The Zhou were the first to formalize the idea of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the Chinese notion that heaven blesses and sustains the authority of a just ruler. An impious and incompetent ruler would displease the gods, who would withdraw their mandate from him. Accordingly it followed that the defeated Shang must have lost the Mandate of Heaven, which had passed to the virtuous, victorious Zhou. From this time on, the Mandate of Heaven became a permanent feature of Chinese political life, underpinning the authority of rulers or justifying their removal. Dr Wang Tao, an archaeologist at the University of London, describes it this way:
The mandate transformed the Zhou, because it allowed them to rule other people. The killing of a king or senior member of the family was the most terrible crime possible, but any crime against authority could be justified by the excuse of ‘the Mandate of Heaven’. The concept equates in its totemic quality to the Western idea of democracy. In China if you offended the gods, or the people, you would see omens in the skies – thunder, rain, earthquakes. Every time that China had an earthquake, its political rulers were scared, because they interpreted it as a reaction to some kind of offence against the Mandate of Heaven.
Gui like this have been found over a wide swathe of China, because the Zhou conquest continued to expand until it covered nearly twice the area of the old Shang kingdom. It was a cumbersome state, with fluctuating levels of territorial control. Nonetheless, the Zhou Dynasty lasted for as long as the Roman Empire, indeed longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history.
And as well as the Mandate of Heaven, the Zhou bequeathed one other enduring concept to China. Three thousand years ago they gave to their lands the name of ‘Zhongguo’: the ‘Middle Kingdom’. The Chinese have thought of themselves as the Middle Kingdom, placed in the very centre of the world, ever since.
24
Paracas Textile
Textile fragments, from the Paracas peninsula, Peru
300–200 BC
Looking at clothes is a key part of any serious look at history. But, as we all know to our cost, clothes don’t last – they wear out, they fall apart and what survives gets eaten by the moths. Compared with stone, pottery or metal, clothes are pretty well non-starters in a history of the world told through ‘things’. So regrettably, but not surprisingly, it’s only now, well over a million years into our story, that we’re coming to clothes and to all that they can tell us about economics and power structures, climate and customs, and how the living view the dead. Nor is it surprising that, given their vulnerability, the textiles we are looking at are fragments.
The South America of 500 BC, like the Middle East, was undergoing change. The South Americans’ artefacts, however, were on the whole much less durable than a sphinx; there, it was textiles that played a central part in the complex public ceremonies. We’re learning new things all the time about the Americas at this date, but, as there are no written sources, much is still very mysterious, compared, for example, with what we know about Asia, belonging to a world of behaviour and belief that we still struggle to interpret from fragmentary evidence like these pieces of cloth, well over 2,000 years old.
In the British Museum these textiles are usually kept in specially controlled conditions, and never exposed to ordinary light and humidity for long. The first thing that strikes you about them is their extraordinary condition. They’re each about 10 centimetres (3 or 4 inches) long, and they’re embroidered in stem-stitch using wool, from either llamas or alpacas, we’re not sure which – both animals are native to the Andes and were soon domesticated. The figures have been very carefully cut out from a larger garment – a mantle or a cape, perhaps. They are strange beings, not entirely human in form, which seem to have talons instead of hands, and claws for feet.
At first glance you might find these figures rather charming, as they appear to be flying through the air with their long pigtails or top knots trailing behind them … but when you look more closely, they are disconcerting, because you can see that they are wielding daggers and clasping severed heads. Perhaps the most striking thing about them, though, is the intricacy of the sewing and the surviving brilliance of the colours, with their blues and pinks, yellows and greens, all sitting very carefully judged next to one another.
These jewel-like scraps of cloth were found on the Paracas peninsula, about 240 kilometres (150 miles) south of modern Lima. In the narrow coastal strip between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific, the people of Paracas produced some of the most colourful, complex and distinctive textiles that we know. These early Peruvians seem to have put all their artistic energies into textiles. Embroidered cloth was for them roughly what bronze was for the Chinese at the same date: the most revered material in their culture, and the clearest sign of status and authority. These particular pieces of cloth have come down to us because they were buried in the dry desert conditions of the Paracas peninsula. Textiles from ancient Egypt have survived from the same period, in similar dry climates thousands of miles away. Like the Egyptians, the Peruvians mummified their dead. And in Peru, as in Egypt, textiles were intended not just for wearing in daily life but also for clothing the mummies: that was the purpose of the Paracas textiles.
