In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  TEOTIHUACAN

  The first great flowering of Central American civilization took place in the first millenium AD in the valley of Mexico, and its centre was Teotihuacan, ‘the place where men became Gods.’ Here the early Mexicans built a vast city, the centre of a trading empire which extended all over Central America. In AD 500 Teotihuacan may have been among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 200,000 people, a vast metropolis laid out on a grid plan with 8 square miles of temples, palaces, and houses. Here, independently of the Old World, they built huge pyramids rivalling those of Egypt and Babylonia, a testimony that although separated so widely by time and space, the human mind still creates the same symbols, the same dreams of bridging the gulf between earth and heaven. An extraordinary discovery made recently under the heart of the Pyramid of the Sun has confirmed that an elaborate cosmic symbolism underlies the layout of the city. It was built over a natural cave; a narrow passage through the lava leading to a seven-pronged chamber dead under the centre of the pyramid. This was the original pilgrimage place which had dictated the siting of the pyramid above. It was the place of emergence of the first ancestors, alluded to in the later creation myth of the Maya, the Popol Vuh: birthplace of the Sun and the Moon, the place where time itself began. Very likely Teotihuacan became an important pilgrimage centre. Hundreds of temples have been uncovered within the city, with altars throughout the residential quarters, and ceramic workshops mass-producing figures of gods and pottery incense burners.

  This was the first true urban civilization in Central America. Unfortunately no written documents give us clues to the rulers who created this great planned metropolis but if we compare its origins with those of the first cities in Shang Dynasty China, then a common picture begins to emerge of the origin of Eastern city civilization, of what has been called the ‘Chinese-Maya continuum’. At the heart of this is the idea of the city as an earthly pattern of the cosmic order, ‘the pivot of the four quarters of the universe,’ as the Chinese put it. The same conception is contained in the Inca name for their empire, Tawantinsuga, the ‘land of the four quarters’ and as we have seen, it may also be valid for the beginnings of Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities too. At Teotihuacan this idea is immediately striking, with great ceremonial axes intersecting in the four directions, aligned to the surrounding mountains and to the constellations, with the subterranean world represented by the primordial cave under the very centre of the pyramid, whose innermost recesses were illuminated by the sun every summer solstice. Here the city is a ritual theatre where humankind maintains the order of the universe; and in Central America, cities retained that function, even though they might become centres of commerce and trade and so on, right down to the Spanish conquest, when the great Aztec conurbations were still dominated by their ceremonial buildings. Ideology then became one of the driving forces in the development of civilization; religious, social, political, call it what we will. And ideology is also the key to understanding that fateful change which came over humanity with the beginning of civilization, by which – in each of the Bronze Age revolutions which are the subject of this book – the few came to dominate the many, as is still the case across much of the world today.

  Teotihuacan, the great metropolis of the Mexican plain, c.500 AD. Its ceremonial axes were aligned to the mountains which encircle it and to the constellations. Compare with Madurai (see here) or Xian (see here).

  THE CLASSIC MAYA

  During the first millennium AD, urban civilization spread across Central America from the valley of Mexico to the rainforests of Guatemala and Honduras. Until recently it was believed that Teotihuacan was the catalyst for this. But though its influence was felt in trade, perhaps pilgrimage and even in politics, it is now clear that the rise of cities in the Mayan cultural area was an indigenous phenomenon deeply rooted in prehistory. Recent excavations north of Tikal at Mirador have uncovered what must have been the great metropolis of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico which flourished between 100 BC and 150 AD. Discovered in the 1920s but only now mapped and examined, Mirador covered six square miles with tens of thousands of people, its Tigre pyramid the biggest among the Maya, nearly 200 feet high: all of this predating the classic Maya sites such as Tikal. Then from the fifth century AD city states arose right across Yucatan. At the time of the European Dark Ages Tikal, for example, sustained a population of 80,000 with huge irrigation systems and hundreds of dependent villages linked by roads and causeways. At the centre, its vast ritual enclosure had a dozen pyramids and hundreds of altars and shrines; its layout an elaboration of Central American cult practice which goes back two thousand years.

