The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Equipped with saddles and stirrups, they were a formative force against standing bowmen. Introduced by the Muslim kingdom of Kanem about 1250, the combination of large horses and Islam created one kingdom after another in sub-Saharan West Africa. But the large horses had to be imported. An armed heavy cavalry was expensive, requiring heavy expropriation of settled farming populations. Since farmers could easily migrate to new lands, cavalries turned to raiding and capturing them, making them slaves and forcing them to farm for the king or his cavalry aristocracy.

  The kingdoms of West Africa between 1250 and 1450 (Kanem, Bornu, Mali, and Songhai) were based on the simultaneous growth of cavalry and slaves. Slaves paid for horses, and cavalries could capture the slaves. By 1450, a large warhorse cost between 9 and 14 slaves. It is estimated that 4,000 to 7,000 slaves per year were taken up the trans-Sahara routes (including that from Darfur in East Africa) to be exchanged for horses. Even if many died during the crossing, the value of each survivor increased five to eight times from below the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast.4

  Stateless communities still thrived where horses could not go: in the tropical rain forests and beyond—along the coasts of West Africa. Lineage societies functioned with the aid of various strategies to maintain their autonomy: clan loyalties, councils of elders, initiation “secret societies,” “age sets” of male contemporaries, systems of mediation by outsiders, ritualized war games to resolve conflicts, and communal “palaver” discussions to mediate internal disputes. Cities and ministates added more complex social institutions in places like Benin. Some were commercial centers, others the center of rituals or artistic expression. The city of Ife, on the forest border, produced glass beads, terracotta, and brass statues. Similar brass sculptures were later produced by court metalworkers in the kingdom of Benin.

  East and South Africa

  Most political institutions in West Africa could also be found in East and South Africa. There were empires, kingdoms, city-states, and stateless societies. But geography and the timing of major population movements like the Bantu migration accounted for certain differences.

  Cattle and Colonization . Perhaps the most important difference was the greater role of herders in East Africa. Bantu agriculturalists added animals to their mixed economy in central and East Africa. Cattle were introduced into East Africa by the more indigenous Nilotic-Sudanic speakers. Cattle herders like the Fulani people were common in West Africa too, but they generally remained north of the more tropical areas of agriculturalists. By contrast, the land of East Africa is slashed by dramatic north-south rifts of mountains and deep valleys, enabling herders to introduce cattle much farther south on high plains overlooking the valleys of agriculturalists.

  As a consequence, East African economies were more frequently pastoral and mixed and rarely (as was the case in West Africa) purely agricultural. In tropical regions of East Africa, the mix of herding and farming peoples in lands formerly occupied by hunter-gatherers created sharply different, often antagonistic economies side by side. Sometimes this castelike separation had dramatic consequences, as in Rwanda and Burundi, where Tutsi herders, Hutu agriculturalists, and Twa hunter-gatherers were incorporated into single states.

  In southern Africa, cattle raising took precedence over farming. Herders can form states, but their need for extensive pastureland generally means lower population densities and fewer villages or cities. In southern Africa, cattle raising tended to form chiefdoms rather than states or stateless societies. The household was the principal unit. Households gathered their round dwellings around an enclosed central cattle pen, a design less likely to lead to towns and cities than the West African shape of rectangular houses on grids of streets. These chiefdoms did sometimes coalesce into states, however, often with central cities studded with royal palaces.

  Great Zimbabwe . The largest of these states in southern Africa between 1000 and 1450 was Great Zimbabwe, which transformed itself from a local chiefdom in the twelfth century to the leading power of southern Africa in the fourteenth. Even today, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are impressive. The city dominates various levels of pasture from a high plateau. Building materials were stone blocks tightly placed together without mortar. The city, which contains the large royal palace, is surrounded by a huge wall that had an iron gate. In its heyday, the city probably numbered 15,000 to 18,000 people, many living inside the high walls:

  It was a city closely integrated with its surrounding countryside. Narrow pathways, dusty in the dry season and muddy in the wet, would have led in intricate ways among the crowded houses. Wandering dogs nobody much cared for, chickens scavenging in the walkways between the houses, and goats tethered at doorways would have been among the sights and background noisemakers of city life. In the later afternoon, hundreds of cooking fires would have added to the mélange of strong smells that filled the air and, if the air was still, would have created something much like smog.5

  The fortunes of Great Zimbabwe were built on more than cattle raising and agriculture. Its chiefs learned to control and tax trade just as they had traditionally demanded cattle. First ivory and beads but eventually gold from farther up the Limpopo River valley made Great Zimbabwe the largest city of southern Africa and an empire of the Shona people. Zimbabwe traded the gold farther north, ultimately to the city of Kilwa and the Swahili cities on the coast of the Indian Ocean, where inner Africa connected to the Afro-Eurasian network.

