In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  Strange as it may seem, the Christian mysteries formed a bridge between the new and the old faith. Perhaps the reason is not hard to find. The central image of Christianity is the sacrifice of Christ himself: the god who gave his blood and body, even his sacred heart, to save the world. (From sixteenth-century Jesuit art to Freda Kahlo and the surrealists, the severed heart is a potent and continuing theme in Mexican art.) In Christianity, the Aztecs could see the key conception of their religion elevated onto a mystical plane: united in the cross, the ancient Meso-American symbol of the Tree of Life, ‘the green tree of the whole world’.

  The same pattern can be observed in the Inca civilization in South America. There the sacred topography still endures; the shamanistic cult of the ancestors, which was so important to the Inca state, survives throughout the Andes. And just as in Mexico and Guatemala, the old deities still receive their traditional offerings. This is especially true of the cult of sacred mountains resembling that still seen in China. The yearly pilgrimage to the glacier below Ahsangate, east of Cuzco, attracts thousands to the ‘Qoyllur Rit’, the ‘star snow’ festival which is named from the rising of the Pleiades and which takes place just before Corpus Christi in the Christian calendar. At this time the ‘bear men’ or shamans meet, initiate new members, and gather holy water from sacred places on the glacier: a living link with the Palaeolithic shamanism of Central Asia and its mountain worship. Down in Cuzco itself, the old Inca capital, modern doctors and health workers are far outnumbered by the curanderos, the traditional healers who intercede with the mountain deities and perform incantations among the peaks. As throughout the Americas, the high culture of the past has been reduced to ‘folk culture’ by war and conquest, violence, disease and persecution. But it is still alive.

  THE NEW ORDER

  After the conquest of Guatemala the Spanish built their new capital Antigua in the shadow of the ancient sacred volcanoes, Agua and Fuego. It was intended as a showcase of the ideals of European civilization. But the reality behind this humanistic façade has been called the greatest genocide in history. It is estimated today that at least three-quarters of the native population of the Americas died of disease or violence in the first century of the Conquest, perhaps as many as 50 million people. Among the Europeans who were horrified by what they saw was Jose de Acosta, whose censored report on the evils done to the native Indians has only recently been published. ‘The Spaniards must bear absolute responsibility for what is happening here,’ he wrote. ‘We have betrayed in our deeds what we professed in our words; everyone agrees the most depraved Indians are those who have come into contact with European culture. We have exploited and plundered these poor people to such an extent that it seems the Europeans are more anxious to decide who has the right to plunder them, rather than make any attempt to protect their human rights. We have not given them Christianity and sincerity but under compulsion, fraud and violence. Never has such cruelty been seen in history in any invasion – by Greeks or barbarians.’

  LAS CASAS: WHAT IS CIVILIZATION?

  In the early days of the Conquest, the Papacy itself urged on the enslavement of the natives in the name of Christ. But it was among the Catholic clergy that the European conscience grew: indeed today they are often conspicuous among the protectors of the natives against their oppressors. The greatest of these early liberation theologians was Bartolomeo de Las Casas, bishop in Coban. A passionate defender of Indian rights, Las Casas’ idealism earned him hatred, and the official tide ‘Protector of the Indians.’ His memory is still revered in the region called in his memory Vera Paz ‘True Peace.’ Coban is one of the few churches in Guatemala where even today the services are sung not in Spanish, but in Maya. Las Casas would take his case to the King and Queen of Spain themselves, urging on them justice for the Indians. (And gradually he came to realize that his arguments against the enslavement of the Indians applied with equal force to the black slaves from Africa and all the oppressed peoples of the world).

  There is an extraordinary sequel to the story of Las Casas, an incident which lights up the history of the sixteenth century like a flash of lightning and continues to illuminate us even today. In 1550 in Valladolid in Spain there took place a public debate between Las Casas and the leading Aristotelian philosopher, Sepulveda. (The two did not actually meet, but each submitted his evidence separately to a royal commission; all this rich body of material still survives.) The questions at stake go right to the heart of the world’s problems even today: in essence, what right does the First World have to dominate, enslave or exploit the Third World?

