The New Penguin History of the World (92 page)

In Meso-america the Olmec foundation proved very important. The calendars, hieroglyphics and the practice of building large ceremonial sites which mark so much of the region in later times may all be ultimately derived from it; the gods of Meso-america were already known in Olmec times, too. Between the beginning and the fourth centuries of the Christian era the successors of the Olmecs built the first great American city, Teotihuacan, in what is now Mexico. It was for two or three centuries a major trading centre and probably of outstanding religious importance, for it contained a huge complex of pyramids and great public buildings. Mysteriously, it was destroyed in about the seventh century, possibly by one of a series of waves of invaders moving southwards into the valley of central Mexico. These movements began an age of migration and warfare which was to last until the coming of the Spaniards, and produced several brilliant regional societies.

The most remarkable were those formed by the Maya cultures of Yucatán, Guatemala and northern Honduras. Their setting was extraordinary, given its appearance today. Virtually all the great Maya sites lie in tropical rain-forest, whose animals and insects, climate and diseases demand great efforts if its resources are to be tapped by agriculture. Yet the Maya not only maintained huge populations for many centuries with rudimentary agricultural techniques (they had no ploughs or metal tools and long depended on burning and clearing land to use it for a couple of seasons only before moving on), but also raised stone buildings comparable to those of ancient Egypt.

Many Maya sites may remain undiscovered in the jungle, but enough have now been found to reconstruct an outline of Maya history and society, both of which have in the last few decades been shown to have been much more complex than was once thought. The earliest traces of Maya culture have been discerned in the third and fourth centuries
BC
; it blossomed into its greatest period between the sixth and ninth centuries
AD
, when its finest buildings, sculpture and pottery were produced. Maya cities of that era contained great ceremonial complexes, combinations of temples, pyramids, tombs and ritual courts, often covered with hieroglyphic writing,
which has only in the last few decades begun to yield to investigation. Religion played an important part in the government of this culture, endorsing the dynastic rulers of the cities in ceremonies in which bloodshed and sacrifice played a signal part. There were also regular acts of intercession and worship in a cycle calculated from a calendar derived from astronomical observation. Many scholars have found this the only Maya achievement worthy of comparison with the buildings and it was indeed a great feat of mathematics. Through the calendar, enough of Maya thinking can be grasped to make it evident that this people’s religious leaders had an idea of time much vaster than that of any other civilization of which we have knowledge; they calculated an antiquity of hundreds of thousands of years. They may even have arrived at the idea that time has no beginning.

The stone hieroglyphs and three surviving books tell us something of this calendar and have provided a chronology for Maya dynasties. The Maya of the classical era used to put up dated monuments every twenty years to record the passage of time. The last of them is dated to 928.

By then, Maya civilization had reached its peak. For all the skill of its builders and craftsmen in jade and obsidian, it had considerable limitations. The makers of the great temples never achieved the arch, nor could they employ carts in their operations for the Maya never discovered the wheel, while the religious world in whose shadows they lived was peopled by two-headed dragons, jaguars and grinning skulls. As for its political achievement, Maya society had long been based on patterns of alliances tying together the cities in two dynastic agglomerations whose history is set out in the hieroglyph of the monuments. At its greatest extent, the largest Maya city may have had as many as 40,000 inhabitants, with a dependent rural population about ten times as big as that: this implies a density of population far greater than that of Maya America today.

Maya civilization was, therefore, a very specialized achievement. Like the Egyptian it required huge investment of labour in unproductive building, but the Egyptians had done much more. Perhaps Maya civilization was overloaded at an early date. Soon after its beginning a people from the valley of Mexico, probably Toltec, seized Chichen Itza, the greatest Maya site, and from this time the jungle centres of the south began to be abandoned. The invaders brought metal with them and also the Mexican practice of sacrificing prisoners of war. Their gods begin to appear in sculpture at the Maya sites. Seemingly, there was a contemporaneous cultural recession marked by cruder pottery and sculpture and a decline in the quality of the hieroglyph, too. By the beginning of the eleventh century, the Maya political order had collapsed, though a few cities were to flicker
back into life at a lower level of cultural and material existence during the next couple of centuries. Chichen Itza was finally abandoned in the thirteenth century and the centre of Maya culture shifted to another site, sacked in its turn, possibly after a peasant rising in about 1460. With that, the Maya story goes into eclipse until our own day. In the sixteenth century Yucatán passed into the hands of the Spanish, though only in 1699 did the last Maya stronghold fall to them.

