7
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
4
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.
5
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.
4
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.
5
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.
8
Apart from this isolated remark, preserved by chance, one could get the impression from
Smith that agriculture, and all that followed, started in Greece,
6
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).
7
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
6
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.
7
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.