59
The Maya Civilization of America
June 13, 1932
In these letters I am trying to trace world history, so I tell you. But in effect this has been the history of Asia and Europe and the north of Africa. Of America and Australia I have said nothing, or next to nothing. I have warned you, however, that there was a civilization in America in these early days. Not much is known of this, and I certainly know very little indeed. Still, I cannot resist the temptation to tell you something about it here, so that you may not make the common mistake of thinking that America was just a savage country till Columbus and other Europeans reached there.
Probably as long ago as the Stone Age, before man had settled down anywhere and was a wanderer and hunter, there was land communication between Asia and North America. Groups and tribes of men must have passed from one continent to another via Alaska. Later these communications were cut off and people in America slowly developed their own civilization. Remember that, so far as we know, there was nothing to connect them with Asia or Europe. There are no accounts of any effective contacts till the so-called discovery of the New World late in the sixteenth century. This world of America was a distant and different world, uninfluenced by the happenings in Europe or Asia.
It appears that there were three centres of civilization: in Mexico, in Central America, and in Peru. It is not clear when they started, but the Mexican calendar began with a date corresponding with 613 BC. We find in the early years of the Christian era, the second century onwards, already many cities growing. There is stonework and pottery and weaving and very fine dyeing. Copper and gold are abundant, but there is no iron. Architecture develops and the cities vie with each other in building. There is a special kind of rather intricate writing. Art, and especially sculpture, is much in evidence and is of considerable beauty.
There were several States in each of these areas of civilization. There were several languages and a considerable literature in them. Well-organized and strong governments existed, and the cities contained a cultured and intellectual society. Both the legislation and the financial system of these States were highly developed. About 960 AC the city of Uxmal was founded, and it is said that this soon developed into a great city comparable to the great cities of Asia in those days. There were also other large cities: Labua, Mayapan, Chaomultun.
The three leading States of Central America formed an alliance, which is now called the League of Mayapan. This was just about 1000 years after Christ, the period we have reached in Asia and Europe. So a millennium after Christ there was a powerful combination of civilized States in Central America. But all these States and the Maya civilization itself were priest-ridden. Astronomy was the science most honoured, and the priests by their knowledge of this science played on the ignorance of the people: Just as millions in India have been induced to bathe and fast during eclipses of the sun and moon.
For over 100 years the League of Mayapan lasted. There appears to have been a social revolution then, and a foreign Power from the border intervened. About 1190 AC Mayapan was destroyed. The other great cities, however, continued. In another 100 years another people came on the scene. These were the Aztecs from Mexico. Early in the fourteenth century they conquered the Maya country and about 1325 AC they founded the city of Tenochtitlan. Soon this became the capital city of the whole Mexican world, the centre of the Empire of the Aztecs, with a vast population.
The Maya Civilization
The Aztecs were a military nation. They had military colonies and garrisons, and a network of military roads. It is even said that they were clever enough to make their dependent States quarrel with each other. It was easier to rule them if they were divided. That has been the old policy of all empires. Rome called it: Divide et impera!—divide and rule.
The Aztecs, in spite of their cleverness in other matters, were also priest-ridden, and, worse still, their religion was full of human sacrifice. Thousands of human beings were sacrificed in this way in a most horrible manner every year.
For nearly 200 years the Aztecs ruled their empire with a rod of iron. There was outward security and peace in the empire, but the people were ruthlessly exploited and impoverished. A State so built and so carried on could not endure. And so it happened. Early in the sixteenth century (in 1519), when the Aztecs were apparently at the height of their power, the whole empire came down with a crash before a handful of foreign bandits and adventurers! This is one of the most amazing examples of the collapse of an empire. And this was brought about by a Spaniard, Hernan Cortés, and a small troop with him. Cortés was a brave man, and daring enough. He had two things which were of great help to him—firearms and horses. Apparently there were no horses in the Mexican Empire, and there were certainly no firearms. But neither Cortés’s courage nor his guns and horses would have availed him if the Aztec Empire had not been rotten at heart. It had decayed inside, just keeping the outer form, and even a little kick was enough to bring it down. The empire was based on exploitation and was much resented by the people. So when it was attacked, the people at large welcomed the discomfiture of the imperialists. As usual when this happens, there was a social revolution also.
Cortés was once driven away, and he barely escaped with his life. But he returned, and then, helped by some of the inhabitants, he conquered. Not only did this end the Aztec rule, but it is curious to find that the whole of Mexican civilization collapsed with it, and soon of the imperial and giant city of Tenochtitlan little was left. Not a stone remains of it now, and on the site of it the Spaniards erected a cathedral. The other great Mayan cities also went to pieces, and the forests of Yucatan engulfed them, till even their names were forgotten, and many of them are now remembered by the names of villages near by. All their literature also perished and only three books survive, and even these no one has so far been able to read.
