A History of the World in 100 Objects (42 page)

Clearly the Anglo-Saxon poet must have looked closely at something very like the Sutton Hoo helmet.

I asked the Nobel laureate and poet Seamus Heaney, who made that translation of
Beowulf,
what the Sutton Hoo helmet means to him:

I never thought of the helmet in relation to any historical character. In my own imagination it arrives out of the world of
Beowulf
and gleams at the centre of the poem and disappears back into the mound. The way to imagine it best is when it goes into the ground with the historical king or whoever it was buried with, then its gleam under the earth gradually disappearing. There’s a marvellous section in the
Beowulf
poem itself, ‘The Last Veteran’, the last person of his tribe burying treasure in the hoard and saying, lie there, treasure, you belong to earls – the world has changed. And he takes farewell of the treasure and buries it in the ground. That sense of elegy, a farewell to beauty and farewell to the treasured objects, hangs round the helmet, I think. So it belongs in the poem but obviously it belonged within the burial chamber in Sutton Hoo. But it has entered imagination, it has left the tomb and entered the entrancement of the readers of the poem, and the viewers of the object in the British Museum.

The Sutton Hoo helmet belonged of course not to an imagined poetic hero but to an actual historical ruler. The problem is, we don’t know which one. It is generally supposed that the man buried with such style must have been a great warrior chieftain. Because all of us want to link finds in the ground with names in the texts, for a long time the favoured candidate was Raedwald, King of the East Angles, mentioned by the Venerable Bede in his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
and probably the most powerful king in all England around 620.

But we can’t be sure, and it’s quite possible that we may be looking at one of Raedwald’s successors or, indeed, at a leader who’s left no record at all. So the helmet still floats intriguingly in an uncertain realm on the margins of history and imagination. Seamus Heaney says:

Especially after 11 September 2001, when the firemen were so involved in New York, the helmet attained new significance for me personally because I had been given a fireman’s helmet way back in the 1980s by a Boston fireman which was heavy, which was classically made, made of leather with copper and a metal spine on it and so on. I was given this and I had a great sense of receiving a ritual gift, not unlike the way Beowulf receives the gift from Hrothgar after he kills Grendel.

In a sense, the whole Sutton Hoo burial ship is a great ritual gift, a spectacular assertion of wealth and power on behalf of two people – the man who was buried there and commanded huge respect, and the man who organized this lavish farewell and commanded huge resources.

The Sutton Hoo grave ship brought the poetry of
Beowulf
unexpectedly close to historical fact. In the process it profoundly changed our understanding of this whole chapter of British history. Long dismissed as the Dark Ages, this period, the centuries after the Romans withdrew, could now be seen as a time of high sophistication and extensive international contacts that linked East Anglia not just to Scandinavia and the Atlantic but ultimately to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The very idea of ship burial is Scandinavian, and the Sutton Hoo ship was of a kind that easily crossed the North Sea, so making East Anglia an integral part of a world that included modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The helmet is, as you might expect, of Scandinavian design. But the ship also contained gold coins from France, Celtic hanging bowls from the west of Britain, imperial table silver from Byzantium and garnets which may have come from India or Sri Lanka. And while ship burial is essentially pagan, two silver spoons clearly show contact – direct or indirect – with the Christian world. These discoveries force us to think differently, not just about the Anglo-Saxons, but about Britain, for, whatever may be the case for the Atlantic side of the country, on the East Anglian side the British have always been part of the wider European story, with contacts, trade and migrations going back thousands of years.

As Seamus Heaney reminds us, the Anglo-Saxon ship burial here takes us at once to the world of
Beowulf
, the foundation stone of English poetry. Yet not a single one of the characters in
Beowulf
is actually English. They are Swedes and Danes, warriors from the whole of northern Europe, while the ship burial at Sutton Hoo contains treasures from the eastern Mediterranean and from India. The history of Britain that these objects tell is a history of the sea as much as of the land, of an island long connected to Europe and to Asia, which even in
AD
600 was being shaped and reshaped by the world beyond its shores.

In Peru, a largely forgotten people have left to history not just a face, like the helmet from Sutton Hoo, but an entire three-dimensional portrait of a warrior. From this small sculpture – from the clothes and the weapons it shows, from the way it was made and buried – we can begin to reconstruct the elements of a lost civilization. That civilization could not possibly have had any contact with the societies flourishing in Europe and Asia at around the same time – but, astonishingly, it shows a great number of similarities with them.

History has been kind to only a few American cultures. The Aztecs and the Incas have an unshakable place in our collective imagination, but few of us know where the Moche are from. Experts in early American history are now slowly recovering the civilizations that ran in parallel with, and were every bit as sophisticated as, their most advanced European counterparts. The Moche are at the centre of that rethinking of the American past.

