In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  The cultural centre of the southern Tamils from ancient Greek times was Madurai, ‘the splendid temple with its tall towers,’ as a poet sang. Since the days of Megasthenes the Greeks had known Madurai as a thriving city, and a great commercial entrepôt; a city of shrines ‘whose citizens rise not to the lark but to the singing of the Vedas.’

  The chief deity in Madurai is the Great Goddess. Her cult was known to the ancient Greeks and an earlier temple is described in Tamil texts of the first century AD. Today none of the fabric predates the Muslim sack of 1314, save the bases of the towers and the walls of the inner shrine to Shiva. But the layout of the city still conforms to the plan required two thousand years ago in ritual texts on city planning: the square of the holy precinct surrounded by concentric circles (‘lotus-shaped’) of the processional streets, and then the outer walls which were demolished by the British. From a distance the great gate towers rise above the plain marking out the ritual space, a living example of the cosmic city which we shall encounter later in ancient China and Central America; one of the great native Indian cities with ancient roots. In the central shrine the deity stands in the traditional posture of the mother goddess, exemplifying female procreative powers. Her name, Minakshi, and those used for Shiva here, Sundarar and Cokkanathar, come from the oldest stratum of the Dravidian language, and could well have been applied to deities as far back as the Harappan Age.

  Madurai, a Tamil sacred city. Still a bustling pilgrimage town, attracting 10,000 pilgrims each day, Madurai was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The processional streets around the temple are named after the Tamil months; the outer walls were demolished by the British in the 1840s.

  Once a year the image of the goddess is taken to the banks of the sacred lake to celebrate her marriage to Shiva. This is a ritual as old as civilization; recorded in ancient Babylonia in the third millennium BC, it was still performed there in Hellenistic times. At the lake, she and her consort are garlanded like earthly potentates and serenaded with haunting hymns in Tamil, one of the oldest of the world’s classical languages and perhaps a living descendant of the language of the Indus cities. ‘The great Goddess,’ says an ancient Indian hymn, ‘is the cause of all: she is peace, the intelligence in all things, all forms of faith; she is consciousness itself; ever in all things and pervading all creation.’ Archaic in name and form, the great goddess of Madurai is part of an ancient and irrepressible current of belief and experience in Indian life which has never been done away with, either by the monotheism of Christianity or Islam, or by the modernization and westernization of our own age; whether it will continue to be so, only time will tell.

  THE LAST INVASION: THE COMING OF THE BRITISH

  The last great period of Tamil culture was in the seventeenth century. In the north the Moghul empire was showing the first signs of decline. And now the last and perhaps most fateful invasion of India took place. Westerners had coveted India’s wealth since Alexander’s day. In the eighteenth century competing European powers began to carve out colonies there. Wars between the British and the French ensued in Bengal and in Tamil Nadu, a part of their global confrontation: the great sacred enclosures at Chidambaram and Srirangam were desecrated and used as fortresses by contending foreign armies. Soon India could be depicted as a naked black female, submissively offering her riches to Britannia. And with that India entered the cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact, the era of colonialism.

  The British triumphed because of India’s own internal divisions, and because they controlled the sea. Along her coasts they created great ports as the basis of their rule: Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, ‘a ring round India.’ The early growth of their power in India was under the corrupt and violent auspices of the East India Company. The conquest happened piecemeal and opportunistically with no long-term goal. It was effected at no expense to the British taxpayer, by mercenaries picking off regional threats one by one. Only in 1857 when the great uprising in northern India, the ‘Mutiny’, put an end to the 258-year existence of the company, did the British government take direct control of its Indian possessions. Ever mindful of tradition, the first viceroy, Lord Canning, read Queen Victoria’s proclamation on 1 November 1858 from the rampart of Akbar’s fort at Allahabad, by the ‘undying tree’ and the ‘pillar of laws’ overlooking the sacred confluence. Thus, following Ashoka, Samudragupta and Akbar, a new dharma was announced from the primal place, and India entered a new phase of her history.

  Astonishingly, even at the peak of their empire, the British were able to rule one of the most populous regions on earth with just fifty thousand troops and a quarter of a million administrators. The era of British rule, the Raj, has become tinged with nostalgia through the medium of television and Hollywood. But, however we dress it up, imperialism is still imperialism. India was turned into a typical colonial economy, exporting raw material and importing finished goods. The natural resources of India were plundered, and her trees and animals, which Ashoka had protected two thousand years before, were thoughtlessly consumed. And, as has happened all over the world from Africa to native America, the Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest living civilization, were treated like children by people who saw themselves as the superior race. In fantastical costumes and invented ceremonies the rulers of a small island five thousand miles away glorified themselves. To them India was the ‘jewel in their crown’; for on it depended the very existence of their empire, the greatest ever seen in history. How easy it is to forget that there was an India before the British came which is still there now they have gone.

