, we might state it as follows.
For most of our evolutionary history, humans have lived in small-scale societies
of nomadic foraging bands that were integrated by face-to-face interactions and
lacked both central authorities and high levels of structural inequality (Fried 1967,
Lee and DeVore 1968, Service 1975, Mullins et al. 2013). The first large-scale,
complex societies, characterized by an extensive division of labor, great
differentials in wealth and power, elaborate governance structures, and large
urban centers, appeared roughly 5,000 years ago (Liverani 2006, Algaze 2008,
Wilkinson et al. 2014). How this “major evolutionary transition” (Maynard Smith
and Szathmáry 1995) occurred is one of the biggest questions of social evolution,
and is a question for which we still do not have a widely accepted answer. However,
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we do know that a first step occurred in the Near East during the Early Neolithic
period (ca. 9700/9500 – 6400/6200 BC) with the emergence of sedentary farming
communities living in larger settlements, supported by a stable economy with
surplus production(Price and Feinman 1995, Bar-Yosef 2001, Zeder 2011).
During the last 10,000 years, large-scale, complex societies have gradually
replaced small-scale, foraging societies. Despite their ubiquity, the ability of today’s
large-scale societies to construct viable states and nurture productive economies,
varies enormously from country to country. Why do states sometimes fail to meet
the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In
many ways, differences between present-day societies can be as large as
differences between our foraging ancestors 15,000 years ago and us today.
In their search for explanations of what makes some societies succeed and
others “fail,” most economists and political scientists focus on the current
conditions or the recent past. Yet modern societies did not suddenly appear 30 or
even 100 years ago; they gradually evolved from pre-existing societies over many
centuries and millennia. If we want to live in better—more peaceful, wealthy, and
just—societies, we need to understand the major evolutionary transition (or
transitions) that occurred in our past and why they resulted in such divergent
outcomes in the present.
Fortunately, today, we are finally able to rise up to Breasted’s challenge. Our
ability to do so is based on the remarkable evolution of information technology that
has taken place over the last several decades. Even more important than
improvements of hardware are recent developments in “knowledge engineering”
techniques—approaches that will enable us to convert the gigantic and
unorganized multitude of facts into structured knowledge, with which we can
finally perform comprehensive tests of the many theories in history and cultural
evolution. This body of organized knowledge will enable us to see much more
clearly, if not fully recover, the lost chapters of a human career, thus fulfilling
Breasted’s dream.
This paper describes our vision for accomplishing this goal. We will do so by
building a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, which
we call Seshat: the Global History Databank. As this paper was written (in the first
half of 2015), Seshat was rapidly becoming much more than a vision. Thanks to the
generous support from government funding agencies, private foundations, and
individual supporters (see Acknowledgments), we have already started the job of
building it.
The goal of this article, thus, is to describe the structure and uses of Seshat. We
start with a theoretical background—a brief overview of various theories that have
been advanced to explain the emergence of large-scale, complex societies over the
last 10,000 years or so, and the changing levels of inequality in the long-term
history of our species. The main question in this section is, how do we extract

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predictions from theories? Next, we explain how data on past societies are
collected and organized in Seshat. In the conclusion, we discuss where we are and
where we are going.

From Theories to Predictions

The Evolution of Social Complexity

Processes involved in the evolution of complex societies are hotly contested, with
various theories emphasizing such factors as population growth, warfare,
information management, economic specialization, and long-distance trade
(Sanderson 1999, Johnson and Earle 2000). Generally speaking, theories tend to
come in several flavors (Carballo et al. 2014). One factor that is common to virtually
all explanations is that truly large-scale, complex societies can be built only on the
basis of reasonably productive agriculture (Currie et al. 2015). Beyond the general
agreement that agriculture is a necessary condition, however, opinions divide.
‘Functionalist’ (or ‘voluntaristic’) explanations emphasize benefits of
cooperation to all: buffering environmental risk, managing competition and
efficiently allocating resources, producing public goods such as an irrigation
system, and capturing returns to scale, for example, in economic production
(Service 1975, Johnson and Earle 2000). In contrast, ‘conflict’ explanations focus
on the dark side of large-scale sociality: class struggle and exploitation, and warfare
and conquest. For example, anthropologists influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels argue that the adoption of agriculture created the surplus that
could be then appropriated by the elites (Hayden 1995). In a recent book, Flannery
and Marcus (2012) describe how the adoption of agriculture and the institution of
private property could enable a few to amass great wealth while the majority was
forced into servitude. Alternative explanations rely on conquest (Oppenheimer
1975) or, in more subtle versions, on environmental and social circumscription
(Carneiro 1970).
Most current theories attempt to avoid the extremes of pure functionalism or
pure coercion. The need for both cooperation and coercion in social life was clear
to Ibn Khaldun (1958). Michael Mann (1986: 146-155) attempted to fold both
forces into one concept, “compulsory cooperation.” Robert Carneiro, who
originally proposed that the transition from autonomous villages to centralized
multi-village polities (chiefdoms) was accomplished by outright conquest
(Carneiro 1970), shifted in later articles to a more cooperative model. He proposed
that multi-village polities could have started as alliances of villages with military
leaders; those leaders were able to transform their temporary powers over allied
villages into enduring, centralized political structures (Carneiro 1998: 36). Yet
other theories, such as the systems approach and cooperation and collective action
perspectives, are discussed in Carballo et al. (2014).
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The theoretical framework that has informed our research 1 is Cultural

Multilevel Selection (CMLS). CMLS offers an elegant and parsimonious solution to
the problem of how to combine the functionalist and conflict elements.
Cooperation and coercion are enjoined in a very special way: cooperation takes
place among lower-level units (but is supplemented with punishment of free-
riders), whereas conflict takes place between higher-level entities (Richerson and
Boyd 1998, Wilson 2002, Bowles 2009, Turchin 2013).
This brief overview shows that we do not lack theories. What we have lacked
so far is a process by which we can reject some theories in favor of others. Different
theories, however, make very different predictions as to where, when, and under
what circumstances we should see the rise of large-scale complex societies during
the last 10,000 years across the globe. Because different theories postulate
different causal factors responsible for the evolution of social complexity, an
analysis of which potentially explanatory variables correlate best with rising social
complexity has a direct bearing on the empirical adequacy of rival theories.
Moreover, we can do better than employing a purely correlational approach.
Because causes precede effects, different theories make divergent predictions
about temporal sequences of events. Thus, we need a dynamical databank that
allows us to trace how different characteristics of past societies changed with time
and determine which variables’ changes precede changes in other variables. Of
course, such an approach will not work in situations where temporal changes
cannot be resolved on a sufficiently fine temporal scale; however, the continuous
improvement in our methodologies of studying the past gives us hope that there
will be a growing ensemble of case studies in which temporal resolution is
sufficient for the purpose of testing theories.
In the next section, we make this discussion more concrete by focusing on one
particular aspect of the evolution of human societies: the interaction between
social complexity, hierarchy, and inequality.

