by Nigel Spivey
It was out of the question to pack up and leave such an archaeological sensation. Surviving on corned beef sandwiches, Kenyon’s team stayed on in Jericho to investigate more thoroughly, and found a further seven skulls similarly ‘reconstructed’. Each appeared to have been carefully detached from the rest of the body, and bore layers of clay once used to remodel facial features. Shells – sourced to the Red Sea – were again used for eyes, and traces of hair were also found, as if belonging to wigs that once crowned the cranium. Most significantly, all the skulls had been shaped to a smooth finish on the underside, suggesting that they were once intended to stand for display, perhaps on some shelf in an alcove; certainly above floor level.
At Jericho, therefore, it seems that certain dead persons had been ‘saved’ to abide with the living, their decorated skulls serving somewhat like old family photographs upon a mantelpiece.The supposition is that these reminders of the dead were created to serve as a focus for some form of ancestral veneration.The early agricultural settlers of Jericho, farming around a fertile oasis in the Jordan valley, occupied a tell (mound) in which one mudbrick house was built literally on top of another. Already, in this settled situation, the links between ancestors and claims upon property were being forged.The living therefore had a motive for cherishing the memory of the dead, and the dead were given special status beyond the grave.This practice of reverence for the dead from their descendants marks a crucial stage in the development of death’s representation: it means that to die is not to be deceased, but rather transformed – into an ancestor.
HONOURING THE ANCESTORS: THE CASE OF EASTER ISLAND
The geographic isolation of Easter Island within the Pacific Ocean, over 3700 kilometres (some 2220 miles) from the nearest major land mass (Chile), along with its relatively small extent – 166 square kilometres (64 square miles): one could walk across the island in a morning – makes it unusual as an example of any autonomous human society. On this volcanic outcrop, as it happened, the practice of ancestor worship had disastrous consequences. Easter Island offers, nonetheless, a classic case of how the ancestral dead can literally loom large in the visions of the living.
Probably first settled by Polynesian mariners in the fifth and sixth centuries, and known in Polynesian as Rapa Nui, the island did not feature on European maps before 1722, when a Dutch navigator called Jacob Roggeveen came across it on Easter Day and named it accordingly.What greeted Roggeveen was the sight for which Easter Island is now a tourist attraction – the slopes of a grassy coastline dominated by almost 400 huge and baleful heads of stone, tall as the houses in Roggeveen’s native Amsterdam (Fig. 123). The Dutchman witnessed islanders kindling fires before the effigies, and offering prayers at the platforms on which they stood.
The total number of these stone heads has since been counted at around 1000. Each platform (ahu in Polynesian) was constructed with a view to the sea, and extended up to 150 metres (495 feet) long; but the effigies (known as moai) were all originally positioned to face inland. From the many figures left unfinished in a central quarry – an old volcanic crater – it is clear that no metal tools, only basalt picks, were used to achieve a columnar torso-base and the features of a head.The largest of the statues, left unshifted in the quarry, is estimated to weigh around 270 tonnes. Once installed upon their platforms, some of the images were evidently given inlaid eyes fashioned from white coral and red scoria stone. A separate piece of red scoria, carved like a drum or pillbox, might be added to the head as a sort of topknot. Over time, as far as a chronology can be established, the statues appear to have ‘competed’ in terms of size and elaboration. Ultimately, they proved too large to move.
123 The colossal stone heads on Easter Island, c.1000–1500.
In fact, what brought about the end of this custom was not a shortage of stone, but a lack of timber on the island to supply the logistics of transport. Some modern commentators cite Easter Island as a tragic parable of human environmental mismanagement, a case of ‘paradise lost’, since the relentless cutting down of trees for scaffolding, rollers and rope eventually left the island population (an estimated 10,000 at its peak) with not only a barren, eroded terrain, but also no means of making houses for shelter and boats or dugout canoes for fishing.