The Spaniards were only in the most formal sense the destroyers of Maya civilization. It had already collapsed from within by the time they arrived. Explanation is not easy, given our information, and it is tempting to fall back on metaphor: Maya civilization was the answer to a huge challenge and could meet it for a time, but only with a precarious political structure vulnerable to outside interference, and at the cost of narrow specialization and burdens which were huge in relation to the resources available to support them. Even before foreign invasion, as political fragmentation occurred, the irrigation arrangements of which the archaeologists have discovered the remains were falling into desuetude and decay. As decisively as elsewhere in the Americas, the native culture left behind no living style, no technology of note, no literature, no political or religious institution of significance. Only in the language of the Maya peasantry did the past retain some foothold. What the Maya left behind were wondrous ruins, which would long bemuse and fascinate those who had later to try to explain them.

While Maya society was in its final decay, one of the last peoples to arrive in the valley of Mexico won a hegemony there which amazed the Spanish more than anything they later found in Yucatán. These were the Aztecs, who had entered the valley in about
AD
1350, overthrowing the Toltecs who then exercised supremacy there. They settled in two villages on marshy land at the edge of Lake Texcoco; one of these was called Tenochtitlan and it was to be the capital of an Aztec empire which expanded in less than two centuries to cover the whole of central Mexico. Aztec expeditions went far south into what was later the republic of Panama but showed no diligence in settlement. The Aztecs were warriors and preferred an empire of tribute: their army gave them the obedience of some thirty or so minor tribes or states which they left more or less alone, provided the agreed tribute was forthcoming. The gods of these peoples were given the compliment of inclusion in the Aztec pantheon.

The centre of Aztec civilization was Tenochtitlan, the capital they had built up from the village. It stood in Lake Texcoco on a group of islands connected to the lake shores by causeways, one of which was five miles long and took eight horsemen abreast. The Spanish left excited descriptions
of this city: its magnificence, said one, exceeded that of Rome or Constantinople. It probably contained about a hundred thousand inhabitants at the beginning of the sixteenth century and to its maintenance went what was received from the subject peoples. By comparison with European cities, it was an astonishing place, filled with temples and dominated by huge artificial pyramids, yet its magnificence seems to have been derivative, for the Aztecs exploited the skills of their subjects. Not a single important invention or innovation of Mexican culture can confidently be assigned to the post-Toltec period. The Aztecs controlled, developed and exploited the civilization that they found.

When the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, the Aztec empire was still expanding. Not all of its subject peoples were completely subdued, but Aztec rule ran from coast to coast. At its head was a semi-divine but elected ruler, chosen from a royal family. He directed a highly ordered and centralized society, making heavy demands on its members for compulsory labour and military service, but also providing them with an annual subsistence. It was a civilization pictographically literate, highly skilled in agriculture and the handling of gold, but knowing nothing of the plough, iron-working or the wheel. Its central rituals – which greatly shocked the Spaniards – included human sacrifice; no less than 20,000 victims were killed at the dedication of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Such holocausts re-enacted a cosmic drama which was the heart of Aztec mythology; it taught that the gods had been obliged to sacrifice themselves to give the sun the blood it needed as food.

