We sank back into peaceful daydreams about the unsolved mysteries of antiquity. Norman had been brought up on the doctrine that America was,a world apart until his own ancestors came over from
Europe, bringing knowledge and culture with them. The politicians believed that, and most of the ordinary textbooks were written by isolationists. Aztecs, Mayas and Incas had only primitive savages from Alaska and Siberia in their family tree. Europe had received its culture from Asia Minor and Africa via Crete and other islands in the narrow Mediterranean. But America had received nothing across the broad Atlantic until Columbus. Primitive vessels could sail along coasts and reefs, they said, but not on the wide ocean. Now Norman wanted to hear the diffusionists' arguments. Were not the American Indian civilizations in Mexico and Peru completely different from the Afro-Asiatic cultures of the inner Mediterranean that had later laid the foundations of European civilization?
Basically not so terribly different, Santiago and I were able to explain. There are enough dissimilarities for those who are specialists and dwell on details. But if an unspecialized layman, who does not delve into the thickness of potsherds or the motives on the cotton textiles, tried to acquaint himself with the broader common features he would probably be quite amazed.
At a rate unknown to mankind elsewhere in the world, a series of jungle and desert tribes in the central parts of America managed to make up the Old World's cultural lead in the course of a few centuries before Christ, while all the rest of the native population of America, in the more favorable climatic zones north and south of the tropical belt, persisted with the primitive tribal communities of their ancestors until the Europeans arrived. The exact century when the tropical tribes in Mexico and Peru received their record-breaking urge and capacity to take this great leap forward from a primitive way of life to full civilization is known to no one living today. Wliat is certain is that the earliest American civilizations made their real breakthrough before the Christian era and yet after the civilizations of Asia Minor had reached their peak and were busy sending sailors out beyond Gibraltar, with everything carried on board that was needed to establish their important colonies along the Atlantic coast of Africa.
What was the essence of the sudden evolution that began just about simultaneously in the jungle thickets of the Atlantic coast of Mexico and among the sand dunes on the opposite coast of Peru? The sun was suddenly worshiped as a god. It did not matter that, in one place, it was rainy and shady among the dense growths of the
jungle, while in the other the sun burned down unhindered on dry sand: in both Mexico and Peru the aboriginal Indians suddenly began to build step pyramids to the sun. They built on the same principles, each under the command of an omnipotent priest-king claiming divinity and descent from the sun rather than from his own local tribe. Brother and sister marriage was practiced in the priest-king's family, just as in Egypt, to keep the divine blood as pure as possible. The priest-king put an end to the old tribal dance round the totem pole, to the sacrifices to invisible spirits and other traditional supernatural. Hereafter it was the solar disc that was to be studied and worshiped. Both on the Mexican Gulf and on the Peruvian desert coast the Indians stopped making family huts of branches and leaves. In both places they began to manufacture adobe brick, using exactly the same procedure as had been used for thousands of years in the Mediterranean area, from Mesopotamia to Morocco. A special type of earth was mixed vdth straw and water and compressed in small rectangular wooden forms whereupon the contents were turned out and baked in the sun into adobe bricks of uniform shape and size. While the neighboring Indians continued to build the wigwams, leaf huts and plank houses of their forefathers, the sun-worshipers, from Mexico to Peru, moved into elegant adobe buildings constructed exactly as in the Old World, often on several floors and with gutters from the roof, and placed side by side to create organized urban communities with streets, sewers and aqueducts.
