Patrick Kirch concludes: "By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had entered a new realm."138 It appears that nearly all other archaic states experienced the same qualitative change to the extreme forms of inequality that Kirch describes for the Hawaiian kingdoms. Based on his survey of seven early civilizations,
( Peter Turchin )
[ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years ]
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