  The most intriguing of the Mayan cities is Copan in Honduras. A medium-sized city state of 20,000 people, Copan was ruled by a single talented dynasty from the fifth to the ninth century AD. Its public plazas, pyramids and ball courts – features shared by all Mayan cities – were adorned with wonderful sculpture. Here the Mayan artists demonstrated a prolific imagination and a creative freedom which at times approaches a western naturalism, such as we might find in the best Gothic or Renaissance stone carving (though of course the aesthetic objectives of a Mayan artist were very different). The recent decipherment of Mayan writing enables us to do now what would have been impossible only a few years ago; to enter into the lives, and even perhaps the feelings, of the rulers commemorated here (as yet the lives of the common people elude us). Most extraordinary is a series of portraits of a king we know by his hieroglyph sign as Eighteen Rabbit. These were the images which thrilled the modern world when they were published by Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. The earliest portrait is the fierce countenance of a man in his prime, his mid-forties, dated 11 October 721. The same king appears on a stele dated 731, ten years on – and is it just our imagination or is this not a softer expression, mellowed with age and experience? Finally late in July 736, there is a crudely executed, almost cartoon-like portrait: strangely sardonic, even perturbed. Two years after this image was dedicated, Eighteen Rabbit was captured by a rival king from the city state of Quirigia and beheaded on 3 May 738, when he would have been in his early sixties. ‘It is for kings,’ said a Mayan Proverb, ‘to eat the bread of sorrow.’

  WRITING

  Writing was invented in Central America independently, as it had been in the Old World: yet another clue to the common patterns in human development. The greatest monument to Mayan literacy is the hieroglyphic stairway of Copan. Literally a hill of signs, this was a huge stepped ramp 50 feet wide, and 108 feet high, with well over 1,200 glyphs telling the mythic and dynastic chronology of Copan down to 755 AD, when it was dedicated by King Smoke Shell. It is the longest single written inscription in pre-Columbian America, a monument to writing, and to time. A fascinating excavation at Copan which took place through the 1980s revealed more evidence of the function of writing in a late classic Mayan city. At the suburb of Las Sepulturas archaeologists discovered a self-contained compound of forty or fifty buildings grouped around eleven courtyards; among them were houses, temples, shrines, storerooms and kitchens. Dominating the main plaza was a great house in whose reception room was a large stone sitting bench, exquisitely carved with hieroglyphs. Flanking the door were two figures holding conch-shell ‘inkpots’: scribes. Perhaps then this was the residence of the head of an extended family or lineage group who were the hereditary scribes, ritualists and keepers of the calendar of the kings of Copan around 800 AD. If this is so, it is a distant parallel with the role of diviners and ritualists in ancient Chinese kingship.

  The last known king of Copan, Yax Pac, died in the winter of 820. The carving of the last date here was left unfinished on 10 February 822. As historical records go, few offer such a riddling combination of mystery and exactitude! With that the dynasty vanished and the city returned to jungle. A few peasant families continued to farm in the delectable valley of the Copan river for the next three centuries but the land never again supported a city. Around the same time Tikal too was dese
rted. Soon all the classic Mayan cities had gone. The Mayan collapse is still a great mystery. The land may have become exhausted, the environment destroyed; perhaps the civilization simply lost its nerve. Very likely, as in the parallel cases of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Romans and even complex modern societies (the former Soviet Union for example) the decline of civilization entailed a combination of many factors: environmental, political, social, climatic, psychological. None of these on its own would have spelt disaster, but in combination they were enough to undermine the functioning and continuance of the social order. As always, the great ritual and government centres were the first to go; far too expensive to maintain when things got tough, they were pointless once the élites had gone. Soon enough the cities were reclaimed by forest, with much reduced peasantry. But the legacy carried on in the hearts and minds of the common people. As we have seen, the cults and customs carried on, still spoken in the Mayan language, and when the Europeans first stumbled on the ruins at Tikal in 1848, the Indians living in the forest could still give their ancient name, Ti’kal, ‘the place where the count of days was kept,’ where the ancestors had borne the burden of time.