The Evolution of Hierarchy and Inequality in Human Societies

The dramatic increase in the scale of societies over the last 10,000 years was
accompanied by many other changes. One particularly interesting pattern is the
trajectory followed by human inequality during this period (Figure 1).

1 It is important to note that, although various members of our research network have

particular theories that they are interested in testing, our overarching goal is to test rival
theories against each other. Thus, data that we gather in Seshat focus on theoretically
relevant variables (variables invoked by various theories, see Building the Databank below),
but overall, the Databank is theory-neutral, and all effort is made to ensure that no particular
theory is privileged. In the long run, theoretical neutrality is enforced by the open-ended
nature of this collective enterprise, which allows for alternative conceptualizations and re-
coding of any variable by proponents of different theoretical frameworks.
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Figure 1. Two hypotheses about the evolution of human egalitarianism (with a

focus on structural inequality). The main hypothesis that we plan to test proposes
that structural inequality was low for small-scale polities, foraging bands and
farming villages. It increased when first centralized polities, chiefdoms, evolved
and reached a peak in archaic states. The Axial Age (800–200 BCE) was a turning
point, and post-Axial polities, such as large empires and nation-states, were
characterized by progressively lower structural inequality. An alternative to this
‘Axial turn’ hypothesis (the solid curve) is the ‘Enlightenment turn’ hypothesis
(broken curve), positing that inequality remained at a high level until much more
recently, the last two or three centuries.

Egalitarianism and a fierce preference for equality have characterized modern

humans for the greater part of our evolutionary history. Although there are
distinctions based on age, gender, and achievement, human foraging societies lack
clear-cut dominance hierarchies, such as the ones present in chimpanzee troops.
Equality in foraging societies is not simply a consequence of their relative poverty;
it requires active maintenance. Egalitarian societies possess social norms and
institutions designed to control those individuals who attempt to dominate others
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and to obtain an unfair share of resources (‘upstarts’) (Cashdan 1980). These

‘leveling mechanisms’ range from gossip and ridicule to ostracism and, ultimately,
assassination. Because of their small scale, societies of hunter-gatherers were
integrated by face-to-face sociality, which enabled a diffuse, non-centralized form
of social organization that was well-suited to maintaining an egalitarian ethos
(Boehm 2001).
The adoption of agriculture c.10,000 years ago saw the evolution of larger-scale
human societies (Flannery and Marcus 2012). More routinized forms of
cooperation were required to sustain novel forms of specialized labor, reciprocity,
pooling, and storage (Whitehouse 2004, Atkinson and Whitehouse 2010,
Whitehouse and Hodder 2010). Agriculture, a sustainable exploitation of the
commons, required the dissolution of small-group boundaries and inter-group
rivalry in favor of larger-scale forms of collective identity, trust, and cooperation
that extended to tens of thousands of individuals (Whitehouse and Lanman 2014),
and, ultimately, millions. Computational demands on memory and information-
processing systems increase dramatically with the size of the cooperating group
(Dunbar and Shultz 2007). When compared with other organisms, humans have
evolved to possess a number of cognitive advantages, including a more complex
memory, more predictive capacities for future simulation, more fine-tuned
systems for correctly identifying a number of individuals, and more precise
numerical discriminatory abilities (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, Fehr and Gächter
2002). As a result, humans are able to cooperate in the largest groups of all
primates (Dunbar 1992). Despite these advantages, our cognitive systems are
quickly overwhelmed when the size of a cooperating group grows beyond a few
hundred.
For individuals to cooperate and coordinate their actions in larger groups,
cultural workarounds are required to overcome these cognitive constraints
(Richerson and Boyd 2001). The main solution that social evolution found was
hierarchical organization, with large human groups integrated by chains of
command. A member of a hierarchically organized group needs to have face-to-face
interactions with only a few individuals: a superior and several subordinates
(Turchin and Gavrilets 2009). This move to more hierarchical forms of social
structure entailed formal offices of leadership and the development of hereditary
systems of ranking and social class that were very different from the dominance
hierarchies in non-human primates (Dubreuil 2008).
The advent of agriculture and hierarchical organization is intimately linked to
a major sea change in the growth of structural inequalities. Although greater
societal size would have had a number of advantages in terms of economies of scale
and greater effectiveness in between-group competition, it required greater
hierarchical complexity, resulting in the first turn in the evolution of egalitarianism
(Turchin 2011). The nature and quantity of resources available to societies affects