  Inner Africa and the World

  During the first millions of years of our species, inner Africa was the world. Only in the past few thousand years did inner Africa take an independent but parallel path, and in the past few hundred years our paths have merged again. Yet, even as inner Africa followed a course separate from that of Afro-Eurasia, its fortunes were connected to developments in the larger world. The Bantu migration began in an area of West Africa that had grown steeply after the desiccation of the Sahara. West Africans later connected with the people north of the Sahara who introduced domesticated camels and horses and brought salt and Mediterranean products across the desert. Later still, West Africa met bearers of the Islamic faith and founded states and empires rich in horses and gold. But by then, Bantuspeaking peoples had colonized much of the rest of Africa, bringing their crops and iron east and south. In the process, they encountered and incorporated other peoples: cattle herders of the central sub-Saharan region, farmers of Malayan and Indonesian crops like bananas and yams in East Africa, and city peoples along the East African coast who traded in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

  Still, the Bantu travelers, the hunter-gatherers of tropical rain forests, and the cattle herders of South Africa created their own networks, some independent and others attached to those of the larger world. They created their own systems of social and political organization, all without writing6 and most without the apparatus of state administration and control. The village-based societies, hunter-gatherers, and pastoral peoples of inner Africa invented a range of voluntary, lineage- and family-based, age- and gender-related institutions that offered an alternative model to the state-based societies that were increasingly shaping the world—even in outer Africa.

  The World of the Americas

  The variety of the Americas before 1450 was almost as great as the variety of Africa. As in Africa, there were hunter-gatherers, part-time and full-time agriculturalists, villages, cities, states, and empires. The great empires are best known; we have already discussed some of them in the chapter on city and state formation.

  States and Empires of Middle America

  The great empires of the early 1400s were the Aztec Empire of central Mexico and the Inca Empire of Peru. But these were relatively recent arrivals at locations in which previous states and empires had ruled for centuries.

  Before the Aztecs . The Aztecs came down from northern Mexico only about a century earlier to the large lake on the high central Mexican plateau. Viewed as crude newcomers, they established themselves as successors to the Toltecs, who,
in turn, claimed descent from the classical rulers of nearby Teotihua-can. From 400 to 600, Teotihuacan had dominated central Mexico politically and culturally. Its city by the same name was not only the largest in the Americas but also one of the largest cities in the world at the time, numbering possibly 200,000 inhabitants. The Teotihuaca-nos passed on a tradition of pyramid building that stretched back to the first Mexican states, the Zapotecs and the Olmecs.

  At the time of Teotihuacan, the Mayan culture encompassed a huge area that stretched from the northern Yucatan Peninsula of eastern Mexico deep into Central America. The Mayans had no single city approaching the population of Teotihuacan, but they had many cities, some with as many as tens of thousands of inhabitants. The remains of Mayan cities like Tikal, Uxmal, Palenque, and Chichen Itza suggest a layout like the cities of central Mexico. They have central open spaces flanked by pyramids and other public buildings. But the Mayan cities do not seem to extend beyond such ceremonial centers. Most Mayan cities were carved out of dense jungle, which has since returned to strangle the ruins, so it is difficult, without further archaeological work, to determine what may lie under the surrounding jungle. Central Mexican cities like Teo-tihuacan and the Zapotec’s Monte Alban, by contrast, lie in open areas, and the excavated central plazas and pyramids are surrounded by mounds that are beginning to reveal the many homes of city inhabitants. The absence of extensive residential areas around Mayan cities leads to the conclusion that they were, at least in their early stages, purely ceremonial: places for rulers and priests, an idea that also fits what we know about Mayan culture.

  Classical Mayan . Mayan writing was a colorful combination of pictures and syllable symbols that has only recently been deciphered. It reveals a culture in which priests played a major role in ensuring the proper balance of natural forces. Mayan cities contain astronomical observatories in which priests learned to predict solar and lunar eclipses and mark the changing seasons and the times for planting, burning, and harvesting. The Mayans used a 365-day calendar and figured the length of the year to within 17 seconds of modern calculations. They invented the concept of zero independently of the classical mathematicians of India, and they used a 20-base computation system (like our 10-base system). They built high step pyramids in stone, decorated with vivid sculptures of gods, jaguars, and serpents, and they painted on bark and stone walls in dazzling color. All this they accomplished with stone tools before metals came to Middle America around 900.

  Recently, another side to Mayan life has come to light. Mayan rulers and priests practiced a ritualistic bloodletting in the belief that it would ensure the necessary rain for the crops. When, for instance, King Pacal died in 683, his son and successor, Chan Bahlum, presided at funeral services by cutting three slits into his penis with a sharp obsidian knife and inserting bark paper into the wounds so that the blood would flow copiously. His younger brother and other family members followed suit.

  Mayan culture was otherwise not very different from that of others in Mexico. They shared many of the same gods; Tlaloc, the rain god, and Quetzacoatl, the feathered serpent, were particularly important. In addition to pyramid temples, all of them had ball courts where they played a ball game similar to that played by the Taino and ancestral to modern soccer. Competing teams could hit the small ball made of local rubber with anything but their hands. The game must have served some kind of dispute resolution function because the losers sometimes were executed, their heads displayed on spikes near the court. The idea that humans had to shed blood or give their lives to appease the gods was common in Mexican societies, though the Aztecs raised it to a new level.