It is extraordinarily difficult to explain this sudden disappearance of an ancient people and an ancient civilization, which had lasted for nearly 1500 years, as soon as they come in contact with the new people from Europe. Almost it seems as if this contact was of the nature of a disease, a new plague that wiped them off. With all their high civilization in some respects, they were very backward in other respects. They were a curious mixture of the various periods of history.
In South America there was another seat of civilization in Peru, and the Inca ruled it. He was a kind of divine monarch. It is strange that this Peruvian civilization was, in its later days at least, completely cut off from the Mexican civilization. They were not far from each other, and yet they knew nothing of each other, and this itself shows their remarkable backwardness in some respects. A Spaniard also put an end to this Peruvian State soon after Cortés had succeeded in Mexico. This was Pizarro. He came in 1530 and he seized the Inca by treachery. The seizure of the “divine” monarch itself terrified the people. Pizarro tried to rule in the name of the Inca for some time and extorted vast wealth. Later this pretence was ended and the Spaniards made Peru a part of their dominions.
When Cortés first saw the city of Tenochtitlan he was astounded at its greatness. He had seen nothing like it in Europe.
Many relics of Mayan and Peruvian art have been recovered and can be seen in American museums, especially, I think, in Mexico. They show a fine artistic tradition. The Peruvian goldsmith’s work is said to be superb. Some of the pieces of sculpture found, especially some serpents in stone, are very fine. Others were apparently meant to be works of horror, and they do horrify!
60
A Jump back to Mohenjo Daro
June 14, 1932
I have just been reading about Mohenjo Daro and the old Indus Valley civilization of India. A great new book has come out describing this and telling us all that is so far known about it. It has been prepared and written by the men who have been in charge of the excavations and diggings, and who have themselves seen the city come out, as it were, of mother Earth, as they dug deeper and deeper. I have not seen this book yet. I w
ish I could get it here. But I have read a review of it, and I want to share with you some of the quotations given in it. It is a wonderful thing, this civilization of the Indus Valley, and the more one learns of it, the more it amazes. So you will not mind, I hope, if we break our account of past history and jump back in this letter to 5000 years ago.
Mohenjo Daro is said to be as old as that at least. But Mohenjo Daro, as we find it, is a fine city, the home of a cultured and civilized people. Behind it there must have been a long period of growth already. So we are told by this book. Sir John Marshall, who is in charge of the excavations tells us:
One thing that stands out clear and unmistakable both at Mohenjo Daro and Harappa is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millennia of human endeavour behind it. Thus India must henceforth be recognized, along with Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt as one of the most important areas where the civilizing processes were initiated and developed.
I do not think I have told you of Harappa yet. This is another place where old ruins, similar to those at Mohenjo Daro, have been excavated. It is in western Punjab.
So we find that in the Indus Valley we go back not only 5000 years but many more thousands, till we are lost in the dim mists of antiquity when man first settled down. The Aryans had not come to India when Mohenjo Daro flourished, and yet there is no doubt that—“the Punjab and Sind, if not other parts of India as well, were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own, closely akin but in some respects even superior, to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt.”
Excavations in Mohenjo Daro and Harappa have revealed this ancient and fascinating civilization to us. How much more lies buried elsewhere under the soil of India! It seems probable that this civilization was fairly widespread in India and was not merely confined to Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Even these two places are far apart.
This was an age “in which arms and utensils of stone continue to be used side by side with those of copper and bronze”. Sir John Marshall tells us of the points of difference and superiority of the Indus Valley people to their contemporaries of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Thus, to mention only a few salient points, the use of cotton for textiles was exclusively restricted at this period to India and was not extended to the Western world until 2000 or 3000 years later. Again, there is nothing that we know of in prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo Daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley the picture is reversed, and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens.
Again we are told that—
equally peculiar to the Indus Valley and stamped with an individual character of their own are its art and its religion. Nothing that we know of in other countries at this period bears any resemblance, in point of style, to the faience models of rams, dogs, and other animals or to the intaglio engravings on the seals, the best of which—notably the humped and short-horn bulls—are distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that have rarely been surpassed in glyptic art; nor would it be possible, until the classic age of Greece, to match the exquisitely supple modelling of the two human statuettes from Harappa figured in Plates X and XI. In the religion of the Indus people there is much, of course, that might be paralleled in other countries. This is true of every prehistoric and most historic religions as well. But, taken as a whole, their religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism . . .
You may not understand a few words in this quotation. Faience means earthenware or porcelain work; intaglio and glyptic works are carvings and engravings on something hard, often some precious stone or gem.
I wish I could see the statuettes found at Harappa, or even their pictures. Perhaps, some day, you and I may journey to Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and take our fill of these sights. Meanwhile we shall carry on—you at your school at Poona, and I at my school, which is called the District Gaol of Dehra Dun.
61
Cordoba and Granada
June 16, 1932
We have journeyed on in Asia and Europe through the years and we have halted at the end of 1000 years after Christ, and had a look back. But Spain has somehow been left out of our account—Spain under the Arabs—and we must go back and fit her into the picture.
