The Great Divide

Home > Other > The Great Divide > Page 33
The Great Divide Page 33

by Peter Watson


  In Aspero there are six truncated pyramids among seventeen mounds. The largest, called Huaca de los Idolos, measures 40 metres by 30 metres by 10.7 metres high and was topped with summit rooms and courts. The raised platforms have modelled and painted clay friezes. The mounds show evidence of cobble and basalt block masonry and adobe construction. The mounds were composed of successive phases of stone-walled rooms, built by progressive infilling of earlier rooms. The outer platform walls are of large, angular basaltic rocks set in adobe mortar with a smooth outer surface coated with plasters and occasionally painted.

  In Caral the largest and most elaborate pyramid is some 140 × 150 metres (450 × 500 feet) and about 20 metres (65 feet) high. The major pyramid has a basal length of 153 metres, a width of 109 metres and rises to a height of 28 metres. El Paraiso, situated two kilometres inland from the mouth of the Chillón River, and adjacent to flood plain cultivation land, was the largest of the Pre-ceramic Period monuments and, at three times larger than any of its contemporaries, was once the largest expression of organisation and labour investment in all of South America.23 This site comprised more than a dozen mounds spread over a 60-hectare area with a nuclear group of seven mounds, the nuclear group forming a rough U-shape with the largest mounds on the arms, framing a sunken plaza. This layout became common in South American monument formation and its religious significance is considered later.* The two large mounds were used for habitation and ‘no artefacts anomalous to domestic use are known’.24 It is uniformly oriented 25° east of north, perpendicular to the solstice sunrise in 1500 BC. El Paraiso’s one-metre-thick stone walls were plastered with clay. Stone was quarried from nearby hills and roughly trimmed. Constructed entirely of monumental masonry, the mound exceeds 100,000 tons in gross weight.

  Later structures in the area (i.e., in the third and second millennium BC) became even more imposing. Huaca la Florida, at 250 metres wide, 50–60 metres deep by 30 metres tall, was the largest monument of its time, with low arms extending at the wings for 500 metres, forming a large plaza that could have held 100,000 people. Stone walls at the site were covered with clay plaster and painted yellow and red.25 Several other indications of change over time are apparent. For example, pre-ceramic sites such as Aspero, Rio Seco, Huaca Prieta and Salinas de Chao are located near the Pacific Ocean, whereas in the initial ceramic period platforms were constructed away from the shoreline, reflecting an evolution from maritime subsistence to irrigation agriculture. Around 1800 BC, the rise in population seen prior to the shift to irrigation agriculture could have been supported by the rich fisheries.

  At Caral the dominant cultigens were Guayaba (shrubs, trees), cotton, guava fruit, gourd, and frijol (beans). Potential staples included two specimens of maize, one each of sweet potato/yam and achira (ginger/banana etc.). If this mix is representative of what was farmed, then, says Moseley, it is difficult to understand how horticulture alone could have sustained a large population and, moreover, the scarce remains of staples at Caral raises the possibility that the population could not live there year round. Staple domesticates are important precisely because they can be harvested in such abundance that they can be stored to feed people until the next harvest, which doesn’t apply to fruit or beans. So, almost certainly, protein at Caral was obtained by exchanging cotton and cultivated produce for marine products. Fishermen essentially fed the coastal farmers.

  This is all confirmed, says Moseley, by the evidence from the Chinchorro. The artificial mummies there, as we have seen, included large numbers of children who underwent privileged mortuary treatment, indicative of early class formation. With so little evidence of farming, and with the chemical analysis of bone indicating that the people obtained 89 per cent of their diet from the sea, the maritime foundation of civilisation in Aspero/Caral can no longer be disputed.

  The similarities and differences between Eridu and Aspero/Caral are further underlined by the ways in which each came to its end. Eridu suffered a gradual reversal, lasting from the twenty-first century BC until the last chapter was played out in the sixth century BC. Power passed to the north, to Warka and Uruk, though Eridu was rebuilt later, probably as a temple complex, in honour of its distinguished history. But sand dunes encroached, the salt waters rose, and the city was slowly choked, its legendary fertility a thing of the past.

  In contrast, and revealingly, recent evidence shows that, just as the advent of El Niño had helped to create Aspero and Caral (as Clift and Plumb say), in that the erection of temples, to cope with the increased frequency of enso events had occurred around 3800 BC, so it was the ever-more-frequent El Niño events that called time on Norte Chico. Again according to Michael Moseley, supported by Ruth Shady and geologists from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, a sequence of earthquakes, torrential rains and flood, and the march of sand across once-fertile fields, set in motion a process that brought the civilisation to an end within a few generations.27