This religion struck Europeans by its revolting details – the tearing out of victims’ hearts, the flayings and ceremonial decapitations – but its bizarre and horrific accompaniments were less significant than its profound political and social implications. The importance of sacrifice meant that a continual flow of victims was needed. As these were usually supplied by prisoners of war – and because death in battle was also a route to the paradise of the sun for the warrior – a state of peace in the Aztec empire would have been disastrous from a religious point of view. Hence, the Aztecs did not really mind that their dependencies were only loosely controlled and that revolts were frequent. Subject tribes were allowed to keep their own rulers and governments so that punitive raids could be made upon them at the slightest excuse. This ensured that the empire could not win the loyalty of the subject peoples; they were bound to welcome the Aztec collapse when it came. Religion was also to affect in other ways the capacity to respond to the threat from Europeans, notably in the Aztecs’ desire to take prisoners for sacrifice rather than to kill their enemies in battle, and in their belief that one day their great god, Quetzalcoatl, white-skinned and bearded,
would return from the east, where he had gone after instructing his people in the arts.

Altogether, for all its aesthetic impressiveness and formidable social efficiency, the feel of Aztec civilization is harsh, brutal and unattractive. Few civilizations of which we know much have pressed so far their demands on their members. It seems to have lived always in a state of tension, a pessimistic civilization, its people uneasily aware that collapse was more than a possibility.

To the south of Mexico and Yucatán lay several other cultures distinct enough in their degree of civilization but none of them was so remarkable as the most distant, the Andean civilization of Peru. The Mexican peoples still lived for the most part in the Stone Age; the Andeans had got much further than this. They had also created a true state. If the Maya excelled among the American cultures in the elaborate calculations of their calendar, the Andeans were far ahead of their neighbours in the complexity of their government. The imagination of the Spaniards was captured by Peru even more than by Mexico, and the reason was not simply its immense and obvious wealth in precious metals, but its apparently just, efficient and highly complex social system. Some Europeans soon found accounts of it attractive, for it required an almost total subordination of the individual to the collective.

This was the society ruled by the Incas. In the twelfth century a people from Cuzco began to extend its control over earlier centres of civilization in Peru. Like the Aztecs, they began as neighbours of those longer civilized than themselves; they were barbarians who soon took over the skills and fruits of higher cultures. At the end of the fifteenth century the Incas ruled a realm extending from Ecuador to central Chile, their conquest of the coastal areas being the most recent. This was an astonishing feat of government, for it had to contend with the natural obstacles provided by the Andes. The Inca state was held together by about 10,000 miles of roads passable in all weathers by chains of runners who bore messages either orally or recorded in
quipu
, a code of knots in coloured cords. With this device elaborate records were kept. Though preliterate, the Andean empire was formidably totalitarian in the organization of its subjects’ lives. The Incas became the ruling caste of the empire, its head becoming
Sapa Inca
– the ‘only Inca’. His rule was a despotism based on the control of labour. The population was organized in units of which the smallest was that of ten heads of families. From these units, labour service and produce were exacted. Careful and tight control kept population where it was needed; removal or marriage outside the local community were not allowed. All produce was state property; in this way agriculturists fed herdsmen and
craftsmen and received textiles in exchange (the llama was the all-purpose beast of Andean culture, providing wool as well as transport, milk and meat). There was no commerce. Mining for precious metals and copper resulted in an exquisite adornment of Cuzco which amazed the Spaniards when they came to it. Tensions inside this system were not dealt with merely by force, but by the resettlement of loyal populations in a disaffected area and a strict control of the educational system in order to inculcate the notables of conquered peoples with the proper attitudes.

Like the Aztecs, the Incas organized and exploited the achievements of culture which they found already to hand, though less brutally. Their aim was integration rather than obliteration and they tolerated the cults of conquered peoples. Their own god was the sun. The absence of literacy makes it hard to penetrate the mind of this civilization, but it is noticeable that, though in a different way, the Peruvians seem to have shared the Aztecs’ preoccupation with death. Accidents of climate, as in Egypt, favoured its expression in rites of mummification; the dry air of the high Andes was as good a preservative as the sand of the desert. Beyond this it is not easy to say what divisions among the conquered peoples persisted and were expressed in the survival of tribal cults. When a challenge appeared from Europe it became apparent that Inca rule had not eliminated discontent among its subjects, for all its remarkable success.