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how much wealth can be inherited, and whether inequalities can persist over
multiple generations (Borgerhoff Mulder et al. 2009). Sedentary agricultural
societies are able to produce food surpluses that can be used to support non-
productive (‘elite’) members of society, whereas hunter-gatherer societies
generally do not produce a surplus (Morrison 1994, Hayden 1995). The historical
and archaeological records suggest that hierarchy and inequality increased after
the advent of agriculture with the development of ranked societies and chiefdoms
(Trigger 2003, Ames 2007). Sedentary farming may have served as a precondition
for the rise of early states: a centralized political organization wielding its political,
economic, and military authority over a territory and a defined group of people,
guaranteeing the division of labor, the storage of food surplus, and the extraction
of resources (Scheidel 2013). However, the most unequal—even despotic—human
societies ever were ‘archaic states’ that first appeared c.3000 BCE (Feinman and
Marcus 1998). These early states were characterized by extreme forms of
structural inequality such as human sacrifice, slavery, unequal rights of
commoners and nobles, and deification of the rulers (Trigger 2003, Kirch 2010).
Religious and ritual mechanisms that evolved for the legitimation of hierarchy and
structural inequality, initially serving the interests of society at large, may have
been hijacked by coercive elites and rulers to drive inequality levels to
unprecedented heights.
A major hypothesis, which we will test empirically, is that the Axial Age
introduced another sea change in the evolution of inequality, starting a move
towards greater egalitarianism that has been continuing to the present. The Axial
Age (Jaspers 1953) refers to a series of religious and philosophical developments
that occurred in such far-flung regions of Eurasia as Greece, the Near East, India,
and East Asia between roughly 800 and 200 BCE. The last two centuries, have seen
the spread of democratic forms of governance and widespread acceptance of
fundamental human rights and equality. These are part of two related
developments that may ultimately have begun in the Axial Age: (1) rulers have
been increasingly constrained to act in ways that promote the public good, rather
than their own interests, and (2) structural forms of human inequality have been
gradually disappearing (the abolition of human sacrifice, slavery, etc.).
Religion may have played an extremely important, yet little-appreciated role in
this second turn. Robert Bellah (2011) has recently argued that a major driver in
the evolution of religion was the need to reconcile the tension between the benefits
of hierarchy and the need for legitimacy and equity, resulting in the new forms of
spirituality associated with the rise of world religions during the Axial Age. One
aspect of this change was the first appearance of a universally egalitarian ethic,
which was largely due to the emergence of “prophet-like figures who, at great peril
to themselves, held the existing power structures to a moral standard that they
clearly did not meet” (Bellah 2011).

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The seeds of this transformation may be traced to pre-axial religions. Archaic

states were nearly always characterized by some sort of divine kingship (Kirch
2010), and the evidence suggests that they practiced human sacrifice frequently
and on a massive scale. While these are both indicators of extreme forms of
inequality, during this phase, we also observe the appearance of ‘gods,’ who are
distinguished from other powerful supernatural beings in that they are
worshipped. Gods became an increasingly important part of social evolution
during the Axial Age along with the rise of qualitatively new forms of social
organization that employed new systems of legitimizing political power. During
this time, gods evolved from capricious deities to transcendental and morally
concerned supernatural beings (concerned, for example, with prosocial behavior
by the rulers) (Norenzayan et al. 2015).
Furthermore, the very large-scale societies (‘megaempires’) of the Axial Age
appear in many distant parts of Eurasia at approximately the same time.
Geographically, these developments appear to be located in the region just south
of the Great Eurasian Steppe. During the Axial Age, this vast region, stretching from
Anatolia to North China, saw the recurrent development of large states and
empires (Turchin 2009, Turchin et al. 2013). The new scale of larger empires,
whose rulers had even more resources to aggrandize themselves, precipitated the
legitimation crisis of the early axial state (Bellah 2011 following Jürgen Habermas).
Axial religions may represent new systems of legitimizing political power, which
were needed to prevent huge axial empires from splitting apart. The increase in
size of the empires at this time may ultimately be linked to new forms of intense
intersocietal competition.
From the perspective of CMLS, the evolution of cultural traits, such as religious
practices and equity norms, can be modeled as resulting from the action of
selective forces acting at different levels of social organization. Costly social
institutions that enable large-scale cooperation can evolve and be maintained as a
result of competition between societies: societies with traits that enable greater
control and coordination of larger numbers will out-compete those that lack such
traits (Richerson and Boyd 1998, Wilson 2002, Bowles 2009, Henrich et al. 2010).
Although societies can compete in many ways, one of the strongest and most
important forms of competition is warfare, which may have acted as an important
selective force favoring large-scale societies. The conditions of endemic warfare
that are characteristic of small-scale societies (Keely 1997, LeBlanc 2003) may
result in strong selection pressure for larger cooperating societies that can bring
more warriors to a battle. Larger numbers alone do not guarantee victory,
however, and military success is also aided by better coordination through
centralized organization and chains of command. This may have been one reason
why initially egalitarian human societies became more hierarchical and unequal
(Turchin 2009, Bellah 2011).

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However, while highly effective on the battlefield, a centralized military

hierarchy has drawbacks as a general way of organizing societies—a society
cannot really be held together by force alone. Additionally, great inequities
resulting from rapacious military chiefs and their retinues alienate large segments
of the population. As a result, early despotic chiefdoms and archaic states were
very fragile and frequently did not outlast their founders. For example, oral records
from Hawaii speak of popular uprisings against chiefs who extracted too much
tribute (Kirch 2010). Bellah proposed that large-scale societies were only able to
achieve stability by replacing brute-force domination by military chiefs with “a
new form of authority, of legitimate hierarchy … which involves a new relation
between gods and humans, a new way of organizing society, one that finds a
significant place for the disposition to nurture as well as the disposition to
dominate” (2011). In other words, according to this theory, a major driver in the
evolution of religion was the need to reconcile the tension between the need for
hierarchy and the need for legitimacy and equity.
In summary, the evolution of social and economic inequality in human societies
over the long term was not simply a U-turn from dominance hierarchies to
egalitarianism and back to hierarchy, as suggested by some anthropologists (e.g.
Boehm 2001, 2012, Flannery and Marcus 2012). Instead, there were two trend
reversals: a ‘zig’ from small egalitarian groups to large-scale hierarchical and
unequal societies, followed by a ‘zag’ from despotism towards the greater
egalitarianism associated with the Axial Age. The hypotheses outlined above to
explain these changes offer a set of predictions that differ in many respects from
the predictions of rival theories and, therefore, can be tested with data on past
societies. Table 1 lists these predictions together with possible alternatives.
It is important to note that Table 1 presents theoretical alternatives in a stark,
binary fashion. In real life, of course, it is possible (indeed likely) that the best
explanatory model will combine more than one mechanism, with different factors,
perhaps, interacting in nonlinear, synergistic ways. Evaluation of such complex
quantitative explanations is not a problem for modern methods of statistical
analysis, especially when combined with a program of mathematical models that
explicitly incorporate such interactions.

