Empire
Page 11
Like its short-lived Mongol contemporary on the other side of the globe, the Aztec Empire was also riven with contradictions quite as gruesome as any Mongol atrocity. An epitome of Aztec art can be seen in the eerily beautiful yet chilling life-sized skulls, which were carved out of single pieces of transparent quartz. The diaphanous interior markings of the crystal inside the glass-like skulls were believed to contain the secrets of the early history and final destiny of humanity.
Several of these skulls belonging to prestigious national collections, such as the superb skull in the British Museum, have been demonstrated to be skilful centuries-old fakes. Yet such is their power, which surely mimics the originals from which they were copied, that the authorities have for the most part taken the exceptional step of leaving them on display.
Less chillingly skilled, yet equally original, is the cartoonlike art produced by the Aztecs, drawn on stretched deer-skin or dried sisal leaves (agave fibre). These recorded scenes from Aztec history have a similar compelling veracity, though entirely different style, to those of the Bayeux Tapestry, which recorded the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Though unlike the Bayeux Tapestry, these have been assembled together as codices, or books, such as the Codex Mendoza.
As this name suggests, the original Aztec artefacts were only made into books following the Spanish conquest. Originally these drawings appeared on long, carefully folded-up sheets of material, and would have told their stories in similar fashion to the lengths of material that make up the Bayeux Tapestry. Included in the Aztec codices are such wonders as a man watching a comet pass through the heavens, and numerous examples of the exotic costumes and headdresses worn on ceremonial occasions, frequently adorned with brightly coloured feathers from local macaws and birds of paradise.
By contrasty, many of the drawings depict scenes of unspeakable horror, at least to Western eyes. Cartoons depict men gathered together enjoying parties of ritual cannibalism; a still-living human, gazing up as his recently cut out heart is held aloft gushing blood; examples of ‘auto-sacrifice’; involving ‘synchronised blood-letting’; where the participants pierced their bodies with cactus spines.
Aztec ritual human sacrifice, cutting out the heart of the living victim.
Even in daily life, simple beauty often coexisted alongside excruciating barbarity. This was a society whose currency was chocolate, yet to pay the gods for keeping them alive, their ritual mass slaughters unleashed waves of blood that spilled down the steps of their towering pyramids.
What is it about quasi-pyramidal structures and their apparent ubiquity in early societies? The Aztec pyramids were not like the classic Egyptian pyramids, yet they bore an uncanny resemblance to Babylonian ziggurats. The Chinese also built pyramidal structures – the mound that housed the Emperor Qin’s terracotta army bears a certain resemblance to one, which may have been more striking when it was first erected. As do the ancient Buddhist stupas of India, the earliest of which date from the fourth century BC. And just a few decades ago, some Chinese archaeologists came across a 5,000-year-old stepped pyramid in the remote mountains of Mongolia.
Babylon, Egypt, Mexico, China, India, now Mongolia – and perhaps even more examples waiting to be discovered in other remote parts of the globe . . . is the building of pyramids somehow a universal stage of human development? In many of the above cases, there can have been no possible contact between the people who built these pyramids. Does this mean that there is something in our common history that prompts civilisations at a certain stage in their development to expend the enormous effort required to erect such massive objects? Is this shape some kind of archetype, which lurks at a subconscious level of the human mind?
The twentieth-century Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, who based his understanding of the human mind upon the existence of a collective unconscious containing such archetypes, would certainly have us believe so. Yet there exists no rigid scientific method to test such a theory. So what is the significance of this shape in humanity’s disparate history – a shape whose appearance is often separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years?
The earliest Mesopotamian stepped ziggurats date from around 3000 BC. The earliest Egyptian pyramids, which were similarly stepped, date from around 2750 BC, and may well have been copied from their Mesopotamian counterparts. The recently discovered and similarly stepped pyramid found in Mongolia seems to have been contemporary with these distant artefacts. Yet despite any resemblance, it certainly could not have been copied from its counterparts in the Fertile Crescent. The earliest Mesoamerican pyramids are thought to date from anything up to 1000 BC. But there could have been no external influence here either. So is all this part of a human trait, or mere coincidence?