  ‘Are not these people,’ asked Las Casas, ‘rational feeling human beings with a soul just like the rest of us, and hence entitled to equality of treatment?’ Las Casas went on to bring fascinating arguments from his study of Greek and Roman civilization to show that the city states of Central America conformed in most respects to the Greek view of what an ideal state should be: rational, political entities entitled to respect, patience, persuasion and kindness. No doubt Las Casas won the moral debate but as the whole of subsequent history shows, the rulers of the West, the people with power and money, continue to view the indigenous peoples of the world, from the Indians of Central America to the blacks of Africa, as what the Greeks to their discredit termed ‘natural slaves’. Europe’s progress to civilization, as Las Casas pointed out, has been as long and painful as any.

  THE FALL OF TAYASAL

  It was a hundred and fifty years after the Conquest that the last independent kingdom in Central America fell. In the remote jungles of northern Guatemala stood the island fortress of Flores, in native speech Tayasal. Here the late Mayan population was a mixture of Mayan and Mexican, which we call Yucatec. The prophetic books of the Yucatan Maya foretold that catastrophe would revisit them every cycle of thirteen katuns, 256 or 257 years. The next cycle was due to begin in 1697. Armed with that knowledge the Spanish force attacked on 13 March of that year. In the middle of Lake Peten they overcame the Mayan war canoes, obsidian-tipped arrows useless against Spanish armour and musket fire. The defenders fled and the Spaniards marched uphill to the top of the island to the great temple of Tayasal. It took them a single day to destroy the twelve temples on the island, to smash their thousands of idols and to conclude in the evening by celebrating a mass on the highest point amid the ruins of the great temple where the church now stands. The last independent kingdom of the Maya had fallen. The locals here seemed to have accepted this almost fatalistically, as an inescapable result of their view of the repeating cycle of time. For three times since the tenth century, the cycle of 256 or 257 years had brought them catastrophe. In Maya eyes this was the true burden of time. And today the old count still continues. The greatest catastrophe of modern Guatemalan history, the US-backed coup which overthrew their democracy in 1954, happened exactly 257 years after the fall of Tayasal.

  THE MODERN MAYA

  Today the Maya, the majority of the Guatemalan population, still live dominated by a European élite. The guerrilla war of the 1980s left 40,000 dead and a million displaced. It is hoped that now, with a new democracy in place, their history will take a different course. The Mayan strategy for survival has remained stubbornly collective. In their great festivals they celebrate the saints as guardians of the community, not as Christian deities. For them identity still resides in the collective values represented by ancestors and community.

  The European élites who have ruled Central America for so long had other views of past and future. One of Guatemala’s modern dictators, Estrada Cabrera, expressed his faith in the values of European civilization by constructing concrete Parthenons all over the land, monuments to colonial progress, to the triumph of Greeks over ‘barbarians’. In the capital, Guatemala City, as all over Central America, the native culture has been swamped by the consumer values of the great neighbour to the north, Uncle Sam. In the city the Indians are submerged, strangers in their own land, widows of the civil war begging in the shadows. But in the countrys
ide things are different – the old universe still holds together.

  In the Mayan calendar the holiest of all days is Wahxakib Batz, ‘Eight Monkey.’ On this morning, seemingly out of nowhere, thousands of ordinary Guatemalan Indians converge on Momostenango, ‘the place of shrines’, in response to a call from a secret world of the spirit. On this day of the year, the nine ancestral shrines in the hills around the town are renewed and propitiated; and from all over Guatemala the daykeepers gather to initiate new shamans who will carry on bearing the burden of time. In the five hundred years since Columbus, these people have lived outwardly in Western time and Western history and yet all the while they have patiently tended a secret universe. At times it may have seemed that their obstinate faithful care of the burden of time would be their downfall but perhaps after all it has been their salvation. For it was the means by which they preserved identity itself down to what is hoped will be a new age of tolerance and pluralism when native Americans may again live in their own history, in their own time.

