As much as I dig ontological psycho-historical speculation I find myself beginning to realize just how different we moderns are from the ancients. I fear that any resemblance between our own systems and those that existed several millennia ago would, like "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs", be purely coincidental.
It just so happened on this moist summer eve that as I stumbled upon this link I happened to be perusing Tagore's Sādhanā.
In "The Relation of the Individual to the Universe" he indeed speculates about what caused the ancient forest-dwellers to acquire wealth, build cities and become kings. After failing to become one with Nature, the ancient sadhus sought to emulate the wider Cosmos in a controllable microverse, in which they could achieve a limited all-consciousness.
Perhaps somewhat analogously to the way mathematicians in the 1930's, stymied by Gödel's proof that axiomatic formalism would always remain necessarily incomplete, created their own artificial oasis of finite and deterministic binary logic in the form of early computing.