I hate seeing "the religion of peace" bullshit here.

[rogerashton]

117. Elaborate?

Well, in a tributary society, a dominant group extracts tribute, in the form of produce, slaves, and (less often) money from the farming villages under its control, and usually exercises other sorts of privilege. In some Marxist languages this is also known as the slave stage of class society, although that is a bit of an oversimplification IMO. Instances are the Judean independent kingdom, the Persian and Hellenistic empires that influenced the development of Judaism, the Roman and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empires, and the Caliphates. Many of the appalling things we find in the Old Testament and Islamic Sunna and in the history of Christianity were simply the common conditions of life in those societies, and not the product of the religions themselves.