Building the Databank

Our long-term goal is for Seshat to be a vast repository for structured data on
theoretically relevant variables for any past human society, for which such data
exist. Our time frame is the last 10,000 years of human history (i.e., from the
Neolithic to the present). ‘Theoretically relevant’ variables are those invoked by
theories about how human societies evolve and function. Such variables either
describe the phenomenon that we want to explain, or something that helps to
explain the phenomenon: explanandum (for example, the trajectories of social
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complexity, or of inequality) and explanans, respectively (Hempel and Oppenheim

1948). Some variables may play both roles, being interesting in their own right and
also having an explanatory potential for other aspects of social dynamics. Because
Seshat will eventually become an active databank, incorporating tools for
automating the harvesting of variable values from Internet-accessible sources (e.g.
historical and archaeological databases, DBPedia, JSTOR), the set of such variables
will expand as new theories are proposed, invoking new explanatory factors.
Seshat is a theory-neutral databank; future investigators will also have the freedom
to re-conceptualize and redefine variables using their preferred theoretical
frameworks.

A Focus on ‘Big Questions’

In addition to having a long-term and highly ambitious goal, we need a set of
realistic, medium-term objectives. Therefore, we initially focus on a limited set of
variables. Our approach to selecting such variables is based on asking ‘Big
Questions,’ such as the long-term trajectory of inequality, discussed in detail in a
previous section (The Evolution of Hierarchy and Inequality in Human Societies).
Over the last several years, our research team has crafted and submitted a
number of proposals to various funding agencies, each addressing a Big Question.
Some of these proposals have been funded; others were declined. Reviewers’
comments consistently indicated that the critical factor in success was the
feasibility of the scientific approach and the potential societal impact of the Big
Question under investigation. In effect, we have developed an ‘evolutionary
mechanism’ that points us to the most interesting questions that can be feasibly
addressed with our approach, as judged by the community of external expert
reviewers employed by funding agencies (thus, the reviewers are the ‘force of
selection’). 2
It should be noted, however, that as Seshat grows by including more variables,
it becomes easier to ask additional Big Questions. As we accumulate an increasingly
large stock of explanans variables, we need fewer new variables to code.
Furthermore, as we develop increasingly sophisticated software for automating
the harvesting of structured data from semi-structured and unstructured sources,
the effort required to capture the values of new variables will progressively
decrease.

The World Sample-30

Just as our initial focus is on a limited set of variables, we similarly cannot start by
trying to code all societies that have been studied by historians and archaeologists.
This means we have to work with a sample. The need to sample societies, however,

2 Successful proposals are listed in the Acknowledgments.

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raises a number of conceptual issues. The defining characteristic of Seshat is that

it focuses on the temporal development of variables. Thus, the potential of this
approach to distinguish between rival theories critically depends on being able to
follow evolutionary trajectories of societies through time. But how do we ‘follow’
societies?

Table 1. Examples of predictions generated by the Z-curve theory and possible

alternative hypotheses.
Prediction Explanation Alternative
The Axial turn in Foragers and early farmers: The turning point is modern:
structural Very low structural inequality structural inequality only
inequality Archaic: Very high struct. starts decreasing after 1700
inequality CE, possibly associated with
Axial Age: turning point the Age of Enlightenment
toward reduced structural (18th century)
inequality
Post-axial: decreasing
structural inequality

More-egalitarian Decreasing inequality helps in Unequal societies are more

societies solving the coordination and stable. Rulers of more
(structurally or cooperation problems present unequal societies can use the
quantitatively) are in large-scale societies by resources they extract from
more internally increasing the willingness of the population to better
stable societies’ members to solve support their warrior
such problems retinues and bureaucratic
administrators and impose
stability by force

More-equal More equal societies are more More unequal societies can
societies do better cohesive, better coordinated in more effectively coerce larger
in between-group military conflicts, and have numbers of people to fight in
competition individuals more willing to conflicts. Another alternative
defend their group is that military effectiveness
is relatively independent of
broader societal cohesion
(this may be particularly
relevant to situations where
societies have a permanent
standing army)

Routinized rituals Routinized rituals are Large-scale, anonymous,

enabled the necessary for the first hierarchical, centralized
emergence of appearance of large-scale, communities arose first (e.g.,
larger societies anonymous, hierarchical, due to warfare), and
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centralized communities. routinized rituals emerged
Thus, they precede such large- subsequently to help
scale societies maintain social cohesion

Axial religions The need to solve collective Religions have been mainly
made societies action problems entailed a used to support structural
more equal by return to more consensual inequalities, such as the
curtailing the forms of hierarchy, rather than divine nature of rulers, legal
coercive power of forcing individuals to obey distinctions between elites
despots self-serving elites. Political and and commoners, or favor for
religious authority became one ethnicity over others.
more closely entwined, and Ruling elites could use
leaders’ legitimacy came to religion as ‘opium for the
rely more on persuasion (e.g., masses,’ which would
through public, credibility- legitimate the existing order
enhancing displays) and less (involving huge levels of
on the naked exercise of power inequality)

Intensified More intense competition More intense forms of

military between groups favors more warfare select for more rigid,
competition leads cohesive societies. Equity- militarized hierarchies that
to the appearance promoting norms, including concentrate power in the
and spread of those hypothesized to stem hands of rulers and elites,
equity-promoting from Axial religions, are a good resulting in greater inequality
norms way of achieving group
cohesion

Warfare Intense competition between Some other factor, such as

intensified during polities drove selection for global climate change,
or just before the cooperation-enhancing equity explains the simultaneous
Axial Age norms and institutions, Axial Age developments in
resulting in nearly Southwest, South, and East
simultaneous appearances of Asia
Axial Religions in far-flung
regions of Eurasia

