possibility of making some use of the extra crops and hers acquired, either by marketing them or by feeding a political or perhaps an armed following.
It is highly probable that on analogies from other parts of the Middle East (Barth (1959) p. 89) the successful did in fact use retainers in this way. The odds against a high degree of success were great. No village is a power vacuum, and once a man's power began to grow, he would face rivals prepared to use violence. Only he himself personally would be able to hold his supporters together, so he would need vigour and good health over a fairly long period. Successful contacts with the leaders of other villages, and - more important - with merchants, officials and powerful people in the towns, would reinforce his control over his own village, and he might even expand his empire over other villages. A man with this degree of success would have several wives and many sons; he would need sons in order to get started and he would achieve more by his success.
No one son would inherit both the wealth and the unique position in the network of contacts and patronage that gave his father power. Of course, the sons of an eminent and wealthy father would start with advantages, and one lineage might be able to claim a number of successful men over the generations. But these would not form a continuous dynasty, but a haphazard series, interrupted by periods when men of other village lineages dominated or at least divided the village. Most villages appear to have contained at least two potentially powerful lineages of this type. A priori then, the possibility of employing labour and even retainers, if it introduced a greater social distance between the top of village society and the bottom, did not prevent a high rate of social mobility between households and lineages. In spite of complications and occasional conspicuous exceptions, the main features of the model seem to hold. As long as land was a free good, a man with a minimum of capital with which to start cultivating, good health and many sons could establish a high ranking position in village society, but without giving any one son more than a slight lead over his neighbours in the new race for wealth and power.
The maintenance of this situation depends on the population of any given village remaining small enough to allow more cultivable land than the village needs. I have no accurate and