The Canadian weaver and textile specialist Mary Frame has been studying these Peruvian masterpieces for over thirty years, and she finds in these funeral cloths an extraordinary organization at work:
Some of the wrapping cloths in these mummy bundles were immense – one was 87 feet long. It would have been a social enactment, a happening, to lay out the yarns to make these cloths. You can have up to 500 figures on a single textile, and they are organized in very set patterns of colour repetition and symmetry. The social levels were reflected in cloth to a tremendous degree. Everything about textiles was controlled – what kind of fibre, colours, materials could be used and by what groups. There has always been a tendency to do that in a stratified society – to use something major, like textiles, to visibly reflect the levels in the society.
There was no writing that we know of at this time in Peru, so these textiles must have been a vital part of this society’s visual language. The colours must have been electrifying against the everyday palette of yellow and beige hues that dominated the landscape of the sandy Paracas peninsula. They were certainly very difficult colours to achieve. The bright red tones were extracted from the roots of plants, while the deep purples came from molluscs gathered on the shore. The background cloth would have been cotton, spun and dyed before being woven on a loom. Figures were outlined first, and then the details – like clothes and facial features – were filled in in different colours with exquisite precision, presumably by young people, as you need perfect eyesight for stitching like this.
Production would have required coordinating large numbers of differently skilled labourers – the people who reared the animals for the wool or who grew the cotton, those who gathered the dyes, and then the many who actually worked on the textiles themselves. A society that could organize all this, and devote so much energy and resource to materials for burial, must have been both prosperous and very highly structured.
Making the mummy bundles, in other words preparing the Paracas elite for burial, involved an elaborate ritual. The naked corpse was first bound with cords to fix it in a seated position. Wrapped pieces of cotton or occasionally gold were put in the mouth, and grander corpses had a golden mask strapped to the lower half of their face. After this the body was wrapped in a large embroidered textile – our fragments must come from one of these – and the encased body was then seated upright in a big shallow basket containing offerings of shell necklaces, animal skins, bird feathers from the Amazonian jungle and food, including maize and peanuts. Then body, offerings and basket, all together, were wrapped in layers of plain cotton cloth to form one giant conical mummy bundle, sometimes up to 1.5 metres (5 feet) wide.
It’s impossible to know exactly what our embroidered figures represent. Apparently floating in the air, with bared teeth and clawed hands, it is
easy to imagine that they are not human but creatures from the spirit world. But as they hold daggers and severed heads, perhaps we are in the realm of ritual sacrifice. What is this killing for? And why would you embroider it on a textile? We’re clearly in the presence of a very complex structure of belief and myth, and the stakes are as high as they can be. For these are embroideries about life and death. Mary Frame explains:
The severed heads, the wounds, the strange posture, seem to be depicting a whole set of stages of transformation between the human into the mythic ancestor. Blood and fertility seem to be themes that are intertwined with this. These textiles are really directed like a supplication for success with crops. Peruvian land is very marginal – it’s terrifically arid down there; the people had an intense focus on rituals that would ensure continual success. Water is necessary for plant growth – blood is conceived of as being even more potent.
When the first Europeans arrived in Central and South America 1,800 years later, they found societies structured around blood sacrifices to ensure the continuing cycle of sunshine and rain, seasons and crops. So these four little embroideries give us a certain amount of information, and can form the basis of a great deal of speculation, about how the people of the Paracas lived, died and believed. But, quite apart from that, they are great imaginative achievements, masterpieces of needlework.
It’s certain that American societies at this date, even advanced ones like the Paracas, were much smaller in scale than the contemporary states that we’ve been looking at in the Middle East and China. It was to be many centuries yet before empires like the Incas would emerge.
But these textiles and embroideries of the Paracas, produced more than 2,000 years ago, are now considered among the greatest in the world. These textiles are seen as part of the fabric of the nation, and in contemporary Peru there is a determined effort to revitalize these traditional weaving and sewing practices in order to connect modern Peruvians directly to their ancient, indigenous, and entirely non-European past.
25
Gold Coin of Croesus
Gold coin, minted in Turkey
AROUND 550 BC
‘As rich as Croesus’. It’s a phrase that echoes down the centuries and is still used in advertisements for get-rich-quick investment wheezes. But how many of those who use it ever pause to think about the original King Croesus, who, until a twist at the end of his life, was indeed fabulously rich and, as far as we know, very happy with it?
Croesus was a king in what’s now western Turkey. His kingdom, Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged across the Middle East about 3,000 years ago, and these are some of the original gold coins that made Lydia and Croesus so rich. They are examples of a new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own right – coinage.
We’ve all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things that it’s easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand. The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold. But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged, coinage began to make an appearance. Fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time. The Chinese began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world the Lydians started making actual coins as we would still recognize them – round shapes in precious metals.
