Yes, it does seem like a fairly silly question, but moving houses and cities in frigging 2021 is still a big deal. Even with movers and packers who just wrap up your entire house and then you take a flight and your entire house reaches its destination a few days later, even with that, it's a nightmare. How did people do that in the ancient world? DID people move their houses and cities in the ancient world? Did this concept exist or was it the general idea that once you purchased a property/ were born into your parent's property, you lived in it, then inherited it, then passed it on to your children before you died?
Also, in really prehistoric civilisations like the Indus Valley, Sumerian, the Chinese Peiligang culture, or even the much earlier Aurignacian Culture, did the concept of property exist? I know that at that time, the concept of 'house' itself might have been a strangely evolving notion, but is there any evidence of house and land ownership in prehistoric civilisations?
Not a silly question at all, actually a very good one requiring a complicated answer. I can't take a proper stab at it right now but I can point you towards some reading on the topic. This series of blog posts is very good, summarizing some thick and hard-to-get tomes on related subjects:
http://hipcrimevocab.com/2017/02/18/labor-in-the-ancient-world-summary/
http://hipcrimevocab.com/2017/03/12/privatization-in-the-ancient-world-summary/
I think the author of those posts is on reddit, /u/thehipcrimevocab , might have some thoughts to contribute.
You might also check out "Ancient Land Law: Mesoptoamia, Egypt, Israel"
I've got a lot more material on this but it's all poorly organized and scattered around, I'll try to come up with something coherent later. I remember reading an article about the development of property purchase and sale laws in Mesopotamia, how at one point you could only sell the temporary use of land, and how some forms of property (including houses, inherited on a familial basis) were protected from purchase under some conditions, with the commercial real estate market being limited to shops and orchards/gardens, stuff like that, but the details escape me at the moment.
I can say that in the Ur III period of Sumerian history, all land and property was owned by the temples and the palace. The use of land was rented out to tenant-farmers on an usufruct basis by the king and temples, usually in exchange for a set number of days of corvee labor on state and institutional projects. A lot of administrative texts from the period are concerned with keeping track of who is allotted which land and how much labor they've done; resettlement and relocation was common, but land transfer documents were rare; the transfer of land from one private individual to another only became commonplace later, and seems to have started in the royal household and progressed "downwards" through the social hierarchy, with richer elites and eventually commoners gradually gaining more rights to transfer land for commercial purposes.
I believe the general narrative is that land management was typically organized under communal and usufruct principles in early states, and that the privatization of property took a long time to become prominent.
Thanks for the mention! I'll have to go back and reread those posts. That final paragraph was spot on and a great summary!
If I understand the original question, it concerns property ownership and how people handled the concept of changing residences in prehistory?
Well, hunter-gathers didn't have permanent residences, and their entire life was basically one long camping trip, so they didn't really own anything that they couldn't carry. People might move between different bands, but there was no concept of private property in our modern sense of the term. That's more than 95 percent of human history. Nomadic pastoralists are the same--highly mobile.
In a lot of food-producing societies, people don't live in individual houses but rather group dwellings such as the Neolithic longhouse. Property would not be owned by individuals but by extended family groups such as clans, lineages, etc. These were associated with the lands they occupied, so moving was generally not an option. A great description comes from Robert Henry Lowie in Primitive Society:
"It follows from the following that we cannot content ourselves with a blunt alternative: communism versus individualism. A people may be communisitic as regards one type of goods, yet recognize separate ownership with respect to other forms of property. Further, the communistic principle may hold not for the entire political unit of however high or low an order but only within the confines of a much smaller or differently constituted class of individuals, in which case there will indeed be collectivism but not communism in the proper sense of the term. These points must be kept in mind when surveying successively the primitive law of immovable and movable property, of immaterial wealth and of inheritance." Primitive Culture, p. 210
I quoted this in my Substack if you want to read more: https://hipcrime.substack.com/p/the-village-and-the-clan
As for more developed civilizations such as the European Middle Ages, people didn't own many items, and if they did they were as mobile as possible, as Witold Rybczynski describes in Home: A Short History of an Idea (pp. 26-27)
In the Middle Ages, people didn't so much live in their houses as camp in them. The nobility owned many residences, and traveled frequently. When they did so, they rolled up the tapestries, packed the chests, took apart the beds, and moved their household with them. This explains why so much medieval furniture is portable or demountable. The French and Italian words for furniture--mobiliers and mobilia--mean "the movables."
The town bourgeois were less mobile, but they too needed mobile furniture, although for a different reason. The medieval home was a public, not a private place. The hall was in constant use, for cooking, for eating, for entertaining guests, for transacting business, as well as nightly for sleeping. These different functions were accommodated by moving the furniture around as required. There was no "dining table" just a table which was used for preparing food, eating, counting money, and, in a pinch, for sleeping. Since the number of diners varied, the number of tables, and chairs, had to increase to accommodate them. At night, the tables were put away and the beds were brought out.
As a result, there was no attempt to form permanent arrangements. Paintings of medieval interiors reflect an improvisation in the haphazard placement of the furniture, which was simply put around the edges of the room when not in use. Except for the armchair, and later the bed, one has the impression that little importance was attached to the individual pieces of furniture; they were treated more as equipment than as prized personal possessions.
For most of human history, for the vast majority of people, you would live in the same place your entire life, outside of the upper classes like royalty. Recall that until the stream engine, animals were the only means of transport. Even then, until the automobile, personal mobility was practically nonexistent, and therefore, so was moving with more than the clothes on your back. In agrarian societies (including medieval Europe), most land and dwellings were not alienable, especially outside of cities, but were transferred by custom and tradition if at all. As the link below puts it, "Early farming societies had complex, overlapping, flexible, nonspatial, and at least partly collective land-tenure systems with a significant commons in the sense that individuals retained one or another kind of access rights to land for different purposes."
The definitive book on Primitive Property is called--Primitive Property!--by Emile Lavaleye (which I learned about from Michael Hudson). It's free online:
https://archive.org/details/primitiveproper01leslgoog/page/n6/mode/2up
And here's another book about the prehistory of private property: https://basicincome.org/news/2021/06/the-prehistory-of-private-property-chapter-by-chapter-summary/