So what motivated such a huge and finally calamitous expenditure of resources and effort? The excavation of certain ahu sites has yielded no evidence of burials below or near the platforms.The consensus is, however, that the moai served as headstones of a sort. None is quite like another: patterns on the torsos may reflect individualized tattoo marks or body-paintings, while the grouping of the figures might indicate some family or clan association.Wider Polynesian tradition tells that a chieftain’s umbilical cord was retained from his birth, and deposited at shrines such as these. If the Easter Island figures were intended as images of heroized or venerable ancestors, then their coastal situation may have had something to do with proprietorial access to marine resources along one particular stretch of shore; and their inland-facing aspect was aligned, perhaps, to a system of allocating land by strips to various family units.What is unquestionable about these statues is their visibility – their dominance of this small community’s insular parameters.The Pacific horizons beyond stayed clear, for all we know, over many centuries. On the island itself a population divided into some 17 clan-groups may have had no other form of claim upon workable land, except to erect prominent images of their forefathers upon the bases of cult worship and overt respect.
Already by the seventeenth century, the degradation of their environment was causing impoverishment, infighting and cannibalism among the Easter Islanders. Most of the moai were pushed over, it was said, for failing to provide the protection and bounty their presence guaranteed.Yet this fate does not detract from the original function of the statues: markers of the aggrandized dead, conspicuously on view to reassure onlookers from the community of the living.
Ancestral worship, as we have noted, is an essentially reassuring practice: it diminishes the terror of death by allowing the dead to live on through images. But what happens when the imagery of death and dying is used to the opposite effect – that is, to heighten and perpetuate the terror of mortality? To travel east from Easter Island to the pre-Hispanic cultures of South and Central America is to discover a stark answer to that question.
THE AZTECS: AN EMPIRE BUILT ON TERROR
The story of the Spanish conquest of lands to the north and south of Panama and its ‘peak of Darien’ is well known, but worth partial summary here.
In February 1519 a Spanish adventurer, Hernando Cortés, landed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. He had come from Cuba, one of the Caribbean islands lately claimed on behalf of the court of Spain, following the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Cortés arrived with around 500 men and 16 horses. He had come not merely to travel in these parts, but to stay – an intention signalled when he burnt his boats.The evangelical aspect of his mission was also made clear when he set about building a settlement on the coast and named it Veracruz, city of the ‘True Cross’. A priest was part of his retinue, as it had been assumed that the region’s indigenous populace would be godless heathens.
It was also assumed that this would be a land bereft of anything resembling civilization. So, as they made their way up on to the central Mexican plateau, Cortés and his compatriots were astonished to find not only the overgrown ruins of huge, stone-built structures, but eventually came across the busy urban centre of a great empire – a city called Tenochtitlan, set up in the middle of a lake.This was the capital of the people known as the Mexica, or Aztecs, ruled by one whose name was transcribed by the Spaniards as ‘Montezuma’.The city itself caused even more amazement. One of the men with Cortés, Bernal Diaz, later recalled how at first they wondered if they had not stepped into some enchanting dreamworld, with so many finely built towers appearing to rise out of the water.Then, as they entered Montezuma’s city, they were overawed by how opulent and well-ordered
it all seemed to be.The very palaces of Spain diminished by comparison.
But juxtaposed with this precise magnificence was something that caused these hardened soldiers profound disgust.The Aztecs were not godless: on the contrary, they had many deities, whose pyramid temples pricked the skyline.What shocked the visitors were the ceremonies performed at these temples, particularly the culminating act of human sacrifice. Lines of victims were led up to an altar at the summit, to be lain over a block and have their hearts hacked out by priests wielding long serrated knives.Warm hearts were offered triumphantly to the gods, while the bodies were tossed aside.The steps of the temples cascaded with human blood; the priests were blackened with it; the sacred precincts were filled with blood, and screams, and the stench of death. Just as the wonders of Tenochtitlan the city could scarcely be conveyed by words, the actualities of Aztec sacrifice were almost indescribably horrific.
