In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  IBN KHALDUN ON EGYPTIAN HISTORY

  Here in Cairo in the late fourteenth century, those questions of continuity were examined by the greatest of all Islamic historians, Ibn Khaldun. His concerns were the same as ours in this book: the nature of civilization, its rise and decline. He considered that settled co-operative human life was the goal of civilization, that it went in cycles of growth and decay like all forms of life. He thought incidentally that over-consumption in society was an inevitable cause of decline. But he believed that under certain favourable conditions of geography and climate, of the character and customs of the people, and their sense of group identity, culture could acquire a rootedness that he called the ‘habit of civilization.’ And in all history Egypt was perhaps the best example of that habit. The pharaohs, he points out, had political power for three thousand years. They were followed by the Greeks and the Romans, and then the legacy was taken on by Islam. ‘So the habit of civilization was continuous here, nowhere else in the world was it more firmly rooted.’ And such an idea perhaps helps explain Egypt’s continuing cultural leadership in the Arab world. Untouched by the Mongol attacks of the thirteenth century which destroyed Iraq, Egypt remained the dynamic centre of Islam until her conquest by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century; even today she has a rich and pluralist culture which reminds us of her Hellenistic ancestry. At the beginning lay the early Egyptian state, the first comprehensive attempt in human history to satisfy the needs of men and women to live together in an ordered state with a degree of happiness and material well-being. And so far it has been one of the most successful.

  FIVE

  CENTRAL AMERICA

  THE BURDEN OF TIME

  A HUNDRED AND sixty years ago deep in the jungles of Central America, European explorers came upon the ruins of a vanished civilization. ‘In the solemn stillness of the forest,’ wrote John Stephens in 1839, ‘the monuments were like sacred things, like divinities mourning over a fallen people.’ It soon became apparent that the builders of the hitherto unknown cities of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, the Maya, had achieved astonishing feats of astronomy, science and mathematics; they had even invented writing independently of the Old World. Sites such as Copan, said its discoverer, were ‘like a newly found history, proving that the ancient peoples of the Americas had not been savages, but had equalled the finest monuments of the ancient Egyptians, with skills in art, architecture and sculpture which had not derived from the Old World, but originating and growing up here without models or masters, having a distinct separate and independent existence like the plants and fruits of the soil indigenous.’

  These sentiments echoed those of the first Europeans to enter the Americas, at a time when the city civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas were in full flower. The first conquistadors literally could not believe their eyes: ‘We were wonderstruck,’ said Bernal Diaz. ‘We said that what lay before us was like the enchantments told in the ancient myths. Some of our soldiers even said that what we were seeing was a thing of dreams. Gazing on such wonderful sights we did not know what to say.’ The sense of shock experienced by the conquistadors could perhaps only be reproduced today by meeting people of another planet.

  The civilizations of America had grown and flowered with no contact whatever with those of the Old World, the Near East, India and China. Yet here were sophisticated societies with great architecture. They had elaborate rituals, writing, science and mathematics and pyramids like those in Egypt. It seemed scarcely credible to Europeans that these native peoples could have created complex societies in many ways rivalling Europe. ‘These Indians have high moral virtue,’ admitted one sixteenth-century friar. ‘Skilled in all mechanical and liberal arts; perfect philosophers and astrologers. In matters of policy they are several steps ahead of those who pretend to greatness in the political arena: and yet,’ he went on, ‘their religion is an abominable caricature of the message of Christ, and can only be the work of the Devil himself.’ It was a great conundrum. The civilizations of the Old World, even the most original, India and China, had all learned from each other as to some degree their histories intertwined. But here was a civilization totally self-contained, which had pursued its own extraordinary vision of human destiny with a stern and amazing constancy. If the physical parallels with the Old World were immediately apparent, the moral differences were profoundly disturbing.

  So much about the pre-Columbian Americans seemed totally original to the Europeans, and yet there were also intriguing clues from a deeper common past of all humanity, some of which struck even the earliest scholarly observers, the Jesuits. If we compare the Maya for example with the ancient Chinese, the similarities of belief and practice and symbol suggest that the peoples of the Americas never quite lost the deep connection with their prehistoric origins in Asia. Even today in the Guatemalan countryside you will see the belief in jade, just as in China, for health and death rites. Other parallels are the symbolism of tortoise and bat; divination; the burning of prayers; representations of the tree of life; in some ways the art of the classical Maya and the Chinese is remarkably similar. All of these elements must go back even before language itself, back to some common root of Asiatic humanity which evolved during the long development of Palaeolithic culture in its Chinese heartland. The Maya also shared with the Chinese the fundamental belief that civilization and humankind are not set apart from nature but are part of a natural order whose workings it is the human duty and the human interest to understand And like the Chinese, the Maya did this through divination, shamanism and through intellectual and moral control. At the core of the Mayan view of civilization was an all-consuming obsession with time, time measured in vast recurring cycles of hundreds of millions of years, longer indeed than the universe is known to have existed. Where the Greeks explored the cosmos through geometry, and the Hindus through metaphysics, the Maya explored it through the mathematics of eternity.