  THE AZTECS

  With the collapse of the classic Maya, the focus of Central American civilization shifts back to its old heartland, the valley of Mexico. Here ringed by mountains was a wide plain and a great lake, Texcoco, with islands and fertile shores. Today it is all covered by Mexico City. Here in the fourteenth century a warlike tribe settled who called themselves Mexica. The city they founded here, Tenochtitlan, was the precursor of what is today the largest city on earth: then it was a stone-built city of 200,000 people situated on an island linked to the mainland by causeways through a vast area of reclaimed swamps.

  The story of the Aztec empire which rose here in the fifteenth century is one of the most dramatic episodes in human history. The Aztecs still hold a fearful fascination for us. In their art we feel a tremendous spirituality, but it is spirituality of a kind unlike anything we recognize from our own civilization. The famous statue of the earth goddess Coatlicue, found in the central plaza, the Zocalo, in 1790, was hastily reburied, for fear it might be seen by the youth of Mexico, for fear that they might be exposed to its still dark and potent magic. Dug up and reburied once more in the early years of the nineteenth century, its awe-inspiring presence was still felt to be unbearable. Later still she found a place behind a screen in the University. Today Coatlicue holds a central position in the Aztec room of the National Museum of Mexico City. Her changing fortunes, as Octavio Paz has remarked – from goddess to demon, and from monster to masterpiece – show the changes in our sensibility over four hundred years. Only in our time can we look her in the face, though still not without a sense of unease.

  The recovery of Coatlicue, ‘the goddess of the serpent skirt,’ mirrors our recovery of Aztec history: the story of a growing desire to engage with its ‘otherness’ rather than simply dismiss it as ‘the work of the devil’. The present centre of Mexico City around the Cathedral was also the ritual centre of the Aztec city. Excavation here since the 1970s has uncovered the foundations of the Great Pyramid of the Aztec war god, Huitzilopochtli. This is where the Spanish under Cortés, when they sacked the city in 1521, saw horrific scenes of human sacrifice. Here, said Bernal Diaz, on the night the city fell, his captured comrades were dragged up the steps by the Aztec priests in a last desperate sacrifice to the god of war, on what the Spaniards from then on called the noche triste, night of tears. It is one of the most famous passages in the history of the New World: ‘Then from the pyramid sounded the dismal drum of Huitzilopochtli, and many other horns and shells and things like trumpets, and the sound was terrifying and we all looked toward the lofty pyramid and saw our comrades being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. We saw them place plumes on their heads and force them to dance … and after they had danced they placed them on their backs on narrow stones and with knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their beating hearts and offered them to their idols.’

  Blood sacrifice had long been a part of Central American civilization, as it has been part of most cultures. But human sacrifice –ritual killing, as opposed to the shedding of blood – was apparently on a limited scale among the Maya till late on in their history. The Aztecs however believed that the Gods needed blood and the hearts of human victims to nourish them in the struggle with the forces of darkness. Without them, they thought the sun would cease to rise. As they imposed their empire by force and terror over the other people of the Mexican plain, this ideology became more and more extreme, till by the time of the Spanish Conquest thousands could die in a single ceremony. All round the site of the great Aztec temple, the Templo Mayor, archaeologists found grim evidence of their devotions. Ritual deposits from the successive rebuildings of the temple platform included skulls; still in place were the chacmools which received the human hearts; there too were the idols which confronted the victims on the steps of the ‘artificial mountain,’ stone representations of the skull racks on which the victims’ heads were mounted, and the obsidian knives with which their hearts were extracted.

  Surrounded by the gaiety of Mexico City’s street life, the Templo Mayor is still one of those places on earth whose terrible associations seem to linger. How was it that a civilization of such brilliance in the arts, in sculpture, in textiles, in poetry could have been so committed to mass blood-letting and human sacrifice? So that in a four-day festival, as the Spanish relate, ten thousand people could be dragged up the steps of the great temple here to have their hearts ripped out, till the place was ‘swimming in blood and reeking to the heavens’. The same questions, it has to be said, have been asked of events in Europe in our own time. When the Spanish saw scenes like this they thought that it must be literally the work of the devil, it was so wholly alien. And yet the Aztecs were only unique in the scale of their killing. Every human civilization has used sacrifice, especially in religion. The theologian and the executioner have been intimates throughout history.