Around 2,000 years ago the Moche people built a society that incorporated probably the first real state structure in the whole of South America. It was a civilization that developed in the narrow strip of almost desert land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains, and it lasted more than 800 years – roughly from the time of the expansion of Rome around 200
BC
to the Islamic conquests around
AD
650. The history of that civilization is accessible to us now only through archaeology, as the Moche left no writing. But what we do have from them is pots.

In the Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum we have an array of these South American pots on show. They are more than 1,300 years old and make an extraordinary sight ranged on the shelves: a series of small clay sculptures about 23 centimetres (9 inches) high, brown with cream painting on them. They conjure up a whole world. There are a pair of owls, a bat, a sealion eating a fish; there are priests and warriors; and all of them sit like small sculptures, but with a looped handle and a spout because, as well as being statues, they are jugs. This is a pottery representation of the Moche universe.

The pot I have chosen to take us further into that world of Peru 1,300 years ago is in the form of a young Moche warrior, kneeling. In his right hand he holds something that looks quite like a microphone but is actually a club, literally a head cracker, and on his left forearm he carries a small circular shield. His skin is a deep copper colour, and his eyes are staring white with an arresting gaze.

Besides using the pots to obtain information about the society they represent, we can of course admire them simply as great works of art. The Moche were master potters, so their creations can best be judged by another master potter, the Turner Prize-winning Grayson Perry:

They’re beautifully modelled: they almost look like they’ve been burnished. If I wanted to get this effect, I’d probably use the back of a spoon, but they’ve probably used some sort of bone implement. They were experts in mould technology, and they used a lot of moulds to replicate these things a number of times. You imagine the person who’s made it has made hundreds of these things, and they’re incredibly confident when they’re making it.

Archaeological excavations of Moche burials often uncover large numbers of these decorated pots – sometimes many dozens of them – all carefully ordered and organized around repeated themes and subjects. The sheer quantity of Moche pots that survive tells us that Moche society must have operated on a considerable scale. Making pots like this must have been an industry with elaborate structures of training, mass-production and distribution
.

Moche territory stretched for about 350 miles along the Pacific coast of what is now Peru. Theirs was, literally, a narrow existence – bounded by the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, usually with only desert in between. But their largest settlement, where now we find the southern outskirts of the modern Peruvian city of Trujillo, was the first real city in South America, with streets, canals, plazas and industrial areas that any contemporary Roman town would have been proud of. The remains of the canal network, which they used to channel the rivers flowing from the mountains, are still visible today. They also exploited the extremely rich waters of the Pacific for fish, shellfish, seals, whales and birds – there is one pot in the British Museum that shows a Moche fisherman in a large boat catching tuna. Carefully managing and irrigating their environment, the Moche grew maize and beans, farmed llamas, ducks and guinea pigs, and as a result they were able to sustain a population three times as large as the area does today.

And yet, as is usually the case in human history, it is not the great acts of water engineering or agriculture that a society honours in its works of art. It is war. The celebration of war and warriors is a central aspect of Moche art, and this reflects the importance of the warrior to their society – just like the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons in Europe. For the Moche, though, war and religion were joined together in a way that would perhaps be less familiar to Europeans. Fighting for the Moche had a very strong ritual aspect to it. For protection this warrior carries a small round shield, not much bigger than a dinner plate, and for attack a heavy wooden club that could crack a skull with ease. His decorated clothes suggest he is a young man of high status, but he is clearly a foot soldier. There were no horses at this time in South America – those came later with the Europeans. So even the elite amongst the Moche travelled and fought on foot.

Moche pots – sea-lion, priests, warrior, bat and pair of owls

Other pots show scenes of warriors fighting each other in single combat, armed, like this figure, with clubs and small shields. These may well be scenes of real fighting, but they also appear to be part of a common Moche myth that we can piece together from groups of pots. These pots seem to have been made entirely for burials and sacrifice and to be about life and death at its most solemn. Taken as a whole, they tell a gruesome story. To lose a contest like this meant much more than just losing face. The defeated warrior would be sacrificed – decapitated by an animal-headed figure and his blood then drunk by others. This bloody narrative told by the Moche pots is by no means just an artistic invention. Dr Steven Bourget, a leading archaeologist, has found evidence that it really happened:

We excavated a sacrificial site which included about seventy-five male warriors sacrificed during various rituals, and we also found the tombs of two sacrificers. One of the tombs also included a wooden club covered with human blood, so we had the ‘smoking gun’ and the victims themselves side by side within the temple.

We found that these were male warriors – robust, strong males aged between 18 and more or less 39. They had a lot of ancient injuries consistent with battles, but also a lot of fresh injuries – a lot of cut marks on the throats, on the arms, on the faces, indicating that most of them have had their throats cut and a few of them had the skin of their face removed, or arms separated from their bodies. Some of them were defleshed completely and transformed into skeletons – even in one case two human heads were transformed into some kind of container.