  This is not to deny the complex and profound legacy of the British: above all the English language, but also English ideas of representative government, urban structures, communications, education and secular law, all of which contributed to Indian civilization. Such developments also helped shape the political unity of India: indeed perhaps the very possibility of a single Indian state only arose as a workable idea because the British made it so. Even Hinduism itself would experience reform and revival under the influence of European and Christian ideas. But perhaps the most fateful legacy of the British was to open India irrevocably to a wider world: to force Indians to redefine their age-long civilization in terms of the new secular dharma of the West.

  INDEPENDENCE

  Our search finally brings us back to Allahabad, to the city of the Kumbh Mela, and to the family house of the Nehrus, three generations of whom have ruled India since Independence. In the library here, crammed with books on the European humanist and socialist traditions, Indian democrats met during the 1930s to discuss what India’s future path should be. Their hopes and fears have been echoed time and again in our modern world by indigenous peoples seeking to mitigate and learn from the Western impact. How far should the Western model be followed, in terms of industrial capitalism, democracy, Western rationality, Western science? How far can indigenous traditions work as the basis of a modern state? Jawarharlal Nehru, the upper-class, English-educated, first Prime Minister, thought European socialist models were the way forward, and came to believe in a complete break with the archaic traditions of India’s past. (At that time, many intellectuals still had faith in the success of the communist experiment in Russia.) In contrast, Nehru’s friend Mahatma Gandhi, whose austere bedroom, complete with spinning wheel and floormat, is also preserved in Nehru’s house, had faith in India’s own path, in self-cultivation, in local economies and village democracy, in Ashoka’s principle of non-violence. For him the greatest legacy any civilization has is simply itself. India’s greatness lay precisely in its Indianness, not in a watered-down Western compromise: but the drift of the world was against him. ‘The ideals of our civilization,’ he said, ‘non-violence, equality, pluralism, tolerance – inward and outward – can only become a true force through informed persuasion, not enforcement. Whether the ever increasing multitude of humanity can ever develop such theical attitudes I do not know. But I do know that we are committed to it –
and that the young are waiting for our support in attempting it.’

  The modern state of India was conceived and argued over only seventy years ago in Nehru’s house in Allahabad, but it rests on a great tradition extending back thousands of years with an amazing cultural continuity which has continually reasserted itself. In that light the beliefs of the Buddha and Ashoka, Kabir, Akbar and Dara Shukoh can be seen as a living body of ideas of continuing validity, as India pursues its destiny as the most multiracial, multilingual society on earth.

  Already the three hundred years of the British period are beginning to feel like a temporary interruption in the continuity of Indian history. The memorials of that era are fading now as a deeper past reasserts itself: the India before the Europeans. And with that past, along with its glories, come the failures and tragedies which civilization is heir to: in India the continuing deep-rooted injustice of caste; the threats of separatism and religious fanaticism; the exploitation of women and the oppression of the tribal peoples; the deep-seated feudalism of some regions which, like caste, has so often defeated the aspirations of Western-style democracy. Such failures, as well as its successes, are rooted deep in India’s past.

  India has been prodigiously gifted and creative in every field of human endeavour. If we were to choose one characteristic legacy – and it would be a Western choice – then perhaps it is that India placed the spiritual quest at the centre of life in the way that no other civilization did (although India also has an impressive and strong secular tradition extending back as far as the time of Ashoka). From ancient times India defined the goals of civilization very differently from the West. The West raised individualism, materialism, rationality, masculinity as its ideals. The great tradition of India also insisted on non-violence, renunciation, the inner life, the female, as pillars of civilization. And through all the triumphs and disasters of her history, she hung on to that ideal. History is full of empires of the sword. India alone created an empire of the spirit.

  EPILOGUE

  In the Nehru house in Allahabad a thumbed boyhood copy of the Gita still lies at Nehru’s bedside, as it always did from his childhood to old age. So perhaps it is still true even at the start of the twenty-first century – true for nations as well as people – that ‘we may our ends by our beginnings know’. When Nehru died, according to the instructions of his will, his ashes were scattered at Allahabad at the sacred confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, as Mahatma Gandhi’s had been. More recently the ashes of Nehru’s murdered daughter Indira and grandson Rajiv were also committed to the turbid waters below Akbar’s fortress, with its undying tree and Ashoka’s pillar of dharma. In his will, Nehru himself had denied any religious significance for the act: ‘I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and I have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga especially is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing and yet ever the same.’

  THREE

  CHINA

  THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN

  THE DISCOVERY OF the origins of Chinese history happened by a strange chance. In 1899 a Chinese scholar in Beijing, Wang Yi Jung, was taken sick with malaria. He had prescriptions for it made up in his local pharmacy. At the time staying with him as a house guest was a friend, the scholar Liu T’ieh-yun (author of the classic novel Travels of Lao Ts’an). Liu saw the prescriptions being made up. One of the ingredients was something used by Chinese doctors for hundreds of years, ground-up old tortoise shells, popularly known as dragon bones. To their astonishment, when the two men looked at the bones they saw that on them was a strange archaic form of writing, some of whose characters were the same as those used in modern Chinese writing. Although this ingredient had been used for hundreds of years, this was the first time it had come to the attention of scholars. The two men determined to find out where the bones had come from. They went back to the apothecary’s shop and the manager gave them their answer. The bones had been dug up near a dusty little town in Honan province in central China, in the plain of the Yellow River, a town called Anyang. And Anyang would be the key to the rediscovery of the ancient civilization of China.