  SIX

  THE BARBARIAN WEST

  IN THIS BOOK we have seen that the roots of modern civilization, that is, the forms of society in which most of the people of the planet now live, were primarily Asiatic. We have seen that civilization developed in radically different ways in the Near East, China and India, ways which still shape their respective ways of seeing. The oldest and greatest of these, India and China, are still alive in the lands of their birth, while in the Near East, Islam is the successor to the ancients. Together the peoples of Asia constitute the vast majority of the population of the world today. In this last chapter, which forms a kind of epilogue, it is time to consider the rise of the West, and to look at some of the ways in which it has interacted with, learned from, and borrowed from the older civilizations which preceded it. Our aim is to see whether commonly held ideologies of the West have universal truth, as is claimed; or whether they should be seen more as idiosyncrasies born of the European landscape, climate and history.

  We frequently speak of the ‘triumph of the West’ these days; ‘the West’ has become a state of mind rather than a place, but in this book we have been taking it to mean the culture of Western Europe and its immediate neighbours, with its colonial offshoots in the Americas and elsewhere. It is Western civilization – European, Christian, capitalist, rationalist – which has become dominant in the world since the Renaissance: the first culture to spread its way of life, values and languages right across the world. But in comparison with India and China, it is recent. There had been relatively complex societies in Western Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages, but literate urban civilization came as an exotic flower to Western Europe with the Romans and faded away in some parts when their empire collapsed, to be reintroduced in the Dark Ages by the descendants of the barbarians who settled in its ruins, by the Franks, Goths, Angles and Saxons. So medieval culture in Western Europe was the product of comparatively late folk movements in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Only after this time were some key ideologies adopted, such as Roman Christianity and Latin culture. That such central beliefs are not indigenous, as they are in India and China for example, may be very significant in the long-term history of the culture. On the other hand, the immigrant tradition would remain a powerful model in Western culture: the ‘taking of the land’ was rooted in Germanic heroic tales, and the parallel founding myths in the Old Testament enabled the Western European barbarians to see themselves as ‘new Israelites’, heroic migrants bringing the ultimate truth as defined in their holy book. As we have seen, the very idea of ultimate truth is foreign to the Eastern civilizations.

  So Western European culture was by no means as deeply rooted as that of the Near East, China and India, and its social and religious beliefs nowhere near as solid, as some medieval Arab commentators noted. Nor did Western Europe ever have political, cultural or linguistic unity, though there were ancient affinities between the northern European peoples who spoke Germanic dialects, and those around the Mediterranean who spoke Romance. As a result, warfare has been prevalent throughout the history of Western Europe. Only since the 1990s has it moved towards unity after centuries of ferocious inter-state wars which have claimed millions of lives even in our own lifetime. Whether Western history is uniquely violent is difficult to say. All civilizations have been prey to the contradiction between their ideals and the reality of their history; none, after all, has succeeded in containing violence. The West’s triumphs on the other hand need no repeating here. Its individualistic conception of freedom was a great gift to the world, and very likely was deeply rooted in its individualistic regional cultures, born in its soil and climate. Its brilliance in art, literature and music is unsurpassed. But in the last five hundred years it is the West which has dealt in death and destruction in every corner of the globe. To try to understand why, let us look at the main strands which make up the tradition.