Try looking at this question from another point of view. What are the shapes of other great isolated ancient or prehistoric structures? Do they bear any resemblance to pyramids, or even to each other? Just a brief list of these would seem to dispel such psychological speculation. The large Stone Faces (Moai) of Easter Island, the Walls of Zimbabwe, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Timbuktu – each of these isolated monuments is unique in construction and form, and had its subtle differences of purpose, too. The pyramid, it seems, is not an archetype – more part of a primitive inclination, only one of many instincts that prompted early human society to build monuments greater than the individual human being.
Although we do not always know the precise purpose of these structures, we can surmise that they somehow represented their society, or its leader, or were vital in the performance of some sacred function for the people who erected them – possibly reminding them of a near-forgotten mythical past, or the mountainous landscape of their original homeland.
Which brings us to the question of who the Aztecs were, and where they came from. The Aztecs spoke a group of closely related languages known as Nahuatal. During the time of the Aztec Empire, this was a largely verbal language. The only permanent records were what we now call the codices, which consisted largely of drawings. However, there is evidence that they also contained writing in picto-graphs and ideograms, as well as a surprisingly sophisticated number system.
Unfortunately, the codices that have come down to us are for the most part corrupted European versions, which included various commentaries. The unadulterated originals were seemingly all destroyed by the Christian invaders, who regarded them as nothing more than pagan texts. Even so, the remaining neo-codices do contain a number of scenes depicting divination, Aztec ceremonies, and ritual calendars, as well as representations of the gods. However, the most reliable and uncorrupted of the several versions of the Aztec origin myth existed only in the purely verbal Nahuatal form.
According to this, at the time of the creation there was a god called Ometecuhtli, which translates as ‘twice a deity’. He existed in male and female form and produced four sons. Two of these – Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli – were given the task of bringing into existence other lesser gods with specific duties, as well as creating the earth and all its people. With the birth of these early four gods, there began a series of historical cycles of creation and destruction related to the sun. During the Aztec Empire and its preceding history there had been four suns, each of which had been destroyed by a catastrophic event. Nahuatal text records: ‘We now live in the time of the fifth sun.’
The people of this era worshipped Quetzalcoatl, the god of light and air, who had rescued humanity after the fourth sun had been destroyed by Tezcatlipoca, god of judgement, darkness and sorcery. In order to appease Tezcatlipoca, and prevent him inflicting another catastrophe, he had to be paid off, nourished with the blood of human sacrifice. If this was not sufficient, he would turn the sun black, the world would be rent asunder in a violent earthquake, and Tzitzimitl, the goddess of the stars, would slay all of humanity.
Just as intriguing is the actual origin of the Aztec people. This leads us back to the very first of our species and their initial migrations out of Africa, a narrative that unearths some
surprising facts, as well as a number of unanswered questions about this period of human prehistory. The first hominids are known to have begun emigrating from Africa around two million years ago. The earliest of these was Homo erectus, who was followed over many millennia by other archaic hominids such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, both sub-species of the genus Homo. All of these species are now extinct; although, as we shall see, elements of them live on in an unexpected fashion.
Our own particular species, Homo sapiens, evolved in East Africa over 200,000 years ago as a separate member of the hominid family. Its one apparent advantage was the size of its cranial capacity. Where Neanderthals and others had a capacity of just under 1,000 cc, Homo sapiens initially had a capacity of around 1,300 cc, though most of this was unused. Almost certainly on account of failing crops (climate change) and consequent territorial competition, groups of Homo sapiens left their native East Africa some 75,000 years ago, following in the footsteps of their hominid predecessors.
