Democracy Didn’t Begin Solely In Greece. Ancient Societies Around the World Practiced It Too, Study Finds

Ancient Societies In Mexico And South Asia Were Democratic Long Before Europe Claimed To Invent It

Most Americans learned in school that democracy was born in ancient Athens, nurtured briefly by Rome, then lost for more than a thousand years before Renaissance Europe revived it. A new study says that story is seriously incomplete.

Researchers examining data from 31 ancient societies across three continents found that collective forms of governance, where power is distributed and citizens have real say in decisions, appeared independently in Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley, and Indigenous North America, parallel to, and in some cases possibly predating, the classical Mediterranean world. Published in Science Advances, the work draws on archaeological and written evidence to produce one of the most systematic global comparisons of ancient governance ever attempted.

As political historian Anne Applebaum has written, in a work cited by the researchers, no nation is fated to autocracy and no nation is guaranteed democracy. Political systems change. With democratic institutions under pressure around the world today, the researchers argue that understanding where collective governance actually came from, and what conditions allow it to survive, matters more than the historical record has typically been given credit for.

Ancient Democratic Governance Appeared Around the World, Not Only in Greece

Among the societies identified as relatively more collectively governed in the study were the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, in North America; the ancient Mesoamerican cities of Teotihuacan and Monte Albán in present-day Mexico; Tlaxcallan, the city-state that famously resisted the Aztec Empire; and Mohenjo-daro, the Indus Valley city in what is now Pakistan. Several maintained broadly collective governance for long periods. Monte Albán endured as a relatively collectively governed polity for more than a millennium.

None of this depended on Athens. Collective governance arose independently across cultures, climates, and continents. Comparing the Americas, Asia, and Europe, researchers found no meaningful difference in average governance scores. No region was consistently more democratic or more autocratic. Among Mesoamerican societies alone, scores spanned the full range from highly collective to deeply autocratic, showing that geography has little bearing on how a society organizes power.

How Scientists Scored Democratic Governance in Ancient Societies

Without ballots or constitutions to examine, the team developed a scoring system built around physical evidence: building layouts, burial practices, public spaces, and written inscriptions. Each society was rated on two dimensions, how concentrated power was and how much ordinary citizens could participate in governance, then assigned a numerical autocracy index score. Societies scoring high on both concentration and exclusion ranked toward autocracy; those scoring low ranked toward collective governance.

Physical clues carry real weight in this kind of analysis. Was the main decision-making space a private palace or an open council hall? Were town plazas wide and accessible, or raised and restricted? Were public inscriptions focused on rulers or on shared beliefs? For four sites, including Rome and the Cambodian capital Angkor, the team tracked governance scores across multiple time periods, showing how the same society could shift between more and less collective arrangements over centuries.

Democracy’s Roots Run Deeper Than the Western Narrative Admits

For more than 150 years, social scientists assumed bigger societies were naturally more autocratic. Large populations, the thinking went, required strong centralized authority. More people meant more hierarchy and more concentrated power.

Data from across the sample told a different story. Population size had only a very weak relationship with autocracy scores. How long a society had been farming, long considered a driver of political hierarchy, showed virtually no correlation with governance style.

How a government paid its bills was the strongest predictor in the data. Governments relying on external resources, mine revenues, control of trade routes, slave labor, or war plunder, tended strongly toward autocracy. When leaders could fund themselves without taxing or drafting ordinary citizens, they had little incentive to share power, and citizens had little leverage to demand it.

Governments depending on internal resources, taxes on local farmers and merchants, market fees, and labor contributions from the general population, tended toward more collective governance. Rulers who needed revenue from their own people had to negotiate with them, which gave citizens bargaining power and gave leaders reason to stay responsive. Researchers are careful to note these are correlations, not proof that one directly caused the other, but the association across dozens of societies and thousands of years was consistent.

Bureaucratic structure followed a similar pattern. Autocratic governments tended to fill offices based on loyalty, kinship, or personal allegiance to the ruler. Collectively governed societies tended to select officials by merit and hold them to defined duties under established rules. When Rome shifted from republic to empire, elected officeholders were progressively replaced by hereditary aristocrats loyal to the emperor, and public administrative buildings were absorbed into the imperial household.

Ritual practice also aligned with governance style. In autocratic societies, public ceremonies tended to be spectacles centered on the ruler. According to the paper, at the ancient Chinese capital of Anyang, rulers were interred during spectacular ritual events that were often accompanied by human sacrifices and the inclusion of horses, chariots, and large quantities of elaborate goods in a deep subsurface tomb. In collectively governed cities like Teotihuacan and Mohenjo-daro, public rituals were participatory, built around shared cultural practices and cosmic order. Higher autocracy scores also consistently aligned with wider gaps between rich and poor, measured through house size differences and disparities in burial goods.

What the study adds up to is a challenge to a long-standing assumption: that collective governance was a Western invention, and that it tends to emerge naturally as societies grow more sophisticated. Neither holds up. Ancient cities in Mexico, South Asia, and North America organized themselves along broadly collective lines without any connection to Athens or Rome, and larger, older societies were no more likely to be democratic than smaller, younger ones. Democracy, or something close to it, turns out to be a recurring feature of human political life across history, not a gift from one civilization to the world.

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