Tadodaho accepted, and soon all five tribes were meeting at the first Council of the Great Peace. Legend has it, right after their work was complete, Dekanawida paddled out into a lake and was never seen again. Where he paddled to in a lake is anyone’s guess. Hiawatha hung around to help keep that peace alive.
It all makes for a great story, except that none of that stuff probably happened that way. Especially the cannibal parts. Sorry.
A Giant Game of Telephone
History will never know if a reformed cannibal named Hiawatha and his miraculously handsome partner, Dekanawida, ever existed in real life since their story wasn’t recorded until the late nineteenth century by Horatio Hale.
Horatio Hale:
An American scientist who studied native populations.
It’s safe to say that their names were sung around campfires in the Haudenosaunee oral tradition for centuries. Through the centuries the legends got wilder. This is probably how the cannibalism accusations got started—not because it was true, but because it sounded like it could be true, and it made the story better.
ethnologists:
People who study differences in cultures.
In fact, some ethnologists believe Hiawatha and Dekanawida represent multiple people, and they don’t mean guys with split personalities.
Instead, quite a few historical men helped the whole peace and unity thing along and through years of storytelling, they morphed into those two. It’s always easier to remember less, rather than more.
However many people it took, they made life good for the Haudenosaunee. The councils met, the sachems worked the tribes’ problems out, and all the laws were kept in memory by the wampum belts. The laws of Hiawatha and Dekanawida were passed down from generation to generation. The Iroquois could still make war on their neighbors, like the Hurons, but they had peace in their immediate territories.
Then came the Europeans—the French, Dutch, and English to be exact—and they brought all their friends to the party (not just actual friends, but smallpox, measles, guns, and rum too). The results weren’t good for the native populations.
You could say the Native Americans were decimated, but that would be an understatement. Decimated means one in ten are killed, which is a lot, but it’s nothing compared to being octodecimated, or even novemdecimated. It’s estimated that eight in ten, maybe even nine in ten, native peoples were killed in the first fifty years of continuous contact with European colonists.
Luckily for the Iroquois tribes, their influential league helped them survive the losses, mostly due to their ship-tight inner workings, just the way Hiawatha wanted it.
The council was divided into three parts. The center nation, the Onondagas, kept the council fire and hosted all the other nations. The “Older Brothers” (Mohawks and Senecas) discussed the issue until they came to an agreement. Then, the “Younger Brothers” (Oneidas and Cayugas) would do the same. If everyone agreed, the matter was sanctioned by the fire keepers, the Onondagas. If not, then the Onondaga fire keeper, named Tadodaho in honor of the original, would hear both sides and cast the tie-breaking vote. If a consensus still couldn’t be reached, then each nation agreed to handle the issue in a way that wouldn’t compromise the league.
Fulfilling a Prophecy
The Hurons—Dekanawida’s people—never joined the Iroquois Confederacy. That was all well and fine until the Dutch arrived. In order to get as many beaver pelts and other furs as possible, the Dutch traded things like guns and whiskey to the Iroquois. This created a power imbalance among the tribes, as now the Iroquois could really do some damage to their enemies, who only had bows and arrows as defense.
The Mohawks and Senecas attacked the Hurons while the Hurons were recovering from a smallpox epidemic—in the middle of winter, no less. The Mohawks and Senecas were mad that the Hurons had been secretly making treaties with the Cayugas and Onondagas behind their back. The sick Hurons didn’t stand a chance. A few villages put up resistance, but it didn’t take long for the Huron nation to run for their lives. Most died, some escaped to other tribes, and others were actually adopted by the Iroquois.
And so, ironically, Dekanawida’s great peace plan, the Iroquois League, ultimately destroyed his own people, just as his grandmother knew would happen.
Despite the natives’ plummeting populations during this time, the Iroquois Confederacy remained powerful. They mowed down their enemies and adopted survivors as their own. Soon, they were in control of upstate New York and parts of what is now Canada, about forty thousand square miles. It sounds like a good thing, but it turned out to be not so great. Mostly because it isn’t hard to spot a giant. Same goes for the Iroquois. Once the Europeans had the tribes in their sights, it didn’t matter how geographically strategic their locations were, or how well their councils worked. They were doomed.
Opposites Don’t Always Attract
The white settlers and native populations were about as different as video games and hide-n-go-seek. Communal farming was the way of life for the Iroquois. To the settlers, land was for individuals, and the more land one had, the better. Their dictionaries had different definitions of pretty much everything, to be honest.
Purple marks the spot.
When the French and Indian War rolled around (1753–1763), the Iroquois backed the English. Contrary to its name, the French and Indian War wasn’t actually between the French and the Indians. Rather, it was a war between the French and the British with different Indian tribes supporting either France or Britain.
For centuries, these two European powers hadn’t seen eye to eye. More like knife to eye. North America was just the latest place to take their battle. The British won, thanks largely to the Iroquois, and the French retreated. Instead of New France, New England survived.