Modern historians, perusing these gruesome eyewitness accounts by Bernal Diaz and others, have tended to suspect a measure of exaggeration. In the era of post-colonial regret, it has become academically fashionable to discredit Cortés as a predatory, double-dealing conquistador bent on robbing Montezuma first of his gold and then of his empire. Of course, Cortés would want to represent himself as a saviour, bringing light to the savage darkness of the jungle: he had to justify to both his contemporaries and posterity the destruction of a splendid city. One influential commentator (Stephen Greenblatt) draws attention to the ‘absolute cultural blockage’ whereby the Spanish deplored idolatry, violence and cannibalism among the Aztecs, while violently imposing a religion centred upon the image of a crucified figure who had instructed followers to drink of his blood and eat of his body.
Quoting Aztec oral sources, the Spanish alleged that at the dedication ceremony of the Templo Mayor (Great Temple), the apex of which can today be glimpsed in the historic centre of the conurbation that has succeeded Tenochtitlan – Mexico City – four squads of executioners had dispatched four processions of captive victims who stood in queues 3 kilometres (2 miles) long. Estimates of the death toll from this sacrificial spree, conducted in 1487, vary from 14,000 to over 80,000. But is any estimate credible? Why should we believe the Spanish – so prone to give a moral gloss to their extermination of Aztec culture?
There are some good reasons for suppressing doubt. In the first place, it is widely agreed that human sacrifice was an essential part not only of Aztec religion, but of other peoples in Central America and the Andes.A succession of ethnic groupings – including Olmec, Zapotec,Maya and Toltec in ancient Mexico, and Moche and Inca in Peru – are known or suspected to have practised human sacrifice. Direct evidence of the custom has come to light at Teotihuacan, the most monumental city of the entire region c.500 AD; while at one Moche site – Huaca de la Luna, near Trujillo on the Peruvian coast – archaeologists have uncovered not only numerous skeletons of victims interred at the base of a pyramid, but even the club once used to shatter their skulls – a club still sticky with blood.The macabre elaborations of Moche pottery are not quite, it seems, a potter’s fantasy (Fig. 124).
While the Aztecs were not inventors of this custom, they may well have taken it to a new extreme: for Aztec society was avowedly militaristic in its organization.Young warriors were obliged to prove their worth, not so much by killing enemies on the battlefield, as bringing them back alive – to be held prisoner until the religious calendar demanded a spectacle of death. Surviving illustrated manuscripts or ‘codices’ compiled by the Aztecs themselves explicitly show priests ripping out the hearts of such captives. It was evidently a matter of pride, not shame; mass murder conducted not in some swift and efficient way (like the guillotine of the French Revolution), or turned into an industrial process (like the Nazi death-camps), but staged as an exultant feat of human butchery.
In the end, we can never know the total numbers of those put to sacrifice by Aztec priests. But to survey what remains of Tenochtitlan is enough to comprehend what horrified Cortés and his men, and fired them with a righteous zeal to see the city fall.Whatever the realities of human sacrifice in Aztec religion, the embellishment of Tenochtitlan’s ceremonial centre is unnervingly direct in its allusion to the cult. Enclosure walls of altars around the Templo Mayor were decorated with façades of multiple skulls, carved from stone with a stucco finish (Fig. 125). Priests and deities alike were represented with sacrificial knives between their teeth; those knives, fashioned from obsidian, the glassy black volcanic stone, feature prominently in dedicatory offerings.The stone-carved reclining figure generically known as a chacmool holds a dish of suitable dimensions to receive a human head or heart.
The imagery of death and dismemberment is everywhere, albeit relying upon symbolic devices for its effect: for example, the jets of blood spurting from a decapitated body are represented by eager snakes. And a curious object frequently reappears, sometimes in the clutches of a god, or else as a stylized motif, looking somewhat like a piece of tropical fruit.The distinctive shape appears on a statue of Coatlicue, the snake-skirted earth goddess who gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war: along with severed hands, it makes a heavy necklace that ends in a death’s-head pendant (Fig. 126).The same shape may be seen in the clenched grip of the death’s-head figure at the centre of the so-called ‘Stone of the Sun’, once intended as a sacrificial altar in the sacred precincts of Tenochtitlan. It is not a fruit at all; it is the human heart.