One approach is to use geo-temporal sampling. First, we select a set of areas on

the Earth’s surface and a temporal sampling rate. We start with the approximate
date at which agriculture was introduced to each area and advance through time
to the present at intervals defined by the temporal sampling rate. At each point in
time, we record the characteristics of the societies that occupy the area. A potential
problem with this approach is that sometimes an entirely new group of people
arrives from elsewhere and largely, or entirely, displaces the group that occupied
the area previously. For example, until the seventeenth century, the Northeastern
United States was occupied by a set of Native American societies. By the nineteenth
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century, however, little trace of their social system remained. The European
settlers brought their own set of genes, crops, domesticated animals, material
culture, language, and institutions, which largely replaced the Native American
equivalents. Thus, an alternative approach to geo-temporal sampling is ‘ethno-
temporal’ sampling: following ethnic groups as they migrate and expand, shrink
and die out, and recording the characteristics of the ethnic group at each point in
time.
Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. Eventually, when our geographic
coverage becomes more complete, we will be able to include the effects of both
spatial proximity and ‘cultural proximity’ (for example, linguistic similarity as a
proxy) in the analysis. Until then, however, we need to select one or the other.
Because tracing ethnic roots of populations can be much more contentious, we
opted for the geo-temporal approach. However, we emphasize that this is only the
first phase in our long-term project. Eventually, our data should be complete
enough to allow a simultaneous estimation of spatial and cultural proximity effects.
We selected 30 areas across the globe for our initial worldwide sample,
stratified by world region and history of social complexity. We divided the world
into ten major regions (see Figure 2 and Table 2) and then selected three natural
geographic areas (NGAs, explained below) within each region. We looked for NGAs
that sampled the diversity of a world region with respect to the relative antiquity
of complex societies within it. Accordingly, one NGA was selected in an area that
developed complex state-level societies very early. Another sampling point was the
opposite in terms of the antiquity of complex societies—ideally, it was free of
centralized polities (chiefdoms and states) until the colonial period. Finally, the
third NGA was intermediate in social complexity. Because different world regions
acquired complex societies at very different times, ‘high complexity’ NGAs can not
be directly compared historically. For example, Susiana in Southwest Asia has
much longer history of complex societies than Hawaii in the Pacific region.
In summary, the World Sample-30 was designed with two goals in mind: (1) to
include as much variation amongst sampled societies as possible, at least along the
social complexity dimension, and (2) to ensure that representation of different
parts of the world was maximized.

Information Architecture of the Seshat Databank

The basic entity classes (types) in the databank’s information architecture are
Organizations and Territories, each of which has a set of temporally-scoped
Variables associated with it. Entity classes serve as units of data collection and
entry and as potential units of statistical analysis. Territories have fixed
geographical bounds that do not change with time, whereas Organizations are
defined by temporal bounds and may be associated with specific Territories at
specific intervals. A subset of variables relate Organizations to Territories, and the
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temporal dynamics of these Relationship Variables allow us to capture both

temporal and geographical dynamics of the features of human societies. One of the
most important relationship variables is the controls relation that specifies which
social organization controls which territories over time. For example, a particular
social organization known as a polity (defined below) may control a particular
territory during a particular period of time, and several organizations, (e.g.,
interest groups, see below) may have the exists within relationship to a particular
territory, which is controlled by a polity.

Figure 2. Locations of the 30 sampling points (Natural Geographic Areas) on the

world map. For the key to NGA numbers, see Table 2.

Currently, we have two classes of Territory: Natural Geographic Region and

Free Form Area.
Natural Geographic Region (NGA). This type of unit is primarily a unit of data
collection or analysis and is defined spatially by the area enclosed within a
boundary drawn on the world map. It does not change with time. Its rough spatial
scale is 100 km × 100 km (but can vary several-fold). Examples: Latium, Upper
Egypt, Middle Yellow River Valley. It is the basic geographical sampling unit.
Free Form Area (FFA). This type of unit is defined spatially by the area enclosed
within a boundary drawn on the world map. It can have any dimensions, and does
not have to be contiguous. The purpose of FFAs is to tie various characteristics of
societies and organizations to a specific set of geographic coordinates. For example,
it is used to indicate what territory was controlled by a certain polity, e.g. Roman
Empire, during a particular period of time (from start year to end year). Another

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example is the area within which the practice of iron smelting was known (exists
within) during a certain period of time.

Table 2. The World Sample-30. The numbers of NGAs correspond to the numbers
in Figure 2.
World Low Medium High
Region Complexity Complexity Complexity
Africa 1 Ghanaian Coast 11 Niger 21 Upper Egypt
Inland
Delta
Europe 2 Iceland 12 Paris 22 Latium
Basin
Central Eurasia 3 Lena River 13 Orkhon 23 Sogdiana
Valley Valley
Southwest Asia 4 Yemeni Coastal 14 Konya Plain 24 Susiana
Plain
South Asia 5 Garo Hills 15 Deccan 25 Kachi
Plain
Southeast Asia 6 Kapuasi Basin 16 Central Java 26 Cambodian
Basin
East Asia 7 Southern China 17 Kansai 27 Middle
Hills Yellow River
Valley
North America 8 Finger Lakes 18 Cahokia 28 Valley of
Oaxaca
South America 9 Lowland Andes 19 North 29 Cuzco
Colombia
Oceania- 10 Oro, PNG 20 Chuuk 30 Big Island
Australia Islands Hawaii

Currently, we have the following classes of Organization:

Polity. Polity is defined as an independent political unit. Kinds of polities range
from villages (local communities) through simple and complex chiefdoms to states
and empires. A polity can be either centralized or not (e.g., organized as a
confederation). What distinguishes a polity from other human groupings and
organizations is that it is politically independent of any overarching authority; it
possesses sovereignty. Polities are defined spatially by the Territories (NGAs and
FFAs) with which they have spatial relationships, e.g., controls. Polities are
dynamical entities and, therefore, their geographical extent may change with time.
Thus, typically each polity will be related to a set of territories, each controlled for
a specified period of time. For prehistoric periods and for NGAs populated by a
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multitude of small-scale, not truly independent polities, we use a variant of