  A Theoretical Interlude: Priests and Soldiers . A modern world historian has an interesting theory that might help explain the bloodletting and human sacrifice that we frequently find in ancient civilizations. Johan Goudsblom7 notes that many ancient agricultural civilizations give enormous power over life and death to priests. In earliest Mesopotamian urban society, for instance, priests supervised the planting and distribution of food as part of the feeding of the gods. Agriculture-based cities were highly vulnerable creations, Goudsblom argues: first vulnerable to the forces of nature and then, if successful, vulnerable to other peoples. Therefore, it should not surprise us to find cases in which priests are given inordinate powers to ensure the land is properly prepared for planting and that all the necessary rituals of farming are carried out to the letter. This would be especially important where nature was unpredictable, like the floods of the Euphrates. The people of Middle America faced the unpredictability of the rains. Rains that came too early or too late or that were too light or too heavy could disastrously limit the crops.

  As city societies became larger, their dependence on reliable agriculture became greater. Priests who bled themselves and urged others to do the same might have been responding to what they perceived to be a very delicate balance between the efforts of humans and nature. In fact, the decline of Mayan society after 900 might be an indicator of how vulnerable it was. From around 800 to 1000, a number of American societies suffered from the lack of rainfall and collapsed. Mayan society was, in fact, able to reorganize along the northern Yucatan after the collapse of cities in the south, but it was never as extensive as in the earlier classical era. Similarly, Teotihuacan collapsed around 800, as did Monte Alban (and, we shall see, one of the great South American states).

  Goudsblom points out that agriculture-based urban civilizations also rely heavily on soldiers but that the role of soldiers often eclipses that of priests at a later stage in their history. He suggests that this occurred after the society had some success in overcoming the threats of nature, achieved a certain level of abundance in crops and populations, and therefore confronted another level of vulnerability—the threat of outside forces, such as brigands, popular uprisings, or other societies. This would account for the rise of military regimes after priestly states in the ancient Near East. It might also explain the rise of soldiers over priests in the Toltec and Aztec states after the decline of Mayan society and Teotihuacan.

  Toltecs and Aztecs . When the Aztecs modeled themselves on the Toltecs, they chose a military rather than a cultural power. The Toltec city Tula displayed symbols of a conquest state: friezes of soldiers, skulls on a rack, roaming jaguars, and eagles eating hearts. These symbols were replicated in Chichen Itza after the Toltec conquest of that Mayan city and in the Aztec capital. Toltec Tula created a large empire based on trade as well as conquest. It was the Toltec who introduced metals and metalworking to Mexico (in copper, silver, and gold), probably from their expeditions into Central America (where metals probably arrived from Peru). Although these were not durable metals, capable of being molded into tools or weapons, they encouraged trade and the making of fine art and jewelry. Toltec state traders also founded settlements as far north as modern Arizona, bringing the Me-soamerican ball game to Phoenix (where a 900-year-old rubber ball was recently discovered) though evidently without the element of human sacrifice.

  The Toltec told a story of their origins in Tula that later became an important part of Aztec lore. They told of a cultural hero or king called Topilzin Quetzalcoatl, who was a peacemaker forced out of the country (promising to return) by another powerful person, Tezcatli-poca, who became a sort of god of war and sacrifice. This conflict between Quetzalcoatl’s peaceful, nurturing force and that of the god of war, conquest, bloodletting, and human sacrifice surfaced in Aztec society and was resolved in favor of the Aztec version of the god of war, Huitzilopochtli.

  The followers of Huitzilopochtli believed that their god of war was also responsible for bringing the sun up every morning. To accomplish this monumental task, the god required regular sacrifices of human blood. This doctrine fueled a centuries-long Aztec expansion throughout central Mexico. The Aztec state of the fifteenth century was first and foremost dependent on the regular collection of prisoners at the ceremonial pyramids, most notably the Major Temple in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City), where their hearts w
ere cut out and offered to Huitzilopochtli.

  It was one of the great coincidences of history that, when the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1519 at the end of a long religious crusade, they met an American empire driven by its own ideas of sacred warfare. The quick Spanish conquest of Mexico owed much to European “guns, germs, and steel,”8 but the Aztecs also had many enemies in Mexico who joined the conquistadores in their march on Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs ran an empire structured in ways that made rebellion by Mexican peoples almost inevitable. It was an empire of military conquest that attempted little by way of cultural or bureaucratic integration (in contrast to the Inca, as we will see). The tentacles that stretched from Tenochtitlan to the other cities of Mexico were mainly military. It was an empire on the cheap, run as was its capital by a military aristocracy that left much of the economy to markets and merchants. Longdistance merchants (pocheteca) were the only other important social class at home. They also created the only alternate arteries throughout the empire along which they traded and spied for the military rulers.

  The conquered peoples of Mexico and parts of what is today Central America were treated as military dependencies each required by treaty to supply stipulated amounts of raw and finished products as well as young men to be sacrificed. Without any stake in or affiliation with an Aztec society that literally bled them dry, many threw in their lot with foreign invaders who ended up taking over everything.