  The Supe people (as the inhabitants of the Supe Valley, part of Norte Chico, are sometimes called) thrived for about 2,000 years but then, around 3,600 years ago, an enormous earthquake, estimated to be at least 8 on the Richter scale, devastated the entire area with a multitude of effects. The earthquake collapsed the walls of the main pyramid complex, as it became part of an enormous landslide of rocks, mud and construction materials. Widespread flooding followed but this was just the beginning. The mountains surrounding the valley were destabilised by the earthquake (and by subsequent quakes) and massive amounts of rock and other debris were sent crashing down. Subsequent El Niños brought huge rains and these rains washed the debris into the ocean where a strong current, parallel to the coast, re-deposited the debris and sand in the form of a large ridge, known today as the Medio Mundo, which sealed off the coastal bays, hitherto rich in marine life, rapidly turning them into sand-filled dead areas. Strong, ever-present, offshore winds then blew this sand back onshore, clogging the irrigation systems and covering the soil in the fields. In the space of a few generations, according to Moseley and his colleagues, what had been a productive (if arid) region, was reduced to an all-but-uninhabitable wasteland.28

  The trajectories of Eridu and Aspero/Caral are instructive, and for two reasons. They underline the point made earlier, about life in the Old World – religious life and economic life – relating mainly to the slow weakening of the monsoon, and the centrality of fertility in early man’s imaginative life, while in the New World the main concern was the unpredictability and violence of natural processes. And second, they highlight how different the natural world was in the Americas, the absence of domesticated animals meaning not just that the New World lacked vital sources of food, but that it also lacked vital sources of energy and was bound to be more restricted in the life-ways that could be pursued. We shall see again and again in later chapters how important domesticated mammals – and in particular pastoral nomadism – were in the history of the Old World.

  • 16 •

  THE STEPPES, WAR AND ‘A NEW ANTHROPOLOGICAL TYPE’

  To call the Bronze Age (roughly speaking 3500–1250 BC) the most interesting and most important epoch in the history of the Old World risks overstating the case. Fundamental transformations undoubtedly occurred at other times. Yet, when we look at the innovations that took place during those centuries, at the changes in weather and climate, at the transformations in material goods, above all at the changes in ideology, there is no denying just how extraordinary a time it was. We may begin by listing those changes/innovations and, as we do, ask ourselves what the long-term consequences were.

  In the previous chapter we covered the rise of the first cities, and cities were to be a major feature of the Bronze Age right across Eurasia, both their construction and their demise. For example, in 1946 the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer began to publish his translations of Sumerian clay tablets and in doing so he identified no fewer than twenty-seven ‘historical firsts’ discovered or achieved or recorded in the cities of the early
Iraqis. Among them were the first schools, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first clocks, the first arch, the first legal code, the first library, the first farmer’s almanac, and the first bicameral congress. The Sumerians were the first to use gardens to provide shade, they recorded the first proverbs and fables, they had the first epic literature and the first love songs. The reason for this remarkable burst of creativity is not hard to find: cities were (and remain) far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before, and some time in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience, for the new conditions required men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas.

  TOOLS FOR LIVING TOGETHER

  It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together – writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures. A measure of the rapidity of the change at this time (and an indication of its importance, necessity and popularity) can be had from the survey reported by Hans Nissen which shows that at the end of the fourth millennium in Mesopotamia rural settlements outnumbered urban ones by the ratio of 4:1. Six hundred years later – i.e., the middle of the third millennium – that ratio had reversed completely and was now 9:1 in favour of the larger urban sites.1

  The achievements of these cities and city-states were astonishing and endured for some twenty-six centuries. It was in Babylonia that music, medicine and mathematics were developed, where the first libraries were created, the first maps drawn, where chemistry, botany and zoology were conceived. At least, we assume that is so. Babylon is the home of so many ‘firsts’ because it is also the place where writing (‘the invention of inventions’) was conceived and therefore we know about Babylon in a way that we do not know history before then.2

  Writing in the Old World began with the practice of clay tokens used to seal and identify containers of goods (and their owners), goods that were traded between the cities of Sumer and elsewhere. In the late 1960s Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a French-American professor of Middle Eastern Studies, at the University of Texas, Austin, noticed that thousands of ‘rather mundane clay objects’ had been found throughout the Ancient Near East. Regarded as insignificant by most archaeologists, Schmandt-Besserat thought otherwise, that they might have formed an ancient system that had been overlooked. She therefore visited various collections of these tokens and, in the course of her study, she found that they were sometimes geometrical in form – spheres, tetrahedrons, cylinders – while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. She came to realise that they were the first clay objects to have been hardened by fire. Whatever they were, a lot of effort had gone into their manufacture.3

  Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi, a site in northern Iraq and dated to the second millennium BC. The cuneiform inscription said: ‘Counters representing small cattle: 21 ewes that lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep . . .’ and so on. When the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list. For Schmandt-Besserat, this was ‘like a Rosetta stone’; she had uncovered a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing.4

  The first tokens dated to 8000–4300 BC were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such sites as Tepe Asiab in Iran (c. 7900–7700 BC), where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Beginning around 4400 BC, more complex tokens appeared, mainly in connection with temple activity. The different types represented different objects: for example, cones appear to have represented grain, an ovoid stood for a jar of oil, while cylinders stood for domestic animals. The tokens caught on because they removed the need to remember certain things, and they removed the need for a spoken language, so for that reason could be used between people who spoke different tongues. They came into use because of a change in social and economic structure. As trade increased between villages, the headman would have needed to keep a record of who had produced what.5

