Cannibals and Kings (20 page)

Gelb emphasizes the fact that POWs in Mesopotamia, India, and China were not used as slaves but were deported from their homelands and established as more or less free peasants throughout the kingdom. It was clearly advantageous in a cost/benefit sense for these early Old World state systems to use their domesticated animals as a source of milk and meat and to use their captives as agricultural laborers and cannon fodder. And underlying this adaptation was the fact that the presence
of domestic animals made it possible to expand and intensify the productive and reproductive base of the ancient Old World states and empires far beyond the level to which the Aztecs could go without suffering severe cuts in their standard of living (although the wages of the sins of intensification were shortly to catch up with them also).

The second dimension that must be considered in assessing the cost/benefits of cannibalism is more political than economic, even though it too ultimately boils down to a question of maintaining standards of living in the face of population growth, intensification, and environmental depletion. As I’ve shown, states emerged from band and village societies through the enlargement and stratification of leadership responsible for economic redistributions and the conduct of external warfare. The earliest kings, such as Sigurd the Generous, cultivated the image of the “great provider” which “big men” everywhere have always used to justify their preeminence: “His liberal hand scattered his sword’s gains o’er the land.” Continued generosity in the face of rapid population growth and environmental depletions, however, demanded continued expansion into new territories and the progressive absorption of additional masses of peasant producers. Not only did the eating of prisoners of war represent a great waste of manpower under the ecological conditions characteristic of the early Old World states, but it was the worst possible strategy for any state that had imperial ambitions. Empire building is not facilitated by the promise that those who submit to the “great provider” will be eaten. Rather, the fundamental principle guiding all successful imperial expansion is that those who submit to the “great provider” will not be eaten—literally or figuratively—but in fact their lives will be preserved and their diet improved.
Cannibalism and empire don’t mix. Throughout history people have been duped again and again into believing that enormous inequalities in the distribution of wealth are necessary for their own welfare. But the one thing no “great provider” has ever been able to do is convince people that there is some kind of parity in the relationship between eating and being eaten. To opt for a cannibal kingdom, in other words, is to opt for perpetual war with one’s neighbors and for a revolt-ridden realm in which people are literally treated as being good for nothing but stew meat. Such a choice made sense only for a state which—like the Aztecs’—had already so depleted its environment that the imperial phase of politics could not be attained.

I should also point out that there was an internal counterpart to the policy of mercy toward prisoners of war. The growth of empire promoted the image of rulers as divine figures who protect the meek from overexploitation at the hands of other members of the ruling class. Imperial governments had to tread a fine line between too much and too little taxation. If the power of local officials to tax the peasantry was not restrained by the emperor, the people would become disorderly, the cost of maintaining law and order would soar, and the survival of the empire would be jeopardized. The natural outcome of the “great provider” image spread over a canvas of continental dimensions was that of the great dispenser of justice and mercy and divine protector of the meek. Here lies the origin of the Old World’s universalistic religions of love and mercy. In the earliest law code known 1,700 years before the birth of Christ, Hammurabi made the protection of the weak against the strong a fundamental principle of Babylonian imperial rule. Hammurabi pictured himself as the greatest of “great providers”: “shepherd,” “giver of
abundant riches,” “bringer of overflowing wealth,” “provider of abundant waters for his people,” “giver of plentiful abundance … who enlarges the tilth” … “heaps the granaries of grain” … “bountiful provider of holy feasts” … “giver of the waters of abundance” … “who has firmly laid the foundations of habitations and supplies them with abundance and good things.” Then he declared himself to be divine: “the sun-god of Babylon who makes the light to rise on the land.” And finally the great protector: “destroyer of the evil and the wicked so that the strong may not oppose the weak.”

The same imperial calculus lies at the heart of the political religion known as Confucianism. The early Chinese kings kept a kind of “brain trust” at court from whom they sought expert advice on how to stay rich and powerful without being overthrown. The most famous of these advisers were Confucius and Mencius, both of whom never tired of telling their royal majesties that the prescription for a long and prosperous reign was to see to it that the common people were well-fed and not taxed too much. Of the two, Mencius was the more daring; he even went so far as to say that the sovereign was relatively unimportant. Only the emperor who was good to his people could expect to endure:

Between these pragmatic doctrines and the emergence of a full-blown religion of love, charity, and the sacredness of human life, there was no great gulf. Already in Mencius’ philosophy, “Benevolence is the distinguishing characteristic of man.”

This balance of the cost/benefits of state-sponsored cannibalism explains, I think, why human sacrifice and cannibalism remained unimportant features of the ancient Old World state religions. Moreover, as Michael Harner has suggested, it may also provide an answer for the first time to the question why political development along the Pacific Coast and highlands of South America culminating in the appearance of the Inca Empire followed the Mesopotamian and Chinese rather than the Aztec pattern. At its prime the Inca Empire embraced a region which extended 1,500 miles from northern Chile to southern Columbia and contained a population of perhaps 6 million people. This vast realm, unlike Mesoamerica under the Aztecs, had an overall political structure of villages, districts, and provinces. Officials appointed by the supreme Inca were responsible for law and order and for the maintenance of high levels of production. Village lands were divided into three parts, the largest of which was the peasant’s own subsistence plot; harvests from the second and third parts were turned over to ecclesiastical and political
officials, who were in charge of provincial granaries. These granaries operated on the ever-normal principle. They were used to compensate for annual ups and downs as well as for regional crises. During times of drought their contents were rushed over a network of government roads and suspension bridges to needy provinces. The political philosophy of the Incas, like that of Hammurabi and Confucius, embraced the lingering impulse of generous “bigmanship.” Enemy states were urged to submit to Inca rule in order to enjoy a higher standard of living. Defeated troops, as in early Mesopotamia, were resettled in different parts of the empire and fully incorporated into the peasant work force, while enemy leaders were taken to the capital at Cuzco and indoctrinated with the Incas’ political religion. The Inca army did not march upon its foes under the banner
WE WILL EAT YOU
. A
S
in early China and Mesopotamia, the Inca priests did occasionally sacrifice human beings—for the glory of the creator Viracocha and the sun god Inte—but these sacrifices were not an integral part of the war system. Only one or two soldiers from a defeated province were chosen. More often the principal victims appear to have been boys and girls who were primed for the occasion with food, drink, and special privileges. Most important, there is no evidence that the victims were dismembered and eaten.