During these wars, the Iroquois absorbed other tribes and refugees devastated by all the diseases and fighting, like the Tuscaroras. Now there were six tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy and all of them formed one really bad habit. No, not picking their noses in public and dining on boogers. The tribes had absorbed colonist culture over the years, making the entire Iroquois nation dependent on the settlers for things like flint, wool blankets, and guns. Even the wampum beads were worthless after white settlers started using machines to make porcelain beads. This is where it gets bad.
After years of trading, the white settlers wouldn’t accept wampum as a form of payment and that left the natives with nothing to trade except their land, which dwindled away. The giant was slowly dying.
Then came the death blow. You can call it the American Revolution. The Iroquois League was divided, unlike the colonists who were finally united in something—their hatred of Britain. Some tribes wanted to continue supporting the English, who treated them marginally better than the American farmers. Most wanted neutrality, but British and American agents made that impossible. And despite their tight-fitting breeches and bug-infested powdered wigs, those white men were really good at killing.
The League split like a log, which was exactly the opposite of what Hiawatha would have wanted. The Oneidas and some Tuscaroras sided with the colonists, but the rest backed the British, and we all know how that turned out. Backing a loser is never a good thing. When the British got booted from the colonies, it was only a matter of time before the longhouse people followed.
One illegal treaty after another deprived the Iroquois of their ancestral lands. The colonists’ terrible idea of a thank-you included taking land from the tribes who sided with them and slaughtering the tribes who didn’t. Nothing gets a message across like a few balls of fire rolling toward a wooden home.
Most Iroquois got the not-very-subtle message and retreated to Canada and northern New York, where the Iroquoian reservations to this day function under the laws of Hiawatha and Dekanawida’s legend. After centuries of power and peace, the Iroquois had lost everything—except their belief in the laws set down by their heroes.
White Men in White Wigs Always Get the Credit
Eventually, Thomas Jefferson took up the banner. He plucked ideas from the English Bill of Rights, Common Law, and ancient Greece and Rome. He wove them together to create something new. But the colonists also took cues from the Iroquois, such as representative government, checks and balances of power, the importance of a constitution, and interpreters of the law for their own government. So while many ideas and people influenced the United States Constitution, it’s important not to overlook the importance of Hiawatha’s vision and how it relates to our current government.
Jefferson wasn’t the only white man cherry picking all of the good stuff about the Iroquois Confederacy for his ideal government. All the way across the pond, two German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were also intrigued by reports of the Iroquoian way of life.
Their reaction was sort of the opposite of what most white men thought. Community living and sharing? Sign them up! So they each wrote a book on how everyone should live closer to the Iroquoian ideal of life.
A few years later, some Soviet leaders decided to model the new Russian government off of these books (and, as such, off the Iroquois). That means that two future rivals—the United States of America and Russia—both drew inspiration for their government and their societies from the Iroquois Confederacy.
Thanks, Hiawatha. Even if you weren’t a cannibal, and even if you weren’t real, the stories about you were real enough to change the world.
Roman, European . . . It’s Uncannily Similar
Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries liked to categorize civilizations according to how similar they looked to their own people. On the totally made up scale of “civilized or not,” they ranked people either “savage, barbaric, or civilized.” If you had servants to prop up your feet whenever you rang a bell, congratulations! You were civilized. If you lived in a communal housing situation and shared everything like the Iroquois, well you were still in the “savage” stage of development.
At the time, people used these theories to explain why some people (Europeans like themselves) were better off than other people (Indians and Africans like the ones they conquered). They must not have noticed all the poverty and misery in their own societies from their darkened carriage windows.
As bad as that sounds, they weren’t the first to rank people. When the Greco-Roman travel writer/geographer/historian, Strabo, explored the world in the first century BCE to the first century CE, he based a people’s moral worth on how much Roman civilization they had. Less Roman influence equaled less worth. Some things never change.
Chapter
5
Gilgamesh
Two-Thirds Divine
Lived: Twenty-seventh century BCE, Mesopotamia
Occupation: King of Uruk, Demigod, Political Pawn
If It Looks Like a Legend, Smells Like a Legend, and Walks Like a Legend . . .
Gilgamesh the king is remembered best for slaying monsters and being a royal pain in the butt. He annoyed everyone from his subjects to the Mesopotamian gods before they decided to put his hero capacity to the test. When he passed with flying colors, he conveniently became every wannabe-king’s long-lost ancestor.
Yes, in his day, Gilgamesh was a megastar. But that day was a long time ago and humans sort of forgot about him—until 1872.
The setting was Victorian London. The dark, musty-smelling archives of the British Museum housed thousands of baked clay tablets with weird lines that looked a lot like chicken scratches. But they weren’t. They were cuneiform, a type of ancient writing that people had stopped using 1,700 years ago. These tablets had sat untranslated for years at the museum, and it wasn’t until one persistent research assistant, George Smith, got down to the eye-ruining work of deciphering those chicken scratches that the ancient king re-awoke.