  The complex tokens appear to have been introduced into Susa, the main city of Elam (southern Iran), and Uruk, and seem to have been a result of the need to account for goods produced in the city’s workshops (most were found in public rather than private buildings). The tokens also provided a new and more accurate way to assess and record taxes. They were kept together in one of two ways. They were either strung together or, more importantly from our point of view, enclosed in clay envelopes. It was on the outside of these envelopes that marks were made, to record what was inside and who was involved. And this seems to be how cuneiform script came about. Of course, the new system quickly made the tokens themselves redundant, with the result that the impressions in the clay had replaced the old system by about 3500– 3100 BC, the very beginning of the Bronze Age. The envelopes became tablets and the way was open for the development of full-blown cunei-form.6

  To begin with, there was no grammar. Words – nouns mainly, but a few verbs – could be placed next to one another in a random fashion. One reason for this was that at Uruk the writing, or proto-writing, was not read, as we would understand reading. It was an artificial memory system that could be understood by people who spoke different languages. Writing and reading as we know it appears to have been developed at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia and the language was Sumerian. No one knows who the Sumerians were, or where they originated, and it is possible that their writing was carried out in an ‘official’ language, like Sanskrit and Latin many thousands of years later, its use confined only to the learned. This next stage in the development of writing occurred when one sound, corresponding to a known object, was generalised to conform to that sound in other words or contexts. An English example might be a drawing of a striped insect to mean a ‘bee’. Then it would be adapted, to be used in such words as ‘be-lieve’. This happened, for example, with the Sumerian word for water, ‘a’, the sign for which was two parallel wavy lines (≈). The context made it clear whether ‘a’ meant water or the sound.

  Although the first texts which contain grammatical elements come from Shuruppak, word order was still highly variable. The breakthrough to writing in the actual order of speech seems to have occurred first when Eannatum was king of Lagash (c. 2500 BC). It was only now that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form. The acquisition of such literacy was arduous and was aided by encyclopaedic and other lists. People – in the bible and elsewhere – were described as ‘knowing the words’ for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read. Some lists were king lists, and these produced another advance when texts began to go beyond mere lists, to offer comment and evaluation on rulers, their conflicts, the laws they introduced: history was for the first time being written down. The list about the date-palm, for instance, includes hundreds of entries, not just the many parts of the palm, from bark to crown, but words for types of decay and the uses to which the wood could be put. In other words, this is how the first forms of knowledge were arranged and recorded.7

  Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. Among other things, they encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.

  Accordingly, in both Mesopotamia and Egypt literacy was held in high esteem. Shulgi, a Sumerian king around 2100 BC, boasted that

  As a youth, I studied the scribal art in the Tablet-House, from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad;

&
nbsp; No one of noble birth could write a tablet as I could.

  Scribes were trained in Ur since at least the second quarter of the third millennium. When they signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers, or priests: literacy was confined to scribes and administrators.8

  Two schools, perhaps the first in the world, were founded by king Shulgi at Nippur and at Ur in the last century of the third millennium BC, but he referred to them without any elaboration, so they may have been established well before this. The Babylonian term for school or scribal academy was edubba, literally ‘Tablet-House’. There were specialist masters for language, mathematics (‘scribe of counting’) and surveying (‘scribe of the field’) but day-to-day teaching was conducted by someone called, literally, ‘Big Brother’, who were probably senior pupils.9

  The scribal tradition spread far beyond Mesopotamia and as it did so it expanded. The Egyptians were the first to write with reed brushes on pieces of old pottery; next they introduced slabs of sycamore which were coated with gypsum plaster, which could be rubbed off to allow re-use. Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes.10

  Not all writing had to do with business. The early, more literary texts of Sumer, naturally enough perhaps, include the first religious literature, hymns in particular. The first libraries were installed in Mesopotamia though to begin with they were more like archives than libraries proper. They contained records of the practical, day-to-day activities of the Mesopotamian city-states. We have to remember that in most cases the libraries served the purposes of the priests and in Mesopotamian cities, where the temple cult owned huge estates, practical archives – recording transactions, contracts and deliveries – were as much part of the cult as were ritual texts for the sacred services. But the propagandistic needs of the cult and the emerging royal elite – hymns, inscriptions – were the elements that provoked a more modern form of literacy. Texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Epic of Creation, may therefore have been used in ritual. But these works, which involved some form of mental activity beyond flat records of transactions, appear first in the texts at Nippur in the middle of the third millennium. The next advance occurred at Ebla, Ur and Nippur. Each of these later libraries boasted a new, more scholarly entity: catalogues of the holdings, in which works of the imagination, and/or religious works, were listed separately. The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.11

 

‹ Prev