Organization called a quasi-polity (see below).
Quasi-polity. The polity-based approach is not feasible for those periods when a
NGA is divided up among a multitude of small-scale polities (e.g., independent
villages or many small chiefdoms) or when it is controlled in quick succession by a
number of different regimes. In instances such as these we use the concept of
'quasi-polity' (in either the spatial or temporal sense). The idea is to collect data for
the quasi-polity as a whole. This way we can integrate over (often patchy) data
from different sites and different polities to estimate what a 'generic' polity was
like. Accordingly, when coding, for example, social complexity variables, enter data
not for the whole NGA but for a ‘typical’ polity in it. For example, when coding for
a quasi-polity, polity territory is not the area of the NGA as a whole, but the average
or typical area of polities within the NGA. Similarly, for societies known only
archaeologically we may not be able to establish the boundaries of polities, even
approximately. Quasi-polity is defined as a cultural area with some degree of
cultural (including linguistic, if known) homogeneity that is distinct from
surrounding areas. For example, the Marshall Islands before German occupation
had no overarching native or colonial authority (chiefs controlled various subsets
of islands and atolls) and therefore it was not a polity. But it was a quasi-polity
because of the significant cultural and linguistic uniformity.
Religious System (RS). This type of Organization is defined in ways that are
analogous to a polity, except it reflects religious, rather than political authority.
Religious systems are dynamical and are typically defined by a set of dated
boundaries. Religious systems are more likely to overlap in space than Polities.
City. Cities are represented by a single point on the map that doesn’t change with
time. Although it is possible to reflect their spatial expansion dynamically, we chose
not to do so in the current implementation.
Interest Group (IG). An IG is a social group that pursues some common interest,
so that its members are united by a common goal or goals. Religious systems are
also interest groups, but the IG category is broader. It also includes ethnic groups,
professional associations, warrior bands, solidarity associations, mutual aid
societies, firms and banks (including their pre-modern variants), etc. The IG is
defined sociologically, not geographically. However, if desired, a territory may be
associated with it in the same way as with a polity or a RS.
Sub-Polity. A sub-polity is an area within a polity for which variable values differ
from the overarching polity. It is a general modeling feature for capturing
situations in which, for example, provinces or regions within a polity have

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significant differences in social organization from the rest. A sub-polity is basically

a polity that lacks sovereignty.
As the databank evolves, and more questions are posed, it is conceivable that
other kinds of Territory and Organization could be added.
Additionally, we recognize that most historical polities did not have sharp
boundaries. Instead, in many cases, their spheres of control gradually declined
from the political center, or centers. There also could be effectively stateless
lacunae inside the territory nominally claimed by a state. The initial
implementation of the databank does not reflect such ‘facts on the ground,’ but the
information architecture supports it through the sub-polity class—an area that is
related to a specific territory, which differs in significant ways from the rest of the
polity.

Figure 3. Seshat Meta-model, showing entity class hierarchy and the most
important relationships between entity classes (note: classes with black text are
abstract and thus never directly coded; they define sets of variables that are
common to all sub-classes). Thin arrows indicate subclass relationships. For
example, FFA is a subclass of Territory, and NGA is a subclass of FFA. Thick arrows
are examples of relationships.

As a coding convention, we prefer to limit the temporal extent of polities to

approximately two or three centuries, because polities tend to evolve with time
and often experience transformative events; thus, it is natural to code the next
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period as a different polity. For example, we divide Roman history into the
following polities: Regal; Early, Middle, and Late Republic; Principate, and
Dominate.
The current version of the Seshat Code Book has been developed primarily for
historical societies. Coding data for societies that are known only archaeologically
poses an additional set of challenges. We are currently developing an archeological
Seshat Code Book that will address these challenges (Marciniak et al., forthcoming;
Palmisano et al. forthcoming).

Coding Procedure
In populating the databank, the following instructions are provided to coders
(using approaches based on NGAs as an example):
• Identify an NGA within the larger World Region. This should be an area
ideally around 100 by 100 km, or 10,000 sq. km. Dimensions, of the NGA,
however, are allowed to vary quite substantially.
• In the NGA data page, list chronologically all polities that were located in the
NGA, or encompassed it (see Latium as an example). For periods when the
NGA was fragmented among many small-scale polities, use the quasi-polity
approach. In the intermediate case, when there were several large polities
(for example, the NGA was on a frontier between two states), focus on the
one that controlled the largest proportion of the NGA.
• As a coding convention, we try not to have too-long chunks of time on the
same polity data sheet. Try to limit the length to 200–300 years, but at the
same time don't slice it too thinly. We aim at roughly 200 (100–300) year
chunks, but are guided by actual historical events that result in major
change. As an example, we have split the Rome-Republican Period into three
polities (Early, Middle, and Late Republic).
• Next, switch to the data page for the polity and code all polity-based
variables there. In other words, you don't put any polity-related codes
within the NGA sheet. The NGA is used as purely a sampling scheme, and all
codes go into the relevant polity sheets.
• When coding NGA-based variables (such as resources, agriculture, and
population), list chronologically the general 'epochs' and then code these
variables for each period separately.
• The same approach is used to add lists of religious systems and cities, in
which case entry is linked to the page for the RS or City.

Transforming Raw Data into ‘Facts’

To design statistical tests of hypotheses such as those listed above, we need to
define and operationalize such concepts as social scale, inequality, and intensity of
military competition. In order to do this, we need to collect and code data
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systematically and we need to be aware of the complications and complexities

involved in such an endeavor. For each area of interest, we have developed a coding
sheet that outlines the particular variables to be coded and how they are to be
categorized or quantified. These coding sheets have been developed in conjunction
with expert historians and archaeologists who have given valuable feedback on
how best to classify these phenomena based on their specialist knowledge of these
issues. These coding sheets are derived from our overall Codebook, which also
discusses some of the complexities involved in coding data of this kind. The current
version of the Seshat Codebook is included in the Supplementary Materials.
The historical and archaeological records for even the best-attested societies
are incomplete, so we need to deal with the issue of missing data. Therefore, for
each variable of interest, we collect data on a number of different measures, and a
certain degree of redundancy in these variables is implemented by design. For
many past societies (some of which are known only archaeologically), we will not
be able to code every variable. Thus, different variables can serve as proxies for the
same underlying factor, enabling us to compare different societies even in the face
of missing data. For example, estimating populations of historical states and
empires is a notoriously difficult problem; as a result, we developed a number of
proxies that correlate with population numbers (e.g., the size of the largest urban
center, the extent of territory controlled, etc.). Furthermore, our statistical
analyses are designed to cope with missing data.
Socio-cultural phenomena described by terms such as ‘social scale’ or
‘inequality’ are often actually multidimensional and cover a range of related, but
quite distinct, aspects of the human condition. Confusion or misunderstandings can
sometimes occur when researchers have different definitions or conceptions of a
particular term that is being used. Intriguingly, Seshat has the potential to uncover
that the different dimensions of these aspects of societies may have evolved
somewhat independently. For example, structural and reproductive inequality
may have seen reductions since the Axial Age, but economic inequality may have
been unaffected or even increased.
One strength of our approach is that we make explicit our assumptions about
how we define and measure these variables. Different researchers may have
different ideas about how these phenomena should be coded, or may have different
interpretations about the information available in the historical and archaeological
records. These different viewpoints can be readily incorporated in our scientific
approach by examining them to see if these different assumptions fundamentally
affect the conclusions we can draw from our investigations. For example, where
different researchers propose different values for a particular variable in a
particular society we can run a series of analyses to see if the main finding is robust
to these alternative values.

