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There are lots of theories about how the state emerged, but one that I find particularly satisfying is described in James Scott’s book “Against the Grain.”

We know that people in places like Mesopotamia were already living in urban settlements and experimenting with agriculture and writing thousands of years before the first state. The marshlands of southern Iraq were incredibly ecologically diverse and rich, and sustained dense populations of foragers who also toyed with agriculture, casually tossing handfuls of seeds in the rich mud left by the annual river floods and returning months later to leisurely gather the resulting grains.

These dense, food-rich, settled communities were neighbors to peoples who would occasionally raid and pillage these communities. They must have been inviting targets, having done the foragers’ work of hunting and gathering for them.

So what if, we can speculate, one of these raiding peoples decided that, rather than periodically attack, they would set themselves up on top of the settled communities? What if those first states, with their parasitic elites and walls and barracks and armies and wars and scribes who catalogued every bull and stand of wheat, were conquerors who integrated themselves as rulers of pre-existing urban communities?

This would certainly reflect a well-established pattern in human history, of warrior-barbarians conquering and then ruling over a subject population of farming food-producers.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Qing_dynasty