  The problem of the Aztecs then is a problem for all of us. And it is a problem which has occupied historians and anthropologists for generations. Why are violence and the sacred so intertwined? Why is death seen as necessary to renew life? Why is killing so ingrained in the psyche of homo sapiens? Was homo sapiens, who triumphed across the world over all the earlier hominids, also peculiarly homo necans, ‘killer man’? As yet we can only speculate. The idea that the shedding of blood is necessary for the continuance of life perhaps became deeply rooted in our psyche during the several thousand generations we spent as hunter-gatherers in prehistory: so deeply rooted that bloodshed is still the most powerful symbol of sacrifice even in Western culture today. And the impulse contained in such a symbol can still erupt with atavistic power and violence. The scenes of frenzied killing which Cortés and his followers saw here, with their captured friends being dragged up the steps to their death, were in a sense proof of the Aztecs’ piety, (as some of the early Spanish churchmen such as the Dominican Las Casas saw). For uniquely among the great civilizations of the world, they raised solidarity with the universe above everything, including human life. In this they could hardly be more different from the humanistic values of the great Old World civilizations, who learned through history, and often from each other, the moderating power of reason; the value of human life, and the need to contain violence in human society by other means (by law, by ‘goodness’, by religious sanction). To us the Aztec universe may appear irrational, terrifying, murderous in its brutality; and yet it is a mirror held up to our humanity which we ignore at our cost. For in the name of other ideals and other gods Western culture has been no less addicted to killing, even in our own century.

  THE FALL OF TENOCHTITLAN

  We need not concern ourselves here with a narrative of the events of the Spanish conquest of Central America. Let us simply record a story which may be taken to symbolize the conquest of one vision of time and history by another. By a 52 to 1 chan
ce, Cortés had arrived in the Aztec year ‘one reed’, when their ancient prophecies said the God Quetzalcoatl would return from exile in the east. For the Aztecs, whose confidence in the recurring cycles of history, the burden of time, was no less than that of the Maya, the coincidence drained away their will to resist. If the Spanish historians of the time are to be believed, the Aztecs immediately understood that these mysterious outside powers would be fatal to their own universe.

  On the terrible final night when Tenochtitlan fell, an omen appeared to the Aztecs which for them symbolized the break-up of their mythic and cosmological order. The story is told by Fray Bernardino de Sahagan in his great General History of the Things of New Spain, and it came from Mexican informants. ‘At nightfall it began to rain but more like a heavy dew than rain. Then suddenly the omen appeared, burning like fire in the sky. It wheeled in huge spirals like a whirlwind giving off light in showers of sparks like red hot embers. It made loud noises rumbling and hissing like metal on a fire. It circled above the walls near the lake shore. It hovered for a while above Coyoncazco (at the shore end of the great western causeway). Then it moved out into the middle of the lake where it suddenly vanished. No one cried out when the omen came into view. The people knew what it meant and they watched in silence.’

  GUADALUPE: THE OLD GODS LIVE ON

  After the conquest, the Spanish set about systematically to dismantle Aztec culture. But today the brilliant culture of Mexico, so prolific in literature and the visual arts, is still in a real sense a synthesis of native and European belief and sensibility. That native pre-Columbian vision still lives on in the Mexican soul, since independence in 1821, nurtured in a democratic atmosphere, as opposed to the tyranny endured till today by the Maya. We can see the continuities still in the greatest pilgrimage in the Americas: the Virgin of Guadalupe outside Mexico City, which attracts two million devotees on her feast day in December, is a conflation of Christian and pre-Columbian practice and traditions. Her shrine stands on the site of that of an Aztec mother goddess, Tonantzin, and today’s worshippers still address the Virgin Mary by that name.