Graeber / Wengrow 319: "Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It's striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority."
we end up with an "assumption that 'democracy' was some sort of remarkable historical breakthrough, rather than a habit of self-governance that would have been available in any historical period" (580)