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Seshat Wiki: an Initial Implementation of the Databank

During 2012, our group developed a flexible architecture for this databank. The
databank has two distinct aspects: textual/descriptive sections (including
references), and coded data. The text-based sections describe what is known about
a particular variable based on previous scholarship. These ‘thick’ descriptions
provide important context about the variables being addressed, the sources of
information used, and make explicit how a decision was made on a particular
coding (for a more extended discussion of these issues, see Hoyer and Manning,
forthcoming). The coded data are based on the narrative sections, and enable this
information to be translated into a form that is amenable to statistical analysis. The
databank therefore combines the best features of traditional humanistic and
scientific approaches to investigating the past. The databank is implemented as a
‘Wiki’ (i.e., a web-based application that enables an open access, collaborative
project), which allows text on different variables to be easily added and updated.
The information from the Wiki is ‘scraped’ automatically and translated into
formats (e.g., tab-delimited files) that can be analyzed in statistical software
packages.
Although the Wiki implementation was a suitable approach during the initial
phases of the databank’s development, it is rapidly becoming a limiting factor due
to the growth of data that is added daily. As of the writing of this paper, we have
developed a plan to port the Wiki data into an RDF-based triplestore (Schreiber
and Raimond 2014). This type of graph-based representation is particularly
suitable for capturing rich, structured knowledge about complex entities and
multi-faceted relationships between them. In contrast with a traditional SQL-based
relational database, graph-based knowledge models, specified in OWL (the web
ontology language) or RDFS (resource description framework schema), facilitate
constant evolution of schema. In addition to the underlying triplestore, we will use
cutting-edge techniques developed by Kevin Feeney, Rob Brennan, and colleagues
to further facilitate data collection, curation and use, as described in the next
section.

Seshat Databank: Overarching Plan

The design goal is to maximize the research community’s collective intelligence
while minimizing overheads. Ultimately, we aim to create a system with easy-to-
use software tools that support the following roles and features:
Seshat Contributors. Non-technical users, such as historians and archaeologists,
can easily add data to the system and update existing data (e.g., using graphical

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input tools). Ultimately, we would like to make this open and robust enough so that
any web user can suggest updates to the datasets in an easy way (crowd-sourcing).
Seshat Editors. Data administrators can moderate, correct, and manage the data
in the system over time. The downside to harvesting data from a broad community
is that inaccuracies, disagreements, user errors, and malicious use must be
managed or else the dataset will degrade in quality over time.
Seshat Data Architects. Knowledge engineers can make changes to the schema
(data structures) over time and manage transitions between versions of the
schema without breaking databank integrity (maintaining and assuring the
accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life-cycle).
Seshat Analysts. Statisticians and mathematical modelers will prepare and
analyze time series data to investigate big questions about human societies.
Seshat Readers. General end-users can browse, search, download, and view
arbitrary slices of the data in a very wide range of attractive and helpful ways.
Seshat Administrators. Technical administrators can manage the data curation
and publication platform or servers to deal with changes in data, schemata,
collection tools and publication formats or tools (e.g., visualizations) over time in a
scalable fashion.
Seshat will be managed through the Dacura Linked Data platform
(http://dacura.scss.tcd.ie), developed at Trinity College Dublin. Dacura provides
support for dataset capturing, curation, and publication (Feeney 2014).
Nonetheless, when dealing with a complex and multi-faceted domain, the
development of formal schema and tools to facilitate convenient and accurate data
input requires considerable experimental and developmental effort. The nature of
the Seshat data is such that there are many opportunities to take advantage of maps
and timelines to capture the spatial and temporal aspects of the data. However,
these tasks are labor-intensive, so the development of the databank system will
proceed incrementally. The Seshat databank will be progressively migrated from
the current Wiki to the Dacura Linked Data platform in a number of phases, each
designed to add functionality to the system, progressively increasing its ability to
gather and present high quality structured data, without interrupting researchers’
ability to add new data. The following text describes the initial phases in the
migration.

Phase 1: Data Validation and Extraction, Seshat Data Web

The first phase of development will retain the current Wiki as the authoritative
source of data and the data-input tool. It will develop a RDF schema (or knowledge
model), which will be used to validate the data in the Wiki and prepare the ground
for future migration. This involves two parallel development tasks.

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First, we must develop the first version of an RDF-based Seshat Knowledge

Model, including definition of vocabularies and formal specification of
relationships between concepts. This will be an incremental process, starting with
the core concepts and working outwards to the details.
Second, we must develop two tools which (a) extract the structured, natural
language data from the wiki into a time series data dump amenable to statistical
data analysis and (b) formally validate the data in the wiki to eliminate coding
errors and remove ambiguity. These two tools enable us to perform analysis on the
data; to track the size and growth of the databank; to detect inconsistencies in the
data set; to copy the data from the wiki to a complementary graph-based database
(RDF triplestore); and to generate data problem reports for the Seshat
Contributors and Editors. The data problem reports will enable Editors or
Contributors to correct and improve the data in the wiki and the Seshat Code Book.
In addition to these tasks, we will use the existing facilities of the Dacura
platform to perform more extensive (semantic) data quality checks, using the RDF
schema to ensure that any updated data conforms to the knowledge model, and
publish the RDF dataset as a simple Linked Data site. This system will operate in
parallel to the existing Wiki so current work practices and data ownership can
continue. Figure 4 illustrates the publication pipeline of the Seshat system, as it
exists in the first phase.
Progress. We have completed most of the development of this phase. Including (1)
a first draft of the Seshat RDF Knowledge Model (Figure 2 shows the high-level
meta-model) and (F2) a working software system, which extracts the variable data
from the Seshat Wiki and analyzes it against the Code Book, producing reports
where there are non-compliant data entries and generating TSV-formatted
extractions of the data for analysis.
These outputs are currently operational in the Seshat data collection system.
This allowed us to create a Wiki-based Data Validation tool that is integrated into
each wiki page, allowing coders (Seshat Contributors) to check their work for
consistency as they enter data. In addition, our Data Export tool allows Seshat
Editors to view the data as it is being compiled and Seshat Analysts to begin to work
on modeling problems.
Further Phases. The goal is to progressively replace the Wiki input format with
graphical user interface tools which use the schema definition to maintain data
quality over time and to ease the task of creating and updating complex instances
of data types. We will progressively add enhancements to the publishing
capabilities—developing richer interfaces for browsing, visualizing, analyzing, and
interlinking the Seshat databank with external sources of knowledge. Once this

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process is sufficiently advanced, we will switch the authoritative source of data

from the wiki to the triplestore, retaining the Wiki as a publishing outlet.

