Late Taosi

Taosi was a highly stratified state in ancient China that was brought down around 2000 BCE by what the excavator He Nu calls a "state of anarchy." Rebels razed the city's walls, built houses in the elites' former neighborhoods, and buried their dead in the elites' former cemeteries. David Graeber and David Wengrow attribute this change to "the world's first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting." For two to three subsequent centuries, the society lasted as a stable and apparently egalitarian polity and even grew in size from 280 to 300 hectares.