  China was the last of the great civilizations to develop independently in the Old World, well over a thousand years after the first in Iraq. The Chinese way was a vision of life unique to itself: as complete a revelation of ‘otherness’ as it is possible to find on earth. As one leading western commentator, Simon Leys, has put it: ‘It is only when we contemplate China that we can become exactly aware of our own identity and that we begin to perceive which part of our heritage truly pertains to universal humanity, and which part merely reflects Indo-European idiosyncrasies.’

  The Chinese conception of civilization differed completely from that of the West and also, in a different way, from that of India too. In China the city began in the Bronze Age not as a centre of population and commerce, but as a ritual enclosure where the king and his diviners mediated between earth and heaven, mankind and nature, living and dead, past and future. And right through Chinese history, from Bronze Age Anyang to the Last Emperor’s Beijing, the city retained that character. For the creators of the Chinese tradition, the main goal of human endeavour was a moral order on earth sustained by virtue, ritual, and reverence for ancestors: hence their vision of civilization itself depended first and foremost on these qualities and obligations. And it expressed itself through the idea of harmony, the congruence of opposites, of inner and outer lives, of male and female, light and dark, yin and yang: an elemental balance basic to all Chinese thought, whether in science, philosophy, food or medicine. These ancient ideas permeated all aspects of Chinese life, and were to prove uniquely durable and valuable to the Chinese people. Even the cataclysms of our own time, from the Communist revolution down to the crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, have been played out against these deeper forces which have shaped China for thousands of years, since its beginning on the banks of the Yellow River.

  ANYANG: THE BEGINNING OF CHINESE HISTORY

  Huang He, the Yellow River, bears its rich yellow silt all the way from Mongolia to the Yellow Sea. It is the destroyer of cities, killer of millions even in our own time. When it leaves the mountains beyond Zheng Zhou, it enters a wide, flat, dusty plain, burning hot in summer. Most of China’s Bronze Age cities were built here, though then the climate was warmer, the land marshier, with sub-tropical flora and fauna. Like the other Old World civilizations, Chinese civilization first arose on the banks of a river, but unlike the civilizations of the ancient Near East, the source of political power did not lie in control of nature, but in control of the past. Whereas in early Iraq or Egypt irrigation was the key to the authority of early kings and states, in China royal power rested on lineage and on divination, the ability to access and co-opt the ancestors.

  China, showing sites mentioned in the text. The ‘middle land’ (zhungwo), from which China gets its name, centred on Songshan, the meridian for Chinese astronomers from 1000 BC.

  There is little to see at Anyang today. It is a small pleasant city with Ming dynasty walls and a drum tower. In the old quarter long leafy lanes lined with whitewashed houses lead to two huge water tanks where people walk in the evenings. There is a medieval Buddhist pagoda at whose gates old people still light incense and burn prayers. To get to the site of the Bronze Age palaces where the dragon bones were found you walk out of town a couple of miles through wheat fields to the village of Hsiao-tun. Here, where the Huan river makes a great bend, stood the wooden palaces of Yin, the last city
of the ill-fated Shang dynasty.

  According to the historian Ssu-ma Chien, writing in the first century BC, the terrible events surrounding the fall of the Shang, a thousand years before his day, took place here. There had been many kings, good and bad, but Chòu was the most wicked and the most intelligent. Strong, lascivious and cruel, he spent his time in orgies, devising dreadful punishments for those of his councillors who complained at his behaviour. Worse, he was negligent to the gods and to the ghosts of the ancestors. Eventually his just ministers turned against him, saying, ‘You do not know the mandate of heaven.’ And in an action loaded with meaning both practical and symbolic, the ‘senior and junior ritualists’ deserted with their bronze vessels and musical instruments to the good duke of Chou, who was known to be compassionate and ‘to care for the common people.’ The wicked Chòu thus lost his access to the ancestors. Then, led by the good duke, Wu Wang, Chòu’s enemies closed in on him and attacked him. ‘On the day chia-tzu,’ says Ssu-ma Chien (‘when the year star Jupiter was in the Cancer-Leo station,’ adds another tradition with spine-tingling immediacy) Chòu was defeated, ‘and he climbed the Deer Platform in his precious jade suit and walked into the fire to his death.’ Various traditions suggest the year was 1122 BC, though other dates are possible. The key to the story according to Ssu-ma Chien, and it may be a key clue to the understanding of Chinese history, is that though rulers may be cruel and merciless, through his capricious cruelty and depravity Chòu had lost the mandate of heaven. This conception of a moral order in politics may be a very ancient one indeed.