I like history and I recently noticed that across different pre-modern cultures there’s almost always seem to be at the most basic level always the 3 classes: an elite class, a warrior class and a clergy class. Why is that? Why not food-producers or something?
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Farmer class is by far the most common, accross all of history (unless, of course, you are the Mongols).
Also in many religions/cultures the three you listed aren’t distinct groups, so they only have 2/3 – in Islam for instance, clergy and elite can be the same person (the Caliph being the main example), while in Tengri tribes warrior and elite are the same thing, and in Japanese Buddhism warrior and clergy are the same thing.
Because warriors have physical power, clergy have spiritual power, and the elite have money. Also pre-modern history often had the warriors as hunters also.
Both the clergy and warrior class had something the other classes did not.
Opportunity to gain wealth and power.
Not every warrior or clergyman did actually make it big. But some could, and those could use that power to gain wealth, and wealth to gain power.
And those positions got transfered to their children (friends/allies)
So once you were in, you had good chances of staying in
You forgot farmers and artisans (including skilled trades). Farmers being the most populous, and therfore the most boring, so they don’t really “make” history, and are therefore largely left out. Skilled artisans are slightly better represented because they make the tools and such for the other 4 classes. An awesome sword would merit mention of the artisan in a warrior’s tale, for example. But, those 3 that you did mention largely show up because they were the most impactful, for good or ill.
The premise of your question is wrong. The warrior class and elite class were usually the same people (warrior-aristocrats), so the third class was usually made up of peasants, who made up the vast majority of the population (that is, at least 80% and sometimes more).
The Roman patricians and equites, Korean yangban, Japanese kuge or kazoku and samurai, European knights and noblemen, and Hindu Kshatriya were all part of the warrior-aristocrat class of their societies. One of the few exceptions to this was China where they had a scholar-bureaucrat class that effectively replaced the warrior-aristocrat class much earlier.
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