  Central America, with the main sites mentioned in the text. The Mexican plain, the Yucatan and the Guatemalan highlands have formed distinctive cultural zones throughout history.

  Since the landing of Columbus in 1492, two conceptions of civilization have fought for the soul of the peoples of the Americas: the one, foreign and recent, that of the West; the other ancient and native. The struggle between these different visions, the central theme of the last five hundred years of human history, was here fought out with particular violence and intolerance. But despite genocide and forcible conversion, the spiritual conquest of the native Americans has never taken place. For all this time they have tenaciously held on to their old languages, their old beliefs, their old views of the cosmos and of time, keeping faith as they would put it with their ‘ancient future.’ This chapter then is the story of the destruction of a civilization, and the tenacious survival of some of its ideals in folk culture right down to our own time.

  THE SURVIVAL OF THE HIGHLAND MAYA

  Our search begins in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Chichi’ is one of the market towns in the highlands of the Quiche Maya. Chichi itself was a Mayan settlement before the Spanish Conquest; its two main pre-Conquest shrines still function today. Both are now Catholic churches. The smaller of the two, El Calvario, is strictly out of bounds to Europeans. The larger, St Thomas, stands over the market stalls, a big flight of steps leading up to the doors. On the steps a traditional fire-altar burns, and travellers burn copal incense in home-made censers, asking forgiveness from the Mayan spirit guardians at the door. All around the market you can pick out the home regions of the traders by their woven jackets. For example Xibalba, the bat, which is an ancient symbol from the Mayan underworld, worn by the last dynasty of the Cakchiquel Maya who ruled here in the Highlands, is today the emblem of the township of Solola, near Lake Atitlan. The designs on the women’s blouses, the huipils, are the most elaborate, carrying coded information about clan and lineage. It is one of the ways the people have preserved part of the pattern of the old Mayan universe.

  In Chichi th
e traditional civic rituals are kept up by the religious guilds, the cofradias. They hark back to pre-Columbian times, organizing the festival days here, both Christian and Mayan. In fact it was through the cofradias in Chichi in 1702, that Europeans were allowed to see and copy the only known manuscript of the Mayan genesis, the Popol Vuh. Our present knowledge of this great work, which has been translated into many languages, derives from this one version; though Mayan shamans still know its stories, and other manuscripts may well exist hidden from European eyes.

  Down the middle of their church are Mayan altars where candles and copal are burned for the ancestors, the shamans and the midwives. At one end of the great barn-like nave, roped to the supports of the balcony, is a huge cross. This is no ordinary cross: it is the magic ‘speaking cross’ of Mayan mythology, in whose name one of the greatest revolts against the European settlers took place in the nineteenth century. The prayers of the cofradias might stand as a text for all the native peoples of the Americas. They also articulate a key theme of our story: the survival of strands of an older culture alongside and even intermingled with its supplanter. ‘These rituals of worship,’ they say, ‘were handed down from our first ancestors, from the time of the first gods, and were never lost,’ despite the Spanish conquest. ‘Don’t expect us to give up these customs, Father Christ, for us only names and fortunes change.’

  The discovery of the lost manuscript of the Popol Vuh in Chichi illuminates another fascinating aspect of the survival of Mayan culture: the perseverence of written testimony. Five hundred years have elapsed since the Europeans first made contact with the civilizations of the New World, five hundred years which saw their conquest, enslavement and the dissolution of much of their culture. In the sixteenth century the Catholic church made a concerted attempt to root out Mayan literature and destroyed the books in formal burnings. Only half a dozen Mayan codices are known to survive today in Western libraries. But you only have to come out to the villages of Highland Guatemala to see that the ordinary people, the descendants of the Maya, have hung on with an almost incredible tenacity not only to some of their most basic beliefs and traditions, but also to the written evidence of their entitlement to their ancestral lands. (Even though today they may still be reluctant to let Europeans see them.) In a little village outside the town of Totonicapan one of the local families bears the name of the last Mayan lord in these parts. Today they are peasant farmers, who live in a big communal room with a stamped earth floor. On one wall, in an elaborate glass-fronted shrine, is the family deity, St James, who has taken on the attributes of the Mayan war god. Incredible as it may seem, the family still possesses sixteenth-century manuscripts including a great book which sets out their legal title to their hereditary lands which they possessed before the Spanish conquest. They have been understandably secretive about the existence of their manuscript. Who can blame them given what has happened to the Maya, in particular the systematic destruction of Mayan literature which took place at the hands of the Catholic church? At the beginning of their family book is a strange map. It shows the sacred central area of the last capital of the Quiche Maya where their early sixteenth-century ancestor was a leading court official. Here are the four main pyramids, the great sacred plaza, the circular altar for the earth god, the ball court and the royal palaces. And underneath is a note by the author writing in the mid-1550s in Quiche which says, ‘These are the constructions in stone and in song of the great Quiche.’ Remarkably, the compilation of this manuscript took place in the same year or two as the Popol Vuh was committed to writing, and some of the leading local Mayan figures from that time are mentioned in the codicils to both books. Clearly in the aftermath of the violent conquest of the Highland Maya, as European domination began to look increasingly permanent, there were those among the Mayan aristocracy who saw the need to look to the future.