But although the invention or introduction of adobe bricks enabled these particular tribes from Mexico to Peru to build solar temples whose ruins still stand in jungle and desert like veritable mountains, they also began to attack the solid rock and hew and joint together gigantic blocks, with a skill and specialized technique in masonry to be found nowhere in the world, except in that same restricted area from the inner Mediterranean and Egypt to the City of the Sun in Morocco. The Olmecs on the Gulf of Mexico, blessed with abundant timber, did not content themselves with the manufacture of adobe bricks, but also suddenly started making long journeys across swamps and jungle to find solid rock suitable for quarrying. Almost a thousand years before Christ, they were transporting stone blocks of up to twenty-five tons each over sixty miles through jungle and swamp to temple sites near the Gulf, where they had
already manufactured enough adobe bricks to build a sun-oriented step pyramid 103 feet high. Who in Europe almost three thousand years ago had the idea and urge to erect buildings as high as ten-story houses? In Egypt the local custom of building adobe step pyramids to the sun was long dead when the Olmecs hit on the same idea. But in Asia Minor, the back-garden of Phoenicia, the sun was still worshiped from temples on top of stepped ziggurat pyramids, and it was that type, after all, and not the Giza-type of pyramids in Egypt, which shared all the fundamental features of the Olmec and pre-Inca temple pyramids in America.
Before the Christian era the jungle Indians on the Gulf of Mexico had also learned the secrets of a perfect calendar system. In record-breaking time they had assembled a body of astronomical knowledge that had taken several millennia of study in the Old World. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians, living in open plains and deserts, had the whole starry sky revolving openly above them. The Phoenicians harvested the fruit of this ancient cultural heritage, which enabled them to navigate out of sight of any land. How could the jungle Indians on the coast of Mexico have caught up with them and won the race, living as they did under the dense foliage of the rain forest where visibility was virtually reduced to the range of their own ax handles? Yet these early Indians had a more accurate calendar year than the Spaniards who came and "discovered" them. Even our own Gregorian calendar is not as accurate as the one used by the Maya Indians on the Gulf of Mexico before Columbus. They arrived at an astronomical year of 365.2420 days, which is only one day short in every 5000 years, while our modem calendar is based on a year of 365.2425 days, which is a day and a half too much in every 5000 years. That sort of knowledge was neither quickly nor easily worked out. The Maya estimate of the length of the year was thus 8.64 seconds closer to the truth than our modem calendar. Their earlier neighbors, who entombed their sun king in the dripping stone pyramid we had visited in Palenque, left an inscription stating that 81 months made 2392 days, giving them a month of 29.53086 days, which deviates by only 24 seconds from the true length of the month.
The Mayas had acquired the basis of all their astronomical knowledge from the still older Olmecs down on the coast, who even
before the Christian era had been carving precise dates on their beautiful stone monuments. Europe had no chronology at that time. Zero in the Christian calendar is January 1 of the year representing the birth of Christ. Zero in the Mohammedan calendar is the year when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina, or a.d. 622 in our calendar. The Buddhist calendar begins with the birth of Buddha, that is about the year 563 B.C. Zero in the ancient Maya calendar would have been August 12, 3113 b.c. in our own time reckoning. What decided this extraordinarily precise starting date? No one knows. Some believe that the Indians snatched this date out of the air, as somewhere to begin their calendar. Others think they may have worked back to some specific astronomical conjunction occurring long before civilization began to flourish in America. In Egypt the first dynasty of the Pharaohs began between 3200 and 3100 b.c; that is remarkably concurrent with the beginning of the Maya calendar, but as far as we know there was no civilization on the American side of the ocean as early as that. If the jungle Indians came to Mexico at least 15,000 years
ago and waited until only a few centuries before our own era before suddenly producing the amazing Olmec civilization, why did they begin their own calendar at a date actually representing the very time when the earliest knovm civilizations elsewhere in the world began?—precisely when they started to flourish in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete?