The Future of Seshat

As described in the previous section, at the time of writing this paper, the main
focus of the Seshat Databank development team is on coding the NGAs in the World
Sample-30 for a set of variables defined by the current list of Big Questions. The
variable classes include social complexity, warfare, rituals, agriculture and
resources, institutions and equity, and economics and well-being (see the current
version of the Code Book in the Supplementary Online Materials for a detailed
description of the variables). Simultaneously, we are making a transition from the
current Wiki to the Seshat triplestore managed through the Dacura Linked Data
platform. Accomplishing these near-term goals will provide us with a solid basis
from which to progressively expand the Databank in multiple mutually supportive
directions.

Figure 4. Seshat Phase 1 publishing pipeline architecture.

The two most important dimensions of Seshat expansion in the medium term
are (1) adding more variables and (2) increasing the databank coverage to a
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progressively greater fraction of the world’s surface. As far as new variables are
concerned, it would be extremely interesting to add data on the evolution of
technology and on linguistic evolution. These variable classes are interesting in
themselves because each is associated with a developed body of theory (for recent
reviews, see Boyd et al. 2013, Gray et al. 2013), and they can be important
explanans variables in helping us explain other aspects of the cultural evolution of
human societies. Another exciting area of research is gene-culture coevolution,
which has, so far, been primarily investigated with theoretical models. There is
little reason to doubt that the ongoing methodological advances in ancient DNA
will soon enable us to test these theories with data (Callaway 2015).
Increasing the thematic and geographic coverage, however, will come at a cost.
Projecting from the current rate of data accumulation, we estimate that by 2017,
the size of the Seshat databank will approach—or exceed—the symbolic threshold
of one million ‘facts.’ 3 But even this enormous amount of data will be restricted in
its thematic and, especially, geographic coverage. It is already clear that extending
the geographic coverage to the whole world is not feasible using our current data
collection approach.
One direction that we are currently exploring is crowd sourcing—developing
software that will support recruitment of volunteers to assist in manual data
processing. More radically, we will need to transition to a technology that
automates the harvesting of the required variable values from open web-sources,
including, but not limited to, the repositories of scholarly publications. Thus, we
intend to explore the possibility of harvesting data from such source as JSTOR’s
archive of academic publications.
While harvesting data from unstructured massive repositories, such as JSTOR,
is a future direction of Seshat development, there are also numerous sources of
structured data available, which contain data relevant to the Seshat Databank. The
Linked Data technology, on which the Dacura platform is based, facilitates
interlinking the Seshat data with other datasets and supports applications and
analysis that integrates Seshat data with other sources, as long as they also use the
RDF technology. Given the richness of the Seshat databank and the expanding web
of data, there will be many important insights to be gained by interlinking data that
go beyond the scope of the Seshat big questions themselves.
Another very important direction in which to develop is improved data quality.
Once the databank has been migrated to the triplestore, each data point in it will
have searchable, structured provenance records associated with it, which will
detail the precise source of each variable value. This will go beyond logging
information on data changes and will connect data values with the source of

3We are using ‘facts’ here to refer to individual RDF triples. A typical Seshat ‘data point,’
depending on its informational complexity (such as temporal extent, presence of
uncertainty or disagreement, etc.), is encoded with 3–10 triples.
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academic research or primary materials. For example, we can have multiple

alternative estimates of the population of some polity at a certain point in time: one
from a contemporary source, such as a tax survey; others based on opinions of
different experts, which may strongly disagree with one another; and yet another
based on the estimate of the maximum carrying capacity given the contemporary
agricultural technology. With this information, we will be able to link values with
evidence, supporting informed debate or a process for resolving disagreements or
ambiguities.
Finally, the value of the Databank will be enhanced by developing support for
applying different interpretative frameworks to the underlying data, supporting
multiple different views of history, perhaps associated with a particular expert,
research team, or research methodology. For example, an estimate of the carrying
capacity, which feeds into the estimated population, itself depends on many
assumptions of the models used to calculate it. The impact of using alternative
assumptions in the models or theories, leading to different interpretations, can
then be quickly analyzed and evaluated. The next logical step is to implement a
catalog of simulation models, which each can generate predictions about the data
based on different mechanisms. As the background data become more accurate
and plentiful, simulations could then be re-run by any Seshat user to discover how
such improved or alternative data affect model predictions. This novel capability
will lead to a more rapid process of theory evaluation, and to quantification of the
limits for the application of a given theory.
Despite the current excitement associated with the digital humanities,
historians and social scientists have not really begun to utilize the full power of
what modern Information Technology can deliver. We believe that the new IT
capabilities will eventually (and in the not-too-distant future) transform the field
of historical social sciences into what the sociologist Randall Collins termed rapid-
discovery science (Collins 1994, although it should be noted that Collins himself was
sceptical that such transformation is likely). It is our hope that Seshat: the Global
History Databank will be one of the key mechanisms by which such a
transformation will be effected.

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation grant to the Evolution
Institute, entitled "Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism,"
a Tricoastal Foundation grant to the Evolution Institute, entitled "The Deep Roots
of the Modern World: The Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political
Stability," an ESRC Large Grant to the University of Oxford, entitled "Ritual,
Community, and Conflict" (REF RES-060-25-0085), and a grant from the European
Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No
644055 [ALIGNED, www.aligned-project.eu]). We gratefully acknowledge the
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contributions of our team of research assistants, post-doctoral researchers,

consultants, and experts. Additionally, we have received invaluable assistance
from our collaborators. Please see the Seshat website for a comprehensive list of
private donors, partners, experts, and consultants and their respective areas of
expertise.

References
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