Poverty and inequality are widely spread across the globe today. This volume explores to what extent they already shaped early complex societies and how they might encourage social modelling beyond the elite. The contributions include quantitative and qualitative case-studies from ancient Egypt, Sudan, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China and Greece and an anthropological response from present day Africa. Contextual discussion is key for understanding how inequality played out in specific historical and social settings, cautioning against unifying narratives. The evidence for poverty is ambivalent. Different from today, early states seem to have seen poverty not as a problem that required solving, unless it affected political stability.