How did the Mayas inherit a calendar that was accurate to a few seconds, if they began it at random at a time when their own ancestors were barbarians and when, as far as we know, the Olmecs themselves had not begun their astronomical observations in America. We have no answer. We only know that the Maya calendar began at 4 Ahau 2 Cumhu, that is August 12, 3113 b.c. We also know that the lowland Maya and their Mexican kinsmen, the Aztecs in the highlands, had both written and oral texts stating that civilization came to Mexico when a white, bearded man who claimed descent from the sun landed on the Gulf of Mexico with a large party of sages, astronomers, architects, priests and musicians. The Mayas called him Kukulkan, the Aztecs Quetzalcoatl; both names mean "Plumed Serpent." We do not know who invented this extraordinary name. A plumed or winged serpent, often of enormous size, is painted on
some of the Pharaohs' tombs in Egypt as well, and on a great many of the Egyptian papyrus manuscripts. A mixture of bird and snake is a divine symbol on both sides of the Atlantic. Birds of prey, snakes and felines were the three special symbols for the personalization of the sun and the sun king in Mesopotamia, Eg}'pt, Mexico and Peru. These were the countries in which the sun king's headdress and other emblems were ornamented with the heads and often whole figures of these three particular animals. No less important in Mesopotamia and Egypt were the birdmen, who in symbolic art surround the sun king and the sun-god. They occur again in Mexico, and in superabundance in Peru, where, just as in Egypt, they are shown as men with beaked bird heads, often helping the sun king on his voyages aboard his crescent-shaped reed boat. From Peru the birdmen reached Easter Island, where they are also depicted with reed boats. But it is not these symbolic, imaginative figures that are credited with bringing civilization to tropical America. This honor is accorded by Mayas, Aztecs and Incas to perfectly normal men. They differ from most Indians only in that they had mustaches, beards and white skins. They did not come on wdngs, but walking through the forest with cloak, staff and sandals, and they taught the natives to write, build, weave, and worship the sun as the supreme deity. They instituted regular schools with the sacred history of the nation as a principal topic. The earliest American historytellers follow them from their first landing on the Gulf of Mexico up to the Aztec highlands, down to the Mayan jungle peninsula, and on through the tropical forest, southward across Central America. The Indians throughout the vast Inca empire, from Ecuador to Peru and Bolivia, tell a remarkably consistent story: civilization was brought to them by white and bearded men who arrived on reed boats. Under the leadership of the sun king, Con-Tici-Viracocha. They first settled on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca. Later they sailed away from there on a whole fleet of reed boats, to land on the south shore and build the sun pyramid, the megalithic walls, and all the monoliths in human form that can still be seen among the remnants of the ruined city of Tiahuanaco. Hostilities with warlike tribes finally drove these first purveyors of culture north by way of Cuzco to the port of Manta, which lies just where the equator crosses Ecuador. Here they altered
course for the west and vanished across the Pacific, hke "foam on the water," hence the nickname Viracocha, "Sea-foam," which was later given also to the Spanish voyagers and all other white men.
We do not need to believe that there is any truth behind these traditions, even though they are as detailed as they are consistent, but in that case it is a still more remarkable cultural parallel that beardless Indians with raven-black hair decided to carve, paint and describe men with beards, fair skins and blond hair, such as we find on the tombs in Egypt and in historical illustrations both from Morocco and the Canary Islands, We believe in the mastery of masonry and astronomy amgng Mexican jungle Indians because the ruins cannot be explained away, but we reject their historic traditions, partly because they involve a religion alien to us, and partly because we only believe in the written word. That is, in the word written by Europeans. We forget that the ancient Mexican civilizations had writing. They wrote on paper, wood, clay and stone. And we forget that they illustrated their hieroglyphic accounts with realistic images. The Olmecs, who were erecting monuments with engraved dates before Christ, also pushed themselves to quite inhuman extremes in order to leave for posterity huge stone representations of two widely disparate racial types.
Although their portraits are amazingly realistic in every detail, they do not portray any surviving Indian type. One type is markedly Negroid, with a round face, thick distended lips and a flat, broad, short nose. This type is popularly referred to as "Baby-Face." The other has a well-defined, sharp profile, with a strong aquiline nose, small, thin-lipped mouth and often a mustache and goatee or flowing full beard. The archaeologists have jokingly nicknamed this type "Uncle Sam." "Uncle Sam" is generally portrayed with a majestic headdress, full-length cloak, belt and sandals. This important type, strongly Semitic in appearance and often carrying a wanderer's staff, is illustrated from the Olmec area southward as far as the legends about the white men go. Modern religious sects have often cited this in support of their belief in the "lost tribes of Israel" or the holy "Book of Mormon." A beautiful stone sculpture of the culture-bringer Con-Tici-Virachocha north of Lake Titicaca in Peru was, in fact, confused by the arriving Spaniards with St. Bartholomew, and a monastic order was establish in his honor until the mistake was dis-
covered and the old statue of the culture-bringer, with his ten-inch stone beard, was smashed to pieces.