These groups of Homo sapiens, which seem to have consisted of as few as 1,000 individuals, are known to have left Africa by two routes – via the Sinai peninsula, as well as across the southern Red Sea Strait to Yemen. As these small groups began to multiply and spread out through Asia and later Europe, they are known to have interbred with the hominid subspecies that preceded them. Consequently, the modern humans who inhabit Asia and Europe still contain around 1 to 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA.
It seems that little interbreeding took place in Africa itself, as the modern African populations who did not migrate contain practically no Neanderthal DNA, and are thus much purer Homo sapiens, a fact that gives the lie to much spurious racialist theory. In fact, one consequence of Homo sapiens interbreeding with his cousin hominids who had preceded him into more northerly latitudes, which had regular cold seasons, was that it enabled him to adapt to those barren periods of the year when nothing grew.
It took Homo sapiens around 20,000 years to spread east as far as China and Siberia. Here the picture becomes blurred. In the twentieth century, evidence of a 750,000-year-old Homo erectus, named Peking Man, was discovered in China. The twentieth-century German anthropologist, Franz Weidenreich, ‘considered Peking Man as a human ancestor and especially an ancestor of the Chinese people’. To this day, the Chinese are taught in school textbooks that they are evolved directly from Peking Man, and not from the group of Homo sapiens who evolved in East Africa.
This claim remains controversial and widely disputed amongst many non-Chinese anthropologists. Whether or not this has any more veracity than the Chinese claim to have discovered Australia remains beside the point. Here again we have the notion of ‘ethos’ entering history. Concepts such as those implicit in the Peking Man theory have similarities reaching back through all of world history. This is a classic claim of racial ‘difference’ (frequently implying superiority) such as has preceded, time and again, a justification for empire. As we shall see, this remains as true in the so-called ‘post-imperial’ period as it was during the long era of empires that preceded it.
To which we now return. As we have seen, the rulers of empire are not only the victors, but see themselves as a superior people – either racially, and/or culturally. An early example of the latter was Alexander the Great’s attempt to ‘conquer the world’. His declared aim was to impose on his conquered lands the advanced and superior culture of Ancient Greece (of which he had only a tentative grasp, having paid little attention during his youth to the lessons he was given by his private tutor, Aristotle).
A similar belief inspired the Soviet Union’s imposition of communism on the nations of Eastern Europe: capitalism was a spent force, the future lay in the Leninist-Marxist approach. The elephant in the room here, of course, is Hitler’s drive to impose on the world ‘a thousand year Reicht an enterprise which falls into both categories of supposed superiority, i.e. racial and cultural.
Some 25,000 years ago, when the first bands of paleolithic hunter-gatherers reached the far north-eastern corner of Siberia, they were inspired by no such inflated ideas of empire. Survival was their main concern. By now the earth was in the grip of the Last Ice Age. With so much water locked in solid ice, the sea levels were some 400 feet lower than they are today, leaving the Beringa Land Bridge joining north-eastern Siberia to north-west Alaska above sea level.27
It is thought that at least three separate waves of hunter-gatherers crossed the Beringa Land Bridge, causing these original inhabitants of the Americas to spread with surprising rapidity through the north and then to the south of the American landmass. What is believed to be the origins of a 21,000-year-old camp fire have been discovered in Mexico. By 8000 BC, the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico had begun to cultivate maize (corn), whose plentiful crops and easy storage would play an integral role in Mesoamerican development, both cultural and agricultural.
This nourishing and easily cultivated grain aided the growth of a series of civilisations, which grew up in Mesoamerica from sometime around 2600 BC. Amongst the most important of these were the early Olmecs (c.1400-400 BC) .These inhabited the tropical terrain and hinterland of southern Mexico on the border of the Caribbean. Today these people are best remembered for their huge, stone carved heads, which appear to be a realistic representation of a people with square heads, broad noses and wide lips, with fleshy but intimidating features.