  The citadel depicted in the book of Totonicapan was destroyed by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. But still the ruins of Utatlan are visited by Mayan shamans, priests or diviners who perform their rituals there on the festival days of their calendar. Theirs is a spirit world maintained in secret for five centuries. The ruins lie surrounded by forests and ravines deep in the Mayan highlands. This is the heartland of the Quiche, an area of resistance to European rule even now. But Utatlan hides an even more extraordinary secret. Right under the citadel destroyed by the conquistadors is a cave running three hundred feet underground. Ever since the fall of the city, ceremonies have taken place here hidden from European eyes. Here the priests pray to the earth, to the ancestors and to the ancient Kings of the Maya, ‘Santo mundo,’ ‘Dios mundo,’ and ‘Rey Quiche’ (Tecun Uman, killed by the Spaniards in 1524). They salute the ‘City of holy ruins’ itself, and their ancient race, ‘Nuestra raza Maya-Quiché’. They burn tallow candles, sugar and copal, pouring alcohol so that the flames and smoke roar up in the darkness. And from the strange mixture of Christian and Mayan incantations come words to the holy earth from the pre-conquest creation book, the Popol Vuh. ‘Holy earth, heart of earth, giver of life, give us children, keep them on your green road and let there be continuity within.’ Afterwards they light a fire at the mouth of the cave to offer ‘a humble thanks to Heaven-Earth,’ and the smoke drifts slowly up the cliff face, catching the rays of sunlight, through a tangle of creepers, ferns and wild lavatera. The Maya took many things from the worship of Christ but what it could not give them was the continuing sanctity of Mother Earth.

  A final example of the perseverance of Mayan custom comes from deeper still into the Quiche Maya heartland, at Momostenango. In the hills above the town is the house of a Mayan shaman, Andres Xiloj. Andres is a living link with the pre-Spanish world. A priest for fifty years, he is a Chuchkahau, a lineage head, literally a ‘mother-father.’ He is also a daykeeper, a guardian of the Mayan calendar which, astonishingly, is still preserved here. An expert in the traditional ritual of incantation and its sacred language, ‘Don’ Andres can interpret ancient texts such as the Popol Vuh. He became a daykeeper after a severe illness, which decided him to ‘give service to the earth.’ Part psychologist, part spirit medium, Andres uses sacred divination as a tool to probe the ills of his patients, to ‘feel’ their past and future, reading the messages given by sensations in his own body. His job ultimately, is ‘to bring what is dark into light.’ For his patients he lays out the shiny dark red coral tree seeds and crystals according to the days of the Mayan calendar, a 260-day cycle based, so the Quiche believe, on the gestation period of the human baby within the womb. In the Mayan year there are thirteen numbers and twenty signs – for example the day may be six snake, or eight monkey. Some are auspicious, some not. Like many of the Quiche, Andres carries this calendar in his head and can translate into the western calendar in seconds. The preservation of a culture’s own time is perhaps a symbol of its will to survive. And for Don Andres, one idea more than any other signifies the difference between the two cultures: for the Maya, the earth is a sacred thing. This was why, in the Popol Vuh, humankind was ‘given memory to count the days,’ to be ‘bearers of respect for its divinity; to keep the rituals which connect humanity, nature and the heavens.’ Without them the universe would cease to bear meaning, for as Andres says, ‘If we make an enemy of the earth, we make an enemy of our own body.’

  The story of the Central American civilizations, then, is very different from those of the Old World. Here we are dealing with the violent, deliberate and systematic destruction of a culture in comparatively recent times. Andres’ divination, the cofradias at Chichi, the Mayan Catholic churches, the lost manuscripts, the rituals at Utatlan: all represent fragments of a collective act of survival, an attempt to keep a universe together five hundred years on from the Conquest. It is the story of how one civilization was conquered and suppressed by another, but refused to accept its values.

  THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ORIGINS

  It may be helpful to recall the background here: humans probably entered the Americas from Siberia acro
ss the Bering Strait during the last glacial period, between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago, though some archaeologists would bring the earlier limit down to 20,000 years ago. Rising sea levels then isolated the American continent, which developed on its own until 1492, though as we have seen, there are many parallels between the civilizations of the Old and the New worlds: in agriculture, cities, metallurgy, divination, writing and even in symbols. By 9000 BC settlers had reached the tip of South America. By 7000 BC they were cultivating staple crops, especially maize. Agricultural villages have been traced in Central and South America, and in the Andes, by 3000 BC, including large and as yet little-known settlements in Amazonia. The cultural traits of these regions were very long lasting. From the second millennium BC, the Olmecs in Central America and the Chavin in Peru would exercise a pervasive influence on iconography, religion and architecture in their respective spheres right up to, and even after, the European conquest. From them the main American civilizations took their inspiration: Teotihuacan, and the Maya, Toltec and Aztec in Central America; the Moche, Nazca, Chimu and Inca in the Andes. In the extraordinary inner power of the Olmec art of 3,000 years ago, for example, we already feel the grave, stoical sensibility of the Central American universe.