The "Uncle Sam" type of Olmec is depicted as a peaceful traveler. The Negroid type of Olmec, on the other hand, appears warlike and primitive, often portrayed in grotesque dances, hunchbacked and crooked, or in the form of a spherical stone head lying loose on the ground, and yet so big that it may weigh up to twenty-five tons. Who were "Uncle Sam" and his companion "Baby-Face"? Which of them was the Olmec? Neither. "Olmec" is a name we have coined because we have no idea who either of them was.
The Olmecs could write. Both Aztecs and Mayas learned writing from them, even if they chose to write in quite different systems of hieroglyphs, so that one Mexican people could not understand another. It is easy to learn to write, but not to invent writing. The art is to discover that words and sounds can be converted into inaudible symbols which can be preserved. Having learned that this is possible, it is a simple matter to think of new signs, letters, runes, cuneiform characters or hieroglyphs. In the Mediterranean area one culture acquired the invention of writing from another. Did the Olmecs invent the art of writing all by themselves on the jungle coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Isolationists believe so, arguing that the Olmec symbols do not resemble those of Egypt or Sumer. But why should we expect to find any Old World symbols preserved unaltered in Mexico when, for instance, the Egyptians and Phoenicians, who had such an intimate cultural contact, chose to use mutually unintelligible scripts? And what about Sumer? Its cuneiform script is utterly different from the hieroglyphics of Egypt, yet we know that these two civilizations were in intimate contact with each other for thousands of years.
The invention of paper can hardly be explained as a natural consequence of inventing writing. Yet the original population of Mexico also manufactured genuine paper to write on. Not of wood pulp, as we do, but using the same recipe as the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians used for papyrus manufacture. They used reeds, hibiscus bark, and other fibrous plants, which they beat and soaked and cleansed of floating cellular tissue before hammering the wet shreds together with special clubs in several layers crisscross manner. The art of producing real paper by this method is so complicated that the
modern Papyrus Institute in Cairo experimented for several years before Hassan Ragab recently succeeded in duplicating the technique of ancient papyrus
manufacture. Mexican Indians, on the other hand, had learned this art to perfection before the Spaniards came, and, what is more, like the ancient Phoenicians, they were busy producing books. Their books, which the Spaniards called codex, did not have cut pages as in Europe, but folded together so that the whole book could be pulled out in one long, broad strip like ancient papyrus rolls. The text was written in hieroglyphs and richly illustrated with colored line drawings, as in the Egyptian papyrus rolls. Among other records these books contained the story of the bearded men, in text and illustrations.
While thousands of American Indian tribes to the north and south were living in the Stone Age until the Europeans came, their jungle and desert kinsmen along a consecutive belt from Mexico to Peru began, like Mediterranean voyagers, to look with the experienced eye of the metalworker for mines where they could obtain gold, silver, copper and tin. They even alloyed copper and tin to forge themselves bronze tools, just as the ancient civilized people had done on the other side of the Atlantic. Jewelers all the way from Mexico via the Isthmus of Panama to Peru made filigree brooches, pins, rings and bells of gold and silver, often set with precious stones, and with a stupendous workmanship such as only the elite of the Old World masters could offer. This goldsmith's craft was, in fact, to cause their tragic fate, for their vast treasures of precious metals in Mexico, Central America and Peru were a far more powerful lure to the greedy conquistadors who followed in Columbus' wake than were the crude stone and bone products of the Indian tribes elsewhere in America. These were first collected by peaceful modern ethnologists.
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