This close resemblance to native African features led some early historians to speculate that the Olmecs must have arrived directly across the Atlantic from Africa, but DNA testing has disproved this theory. The Olmecs developed a hieroglyphic script, believed to be the earliest in Mesoamerica, as well as an advanced mathematics used to calculate calendars and the movement of the stars. On the other hand, they also introduced the ritual practice of blood-letting described earlier – self-stabbing to produce blood and appease the gods.
Around the half century prior to 350 BC, the Olmecs went into a sudden decline. Entire cities were abandoned, and the population diminished rapidly. Historians have tended to put this down to a series of violent eruptions that took place in the region around this period. However, many elements of Olmec civilisation would pass on to successive Mesoamerican civilisations. With hindsight, we can see that the Olmecs played a formative role in the evolution of the Aztecs.
The other dominant civilisation in the region were the Maya, who co-existed with the Olmecs, flourishing between 1800 BC and AD 250. The Mayan territory lay to the south-east of the Olmecs, straddling the wide swathe of the Mesoamerican peninsula from Yucatan to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. Inevitably there was conflict between these two neighbouring territories. Apart from the exotic feathered decorations of the combatants, these battles were primitive affairs, fought in Stone-Age style with spears, stone axes and hurled stones. Warriors were bedecked in coloured feathers and their leaders would wear feathered headgear. Not until around 380 BC were more modern weapons introduced. (In fact, these were secrets stolen from the Tenochtitlan, inhabitants of a powerful city state that occupied central Mexico.)
This advanced technology consisted of slings, spears tipped with sharp obsidian blades, as well as wooden shields, helmets made of strong hide, and upper armour tailored from animal skins. Even with the introduction of such new weapons, the battles remained somewhat primitive. The secrets of making iron, and constructing a wheel, let alone a chariot, remained unknown. This meant that battles were fought with little strategy in mind. Armies would form in line opposite one another, and then charge.Thus, according to the twentieth-century South African anthropologist, David Webster, such battles soon descended into anarchy, with much ‘thrusting, stabbing, and crushing’.
Almost all men in Mayan society were trained as warriors, and were esteemed according to the ferocity with which they fought. This was the only means by which Mayans could rise in social status. However, the object in battle was not to kill your opponent, but to capture him alive. Prisoners thus taken would be used as human sacrifices in the ce
remonies conducted to appease the gods.
The only exception to this warrior class were the priests. It was believed that they could communicate directly with the gods, or act as an intermediary between a citizen and his chosen god. More significantly, the Mayans developed their own language, which was more sophisticated than Olmec. Unlike previous Mesoamerican languages, which consisted of pictographs (standardised drawings resembling objects), the Mayans developed a script consisting of ideograms (symbols standing for ideas). This crossed the threshold from being a pictorial recording system to a sophisticated language, capable of conveying a much more subtle expression of thought.
Like the Olmecs, the Mayans also built impressive pyramids. However, the Mayan pyramids tend to be shorter, with a larger area at the summit. Experts have concluded that this was to enable the construction of a temple, or perhaps to accommodate larger human sacrifices. The Mayans also developed their own distinctive method of stone carving, for both statues and friezes. Investigations of the movements of the stars and the change of the seasons led the priests to develop their own mathematical system. As distinct from our present decimal system (based on ten numbers), the Mayan system was vigesimal, i.e. based on twenty numbers (counting both fingers and toes).
The Mayans also invented, and inserted into their calculations, a symbol for zero. This was an astonishing feat. Zero was, and remains, a particularly slippery concept to grasp. It was something that represented nothing.28 The Mayan symbol for zero was an empty tortoise shell. According to the contemporary US historian, John Justeson: ‘This may have been the earliest known occurrence of the idea of an explicit zero worldwide.’ A number of experts contest this, some claiming the Babylonians as the first, others the Indians. Interestingly, this symbol did not reach China until the fourth century AD, while it was not until the early 1100s that it passed to Europe from Arabic culture.