One day, George was reading at a table stacked high with tablets when one fragment of baked clay sang to him.
Words like “flood” and “boat” and “animals” jolted him up like a bucket of ice water down the neck. Thinking he had found confirmation of the Biblical story of Noah’s ark, George forgot all about his stuffy Victorian ways. He started jumping up and down and undressing himself as if ice cubes really had gone down his neck.
A loud-mouthed soprano is in there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.
Queen Victoria would not have approved.
The tablet George had found was a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the finding would eventually shake Victorian society’s beliefs in their precious Greek poet Homer—the original king of epic stories.
This is the Flood tablet, but you already knew that if you’re fluent in chicken scratches.
So who was this Gilgamesh, hero of Sumer? How did the real man ever get mixed up with the demons and monsters of the epic? And was this really a reference to the same flood of the Bible?
A reconstructed Ziggurat of Ur. Demigods not included.
Spielberg Worthy
Gilgamesh was the son of a king and a goddess, which certainly helped his hero status. According to the legend, Gilgamesh had more of his mom than his dad in him, and we’re not talking about eye shape. He was two-thirds divine and only one-third human. Gilgamesh couldn’t get over how cool he was, and he didn’t let anyone else get over it either.
He went around town—the ancient city of Uruk to be precise—doing whatever he wanted. That included stealing other men’s girlfriends and making his people participate all day in meaningless competitions. It would be fair to say that he was history’s first badly behaved royal.
Eventually, his subjects couldn’t take it anymore. They started grumbling—loudly. Gilgamesh wasn’t so cool or funny to them anymore, and they wanted their girlfriends back. They prayed to their gods at the city’s ziggurat, and for once, their prayers were answered. The gods agreed: Gilgamesh was too big for his britches (or in the case of ancient Uruk, his sheepskin loincloth).
The gods put their heads together and came up with a plan to teach Gilgamesh some humility. They created a wild man, more beast than human, who was equal to Gilgamesh in strength. They named the man Enkidu and turned him loose on the countryside.
Mayhem broke out in the forests around Uruk, and hunters began to complain to Gilgamesh, begging him to do something about Enkidu. The gods rubbed their hands in anticipation. Finally, the king would get just what he deserved—someone else equal to him in the annoying department. But Gilgamesh didn’t have to think long. He knew that only one thing could stop this hairy beast-man—a woman. He chose Shamhat. She only needed a week before she had Enkidu wearing clothes, walking on two legs (instead of four), and even singing.
After he had been tamed, Enkidu walked right into Uruk, sought out Gilgamesh, and professed his undying loyalty. Some versions say the two wrestled first, but either way, they soon became fast friends. Together, they did all sorts of things best friends in Mesopotamia did, like slaying forest monsters, irritating a goddess, and fending off more beasts sent by the irritated goddess.
The gods decided that Gilgamesh must pay for his flippant attitude, and the only way to get even with him was to kill his best friend. When Enkidu died, Gilgamesh decided to undertake a quest for immortality. That dying business just wasn’t his thing.
His quest took him all over the known world and even into the Underworld. According to rumor, the man who had survived the Flood, Utnapishtim, was granted immortality, and Gilgamesh was determined to find him a
nd make him spill his secrets.
After a long search, Gilgamesh found Utnapishtim and his wife and, in his usual brash manner, demanded the secrets of the gods. So Utnapishtim played along. He told Gilgamesh that if he could stay awake for six days and seven nights, then he might be able to overcome death. Gilgamesh agreed, then promptly fell asleep for a full week. Of course he tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall. Or rather, on the moldy bread left out each day by Utnapishtim’s wife to mark the time.
By the end of the epic, Gilgamesh finally realized he could never outwit death and accepted life as it came.
Historicity: Just a Fancy Word for What Really Happened
What would ever make people think that a story like this could be true? As it turns out, it was more chicken scratches. In 1922, a real outdoorsy guy named Herbert Weld-Blundell dug up a four-sided tablet called a prism in the sands of an ancient city-state. It made everybody’s eyes pop out of their head when it went on display.
Maggots tell no lies.
The Weld-Blundell Prism (catchy name, huh?) listed the names of every king in Sumer from the shadowy beginnings of life to 1800 BCE, which was when the tablet was written. Guess who made the list? That’s right, Gilgamesh the King of Uruk. But if you think this settled the matter of his existence, you’re wrong.
The lengths of the kings’ reigns were longer than the most boring class you’ve ever had to sit through. According to the list, kings ruled for as long as 43,000 years and although some classes may feel that long, it’s an impossible amount of time for humans to imagine living. Compared to these early kings, Gilgamesh’s reign was pretty reasonable, clocking in at a measly 126 years.
Famous Phonies Page 5