Something you know already, if you still remember it. It was in 711 AC that the Arab general crossed to Spain from Africa. He was Tariq, and he landed at Gibraltar (the Jabal-ut-Tariq, the rock of Tariq). Within two years the Arabs had conquered the whole of Spain, and a little later Portugal was added. They went on and on; marched into France and spread all over the south. Thoroughly frightened at this, the Franks and other tribes joined together under Charles Martel, and made a great effort to stop the Arabs. They succeeded, and at the great battle of Tours near Poitiers in France the Franks defeated the Arabs. It was a great defeat and put an end to Arab dreams of the conquest of Europe. Many times after that the Arabs and the Franks and other Christian people in France fought each other; and sometimes the Arabs won and entered France, and sometimes they were pushed back in Spain. Even Charlemagne attacked them in Spain, but he was defeated. On the whole, however, for a long period the balance was kept up, and the Arabs ruled in Spain but went no further.
Spain was thus made part of the great Arab Empire, which spread right across Africa to the borders of Mongolia. But not for long. You will remember that there was civil war in Arabia and the Abbasides pushed out the Ommeyade Caliphs. The Arab Governor in Spain was an Ommeyade, and he refused to recognize the new Abbaside Caliph. So Spain cut itself off from the Arab Empire, and the Caliph at Baghdad was too far away and too full of his own troubles to do anything in the matter. But bad blood continued between Spain and Baghdad, and the two Arab States, instead of helping each other in the hour of trial, rather welcomed the difficulties of each other.
It was somewhat rash of the Spanish Arabs to break loose from their homeland. They were in a far country amid an alien population, and were surrounded by enemies. They were small in numbers. In the event of danger and difficulty there was no one to help them. But in those days they were full of self-confidence and cared little for these dangers. As a matter of fact they did remarkably well in spite of the continuous pressure of the Christian nations in the north, and, single-handed, they maintained their dominion over the greater part of Spain for 500 years. Even after this they managed to hold on to a smaller kingdom in the south of Spain for another 200 years. And so they actually outlasted the great Empire of Baghdad; and the city of Baghdad itself had long been reduced to dust when the Arabs said their last farewell to Spain.
These 700 years of Arab rule in parts of Spain are surprising enough. But what is more interesting is the high civilization and culture of the Spanish Arabs, or Moors as they were called. A historian, carried away by his enthusiasm a little, has said that: “The Moors organized that wonderful kingdom of Cordova, which was the marvel of the Middle Ages, and which, when all Europe was plunged in barbaric ignorance and strife, alone held the torch of learning and civilization bright and shining before the Western world.”
Kurtuba was the capital of this kingdom for just 500 years. This is usually called Cordoba in English, sometimes Cordova. I am afraid I have a way of spelling the same name differently at times. But I shall try to stick to Cordoba. This was a great city of a million inhabitants, a garden city ten miles in length, with twenty-four miles of suburbs. There are said to have been 60,000 palaces and mansions, 200,000 smaller houses, 80,000 shops, 3800 mosques and 700 public baths. These figures may be exaggerations
, but they give some idea of the city. There were many libraries, the chief of these, the Imperial Library of the Emir, containing 400,000 books. The University of Cordoba was famous all over Europe and even in western Asia. Free elementary schools for the poor abounded. A historian says that: “In Spain almost everybody knew how to read and write, whilst in Christian Europe, save and except the clergy, even persons belonging to the highest ranks were wholly ignorant.”
Such was the city of Cordoba, competing with the other great Arab city of Baghdad. Its fame spread all over Europe and a German writer of the tenth century called it “the ornament of the world”. To its university came students from distant places. The influence of Arab philosophy spread to the other great universities of Europe, Paris, Oxford and the universities of northern Italy. Averroes or Ibn Rushd was a famous philosopher of Cordoba in the twelfth century. In his later years he fell out with the Spanish Emir and was banished. He went and settled in Paris.
As in other parts of Europe, there was a kind of feudal system in Spain also. Great and powerful nobles grew up, and between them and the Emir, who was the ruler, there was frequent fighting. It was this civil war which weakened the Arab State more than the attacks from outside. At the same time the power of some small Christian States in northern Spain was growing and they were pushing away at the Arabs.
About 1000 AC—that is, just at the end of the millennium—the kingdom of the Emir extended almost all over Spain. It even included a bit of southern France. But collapse came soon, and, as usual, it was due to internal weakness. The fine fabric of Arab civilization, with its arts and luxury and chivalry, was, after all, a rich man’s civilization. The starving poor revolted and there were labour riots. Gradually civil war spread, and the provinces fell away, and the Spanish Empire of the Arabs went to pieces. Still the Arabs continued, split up as they were, and it was not till 1236 AC that Cordoba finally fell to the Christian King of Castile.
Glimpses of World History Page 28