BrewerDP. Pdf

 

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separate discussion). The editors of the Lectures on Jurisprudence note thirteen references to 

Homer in their index.  In Smith’s words, ‘we have the best account which is to be had of the 

ancient state of Greece from [Thucidides] and from Homer’ (LJ(A) iv.65).  He  evidently 

thought that Homer’s  Iliad was based on real events, selected and presented poetically; 

‘Homer  accordingly has recorded the most remarkable war that his countrymen had been 

engaged in before those days’ (LRBL ii.45). Smith  also made occasional reference to Greek 

legends (as we would see them), so, for example, Theseus, the  legendary founder of Athens, 

plays a role in  his discussion of the beginnings of Greek cities. Whatever one thinks of  this 

sort of  evidence, the main point is that Smith had no evidence about periods before  Homeric 

Greece.  

Smith did not give chronological dates for early periods, so we do not know quite what date 

he would have assigned to the Homeric period. I will occasionally  use some very 

approximate dates to  summarize  Smith’s implicit dating and the dates covered by his 

evidence, as compared to what is now known about the chronology of events.  The dates 

themselves are not important – what matters is that Smith’s evidence cannot possibly cover 

some of the key stages in his ‘conjectural’ history. 

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Smith made little use of  the Bible as a source for early 

history

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 although the Old Testament was a genuinely old document which claimed to give a 

historical account of even earlier times, and one which was well known  to Smith and his 

students. This must have been a deliberate decision, though it would not be safe to deduce 

anything about Smith’s religious views from it. The simplest explanation is that he was a very 

cautious man, and  if he had said anything, explicit or even implicit, to support or reject the 

biblical account, it could have led to trouble. 

Not only did Smith avoid referring directly to the Bible, he said remarkably little about the 

early history of the whole region from Mesopotamia to Egypt.

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 It is now  thought that this 

area saw the first agriculture, the domestication of key food plants and animals and, later, the 

first cities, and the first writing. Smith could not have known  the results of modern 

archaeology, but even in the eighteenth century it was recognized that Egyptian civilization, 

say, was very old. In a fragment on the division of labour attributed to Smith, he remarked 

that ‘Egypt, of all the countries on the coast of the Mediterranean seems to have been the first 

in which either agriculture or manufactures were cultivated or improved to any considerable 

degree’  (printed in  LJ p.  586) because the Nile provided opportunities for water transport. 

                                                 

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 There is an example of a rather unpleasant story from Genesis, used to argue that tribes or nations in early 

times were small (LJ(A) iv.14) and a passing remark that ‘Abraham, Lot, and the other patriarchs were like little 

petty princes’ (LJ(B) 20). Not surprisingly in a course on jurisprudence, there are also a few biblical citations on 

points of law. 

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 A (probably mythical) pharaoh called Sesostris is mentioned once in each year’s lectures (LJ(A) iii.128, LJ(B) 

54), but not linked to the four stages. 

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Apart from this isolated remark, preserved by chance,  one  could  get the impression  from 

Smith that  agriculture, and all that followed, started in Greece,

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 perhaps because he was 

primarily interested in tracing the history of Europe but surely also because of his ingrained 

caution in dealing with anything which might embroil him in religious disputes.  

It may be worth noting that  there was nothing in the available evidence to prevent Smith, or 

any of his contemporaries, from accepting a biblical chronology, even Bishop Ussher’s date 

of 4004 BC for the creation. That Smith chose to be silent does not mean that he had any idea 

of the geological time scales which we now take for granted. It is quite likely that he believed 

in some sort of fairly recent creation, if not the specific account of creation given in the Bible. 

Before Darwin, and before modern archaeology and geology, there was little else on offer. 

The age of hunters  

The first of Smith’ s stages was the age of hunters. We now  know  that humans  evolved  as 

hunter-gatherers  over a period of millions of years, that anatomically modern  humans 

emerged  some 150,000–200,000 years, and  that they remained  hunter- gatherers until about 

10,000 years ago. Smith and his contemporaries did not know that. The claim that hunting 

was the first stage from which all human societies had developed was entirely ‘conjectural’, 

in Stewart’s sense.  That we  now regard this particular conjecture as correct does not make it 

any the less conjectural.  

Without any usable archaeological information, Smith was limited to written sources, but  

hunter-gatherer societies are illiterate. He could therefore only look to reports from literate 

outsiders. In practice, that meant reports by European observers of hunter-gatherers in the 

Americas and, to a lesser extent, in southern Africa and elsewhere. This sort of  evidence, 

however, demonstrated the existence of a hunting  type of society, but not a hunting  stage, as 

the first in a sequence of successive stages. In particular, Smith and his contemporaries had 

no reliable evidence that any more advanced society had started out from a hunting stage, still 

less any evidence of a process of change from hunting to a later stage (pastoral, in Smith’s 

framework).

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As far as the evidence available to the eighteenth century was concerned, it could have been 

the case that some societies were, and remained, hunters while other societies never went 

through a hunting stage. In Smith’s introductory story, people marooned on an island have no 

                                                 

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 The same fragment also remarks that agriculture and manufactures ‘seem to have been of very great antiquity’ 

in China and Bengal (LJ 586), almost his only reference to the early history of these areas. 

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 This is not quite true. For example, Smith cited Ossian to show that the Scots and Picts had been ‘much in the 

same state as the Americans’ in the early middle ages (LJ(A) iv.101), though he made no more of it. The poems 

of Ossian are now known to have been an eighteenth century forgery. 

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