The Inca priests functioned as redistributors of meat, and sacrifice was a daily event. But the high priests in Cuzco expended their surgical skills on llamas, while at lesser shrines guinea pigs were so honored. Both of these animals, as I pointed out earlier, were absent from the food production inventory of the Aztecs. Of the two, the llama is the more important in the context of the present discussion because it is a member of the camel
family, whose natural pasture consists of high-altitude grasses which cannot be eaten by human beings. Recent excavations by J. and E. Pires-Ferreira and Peter Kaulicke of the University of San Marcos in Peru have traced the origin of llama domestication to hunters who invaded the puna of Junin at the end of the last ice age. Domestication was not completed until sometime between 2500 and 1750
B.C
.—late by Old World standards but early enough to have played a role at the very beginning of the process of state formation in South America.

Inca llamas and guinea pigs were not inherently less contemptible than Aztec dogs and turkeys; they were simply better sources of meat. Llamas made it possible for the Incas to stop sacrificing human beings because llamas made it possible for the Incas to stop eating human beings. The lesson seems plain: the flesh of the ruminants tamed the appetites of the gods and made the “great providers” merciful.

Earlier I showed that animal domestication originated as a conservation effort triggered by the destruction of the pleistocene megafauna. But what began as an attempt to guarantee meat rations to village populations ended in the usual paradox that we have come to expect whenever a mode of production is intensified to allay reproductive pressures. Sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and other domestic species originally could be raised primarily for their meat because during early neolithic times villages were surrounded by ample reserves of forests and grazing lands which were not needed for the planting of wheat, barley, and other crops destined for direct consumption by human beings. Yet as human population density soared in response to the expansionist political economies of the early states and empires the area of forests and unplowed grasslands available per capita for animal husbandry grew smaller. Wherever a farming population possessing domesticated animals increased rapidly, a choice had to be made between growing more food plants or raising more animals. Ancient states and empires invariably gave priority to the raising of more food plants since the net calorie return on each calorie of human effort invested in plant production is on the average about ten times greater than the net calorie return obtainable from animal production. In other words, it is energetically much
more efficient for human beings themselves to eat food plants than to lengthen out the food chain by interposing animals between plants and people. Grains convert about .4 percent of each unit of photosynthetically active sunlight to humanly edible matter. Feeding grain to cattle yields meat containing only 5 percent of this percentage, that is, .02 percent of the original unit of sunlight. The decision to increase the acreage devoted to farm crops at the expense of the acreage devoted to animal pasture thus represents a strategy aimed at raising and feeding people rather than raising and feeding animals.

But domesticated species are valuable for other products and services. To raise and slaughter them for their meat alone is to destroy their value as traction machines, as producers of fibers, and as providers of fertilizer. Since some of the domesticated species can also be made to yield a continuous supply of animal protein in the form of milk and milk products, one can readily understand why domesticated animals were used with steadily decreasing frequency as a source of meat: they were worth more alive than dead. Therefore, meat gradually disappeared from the daily diet of the common folk of the ancient states and empires, who after thousands of years of “progress” found themselves on the average consuming almost as little animal protein as the common citizens of Tenochtitlán. Over a vast region of the Old World corresponding to the former zones of greatest meat and grain production, animal flesh soon became a luxury whose consumption was increasingly restricted to occasions involving ritual sacrifice and ecclesiastical redistributions. Eventually, the consumption of the flesh of the most expensive species came to be forbidden altogether, while in the regions suffering the greatest depletions meat itself became
ritually unclean. Before long there rose for the first time in history ecclesiastical doctrines aimed at inculcating the belief that eating plants was more godlike than eating flesh.

The decline in the per capita consumption of animal flesh represented a decline in nutritional standards. Since this may not seem obvious to modern-day vegetarian enthusiasts, who argue that meat-eating is a noxious habit, let me clarify this point before going on to ask why the flesh of certain animal species rather than others became taboo in the ancient Middle East. Vegetarians are perfectly correct when they claim that we human beings can satisfy all our nutritional needs by consuming nothing but food plants. All twenty amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are present in plants. But no one food plant contains all twenty amino acids. The full complement of amino acids can be obtained from food plants only by eating large amounts of bulky nitrogenous foods, such as beans and nuts, plus still larger amounts of starchy grains or root crops on a daily basis. (Beans and nuts are expensive foods in themselves.) Eating meat is therefore a much more efficient way for the body to obtain all the amino acids needed for health and vigor. Meat provides the essential nutrients in highly concentrated packets. As a source of protein, it is physiologically more efficient than food plants and this fact is reflected in the virtually universal preference exhibited by pre-state village peoples for meat over vegetable foods as items in redistributive feasts.