These early Lydian coins come in many different sizes, from about the scale of a modern British 1p piece right down to something hardly bigger than a lentil. Lydian coins are not all the same shape. The largest one here is a kind of figure-of-eight shape – an oblong, slightly squeezed in the middle – and on it are a lion and a bull facing each other as if in combat, and about to crash together head-on.
These coins were minted under Croesus around 550 BC. It’s said that Croesus found his gold in the river that once belonged to the legendary Midas – he of ‘the golden touch’ – and it’s certain that the region was rich in gold, which would have been extremely useful in the great trading metropolis of Lydia’s capital city, Sardis, in north-west Turkey.
In small societies there isn’t really a great need for money. You can generally trust your friends and neighbours to return any labour, food or goods in kind. The need for money, as we understand it, grows when you are dealing with strangers you may never see again and can’t necessarily trust – that is, when you’re trading in a cosmopolitan city like Sardis.
Before the first Lydian coins, payments were made mostly in precious metal – effectively just lumps of gold and silver. It didn’t really matter what shape the metal was, just how much it weighed and how pure it was. But there is a difficulty. In their natural state, gold and silver are often found mixed with each other and, indeed, mixed with other less valuable metals. Checking a metal’s purity was a tedious task, likely to hold up every business transaction. Even once the Lydians and their neighbours had invented coinage, about a hundred years before Croesus, this problem of purity still remained. They used the naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, not the pure forms of the metals. How could you know exactly what a particular coin was made of and therefore what it was worth?
The Lydians eventually solved this problem, speeded up the market and, in the process, became hugely rich. They realized that the answer was for the state to mint coins of pure gold and pure silver, of consistent weights that would have absolutely reliable value. If the state guaranteed it, this would be a currency that you could trust completely and, without any checking, spend or accept without a qualm. How did the Lydians manage to pull this off? Dr Paul Craddock, an expert in historical metals, explains:
The Lydians hit on the idea of the state, or the king, issuing standard weights and standard purity. The stamps on them are the guarantee of the weight and the purity. If you’re guaranteeing the purity, then it is absolutely necessary that you have the ability not just to add elements to the gold but also to take them out. To some degree, taking out elements like lead and copper is not too bad; but unfortunately the main element that came with the gold out of the ground was silver, and this had not been done before. Silver is reasonably resistant to chemical attack, and gold is very resistant to chemical attack. They took either a very fine powder of the gold straight from the mines, or else got bigger pieces of old gold hammered out into very thin sheets and put these in a pot along with common salt, sodium chloride. They then heated that in a furnace to about 800 degrees centigrade, and ultimately they were left with pretty pure gold.
So the Lydians learnt how to make pure gold coins. No less importantly, they then employed craftsmen to stamp on them symbols indicating their weight, and thus their value. These first coins have no writing on them – dates and inscriptions on coins were to come much later – but archaeological evidence allows us to date our coins to around 550 BC, the middle of Croesus’s reign.
The stamp used to indicate weight on his coins was a lion, and as the size and therefore the value of the coin decreased, ever smaller parts of the lion’s anatomy were used. So, for example, the smallest coin shows only a lion’s paw. This new Lydian method of minting moved the responsibility for checking the purity and weight of the coins from the businessman to the ruler – a switch that made the city of Sardis an easy, swift and extremely attractive place to do business in. Because people could trust Croesus’s coins, they used them far beyond the boundaries of Lydia itself, giving him a new kind of influence – financial power. Trust is of course a key component of any coinage – you’ve got to be able to rely on the stated value of the coin, and on the guarantee that it implies. It was Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold standard starts here. The consequence was great wealth.
It was thanks to that wealth that Croesus was able to build the g
reat Temple of Artemis at Ephesus – the rebuilt version of which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But did Croesus’s money bring him happiness? We’re told that he was warned by a wise Athenian statesman that no man, however rich and powerful, could be considered happy until he knew his end. Everything would depend on whether he died happy.
Lydia was powerful and prosperous, but it was threatened from the east by the rapidly expanding power of the Persians. Croesus responded to this threat by seeking advice from the famed Oracle at Delphi. He was told that, in the coming conflict, ‘a great empire would be destroyed’ – the archetypal Delphic utterance that could be interpreted either way. It was his own empire, Lydia, that was conquered, and Croesus was captured by the great Persian king Cyrus. In fact, his end wasn’t so bad. Cyrus shrewdly appointed Croesus as an adviser – I like to think as his financial adviser – and the victorious Persians quickly adopted the Lydian model, spreading Croesus’s coins along the trade routes of the Mediterranean and Asia, and then minting their own coins in pure gold and pure silver at Croesus’s mint in Sardis. It echoes the way the Kushites absorbed Egyptian culture when they conquered their northern neighbour.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 15