  THE LEGACY OF GREECE

  The role of the Greek tradition in European culture is problematic. Should we even view Greece as part of the West? The question may seem perverse, but where a Muslim scholar in tenth-century Baghdad would unquestionably have seen himself as the intellectual heir of classical Hellenism, the idea may never have occurred to a tenth-century scribe in England. She would have been familiar with some of its stories and myths; indebted too to the great patristic legacy in Greek; but she would hardly have thought herself its heir. Israel and Rome loomed far larger in her imagination. The West’s invention of Greece as its great spiritual ancestor took place much later, beginning after the eighteenth-century Enlightenment when the role of traditional religion in the West began to fade before modern secularism and science. Then new, and more impressive, intellectual antecedents were needed to corroborate Europe’s growing supremacy over older and greater civilizations. Prior to the Enlightenment too, classical Greek culture had been mediated through Roman culture with its rationalistic aesthetic, and through Roman Christianity with its patriarchal authoritarianism. It was the Roman view of Greece which was articulated in the Renaissance and set on a pedestal in the Enlightenment. Only in the mid-eighteenth century did Western Europeans begin to be able to study, for the first time, surviving elements of real Greek culture – landscape, buildings, customs – and especially the people of Greece who, though impoverished and brutalized under centuries of Turkish rule, had clung on to the ancient holistic view of nature which the West and Europe lost with the Enlightenment and the modern scientific view of life: a clue, however indistinct, to the real nature of the classical Greek achievement.

  Greece in fact was always the intermediary between Europe and Asia. In the Bronze Age she was first to receive the palace-based civilization of the Near East, but this was not deeply rooted, and when the palaces went, so did the civilization. Similarly in the sixth century BC she was the first to assimilate the new scientific philosophical ideas coming out of Asia, from Iraq, Iran and India, in the Axis Age. In the early fifth century BC these were transformed by the Greek genius into one of the greatest eras in world culture.

  The heyday of classical Greek civilization was very brief – the first half of the fifth century BC. The astounding Riace bronzes, the statues from Olympia, Pindar, Aeschylus, the Eleusinian mysteries, the new science of Ionia, the fledgling democracy of Athens and its victories over the Persian empire constitute the familiar landmarks, the fullest realization of a spiritual tradition. The later fifth century, from the Periclean age to Plato, for all its brilliance, was perhaps the overripe coda to one of the most amazing epochs in world history. So familiar indeed are these landmarks that it is easy to miss the uniqueness: neither East nor West perhaps, but a peculiar transformation effected on Greek soil. By 400 BC it had fallen apart in imperialism, in the collapse of democracy, in the horrors of the Peloponnesian War, in political disaster and in a failure of nerve on which Plato would look back with haunting nostalgia. The fifth century Enlightenment opened up every possibility, but it did not lead to a golden age. Gre
ece never united, remaining instead a land of warring city states, and in the mid-fourth century they fell to the brutal and vigorous Macedonians from the north. With that, Athens lost for good its cultural eminence which passed to the great Hellenistic foundations in Asia and North Africa, the powerhouses of a multi-racial empire which spread from the Balkans to India. It was the ideals of this Hellenistic Age, adapted by the Romans, which would be the first shapers of the Western tradition.

  THE GREEK CONQUEST OF ASIA

  ‘The Greeks,’ said Aristotle, ‘are intelligent and free and have the capacity to rule all mankind.’ In the fourth century BC, under Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, they invaded the near East, overrunning Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and then Egypt. The Greek era in Asia, known as the Hellenistic, is now seen as one of the most revolutionary in world history.

  Within a generation, the valley of the Nile thronged with Greek colonists, as if on a gold rush. The civilization of Egypt, ancient, mysterious and exotic, made a deep impression on Greek minds. In upper Egypt the monuments were covered with graffiti by awestruck Greek tourists. The native Egyptians, as we can now see from oracular and apocalyptic papyri, were strongly resistant to these new outsiders, as they had been in the past. (This was nothing new: Herodotus had written that ‘they keep the ancestral laws and add none other in avoiding foreign customs.’) In a prophecy of the Greek period, native Egyptians looked forward to the day when the ‘foreign civilization planted among us will fade away; these foreigners who occupy Egypt will disappear like autumn leaves.’ Others were more open in their hostility. ‘These Greeks are thieves and upstarts, addicted to violence,’ fumed one Egyptian priest. ‘To think we taught them all they know.’ And at Luxor still today, in the inner shrine of the ancient Egyptian temple, striding like a Pharaoh of old, is the violent golden boy of Western history, Alexander himself.