124Decapitation scene on Moche pottery.
125A façade of skulls on the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, 15th century.
126Stone statue of Coatlicue from Tenochtitlan, c.1450–1500.
These images glorify the rite of sacrifice and attest its religious function. According to Aztec cosmology, the gods had created the world by sacrificing their own blood. Quetzalcoatl, ‘the plumed serpent’, carried out the sacrifice, spilling his blood too.This meant that mortals owed their existence to the gods, an obligation that could only be settled in kind. If repayment were not forthcoming, the gods would forsake the Earth. The sun would wane, the crops would fail, and all life would perish.
The concept of human blood providing cosmic nourishment was deeply rooted in ancient Mexican beliefs. Players of the enigmatic ball-game, instituted in Olmec culture many centuries before the Aztec empire, seem to have re-enacted the sun’s daily journey across the heavens.A movement of the ball that went contrary to solar motions was penalized – and this was a game in which the penalties could be drastic.The carved walls of the grandiose ball-game court at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza certainly suggest as much.There we see, for example, one player, still wearing his knee-pads, proudly flourishing the head of a decapitated opponent.
To die for the gods was deemed an honour, but it was not an honour for which the Aztec ruling nobility cared to volunteer.Victims could be slaves or social outcasts, but predominantly they were prisoners of war, seized from the numerous subject peoples of the expansive Aztec regime.The splendour of Tenochtitlan derived from exacting economic tribute from these peoples.Tribute was forthcoming only because failure to provide it entailed war – and the herding of captives for sacrifice. So the Aztec empire was built on terror, and the images of skulls, knives and ripped-out hearts were necessary to maintain a vivid, ubiquitous fear of death.
When Hernando Cortés saw this empire collapse with the city of Tenochtitlan in 1521, he could bless his possession of crossbows, cannons and horses – all new to the Aztecs – and also his fortuitous import of smallpox, a disease that spread rapid damage among the besieged inhabitants of Tenochtitlan. But his greatest advantage came from within the empire.The Aztecs were feared and hated by vast numbers of the people they ruled, so Cortés lost no time in recruiting a large army of the disaffected.When Tenochtitlan yielded, these were the troops who rampaged through the city, dealing with the Aztecs in the supreme local currency – human blood.
THE TERRACOTTA ARMY: A SUBSTITUTE FOR SACRIFICE?
Ruling by terror is part of th
e historical reputation of the warlord sometimes saluted as ‘the first emperor of China’: Qin Shihuang, or Shi-Huang-ti, whose achievement between 221–210 BC was aggressively to extend the small state of Qin (or Ch’in) into a large domain, cordoned to the north by the only piece of human handiwork visible from outer space – the Great Wall of China. But archaeologists, working constantly since the 1970s, have discovered that Qin Shihuang was in fact a master of terror management – a pioneer of using art to reduce, not increase, the palpable fear of death.
In the words of one of his scribes, Qin Shihuang commanded ‘a million armed soldiers, a thousand chariots and ten thousand horses, to conquer and gloat over the world’.Yet this potentate was haunted by his mortal destiny. Scientists at his court were sent to scour the land for magical plants that might create the elixir of eternal life. Failing such a find, Qin Shihuang prepared to meet his end. He might be compelled to retire below, but must he go there alone?
Historians believe that a number of ancient peoples – for instance, the Scythians of the Russian steppes – indulged in ritual slaughter when a king died. Retainers in the royal household were put to death in order to accompany their master in the next life; also interred with the king were his favourite horses and his chariot. Qin Shihuang was not so demanding. In the vicinity of his intended mausoleum at Lintong, near Xi’an in Shanxi province, he commissioned a number of underground pits or chambers to accommodate his companions in death. Previous feudal overlords and nobility in the region had gone to their graves with perhaps several figurines of bronze or clay. Qin Shihuang went with a following of thousands – all done on life-size scale (Fig. 127).