Here is a prime example of sideways history; yet it also serves as a prime example of a concept remaining undeveloped. The Mayans found no need to make further use of their newly discovered zero. The Europeans, who were entering the age of widespread foreign exchange and banking, certainly did, and benefitted accordingly. This led to a great leap forward in European mathematical understanding, as well as facilitating mercantile interaction.
The collapse of Mayan civilisation was as mysterious as it was sudden. After a continuous history of over 2,000 years, Mayan life rapidly began to disintegrate. Between the end of the eighth century AD and the beginning of the ninth century AD, the Mayans began to desert their cities, as well as the pasturelands they had painstakingly carved out of the tropical rainforest. The jungle reclaimed most of these sights, but cities and ancient pyramids are still being discovered to this day. Aerial mapping techniques used in Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula (Mexico) indicate the existence of large networks of freshwater canals, farming on an industrial scale, and extensive cities with pyramids, temples and plazas.
It was out of this rich mix of Mesoamerican civilisations that the Aztecs would finally emerge as the major empire. In 1428, a triple alliance was formed between the three most powerful city states in central Mexico: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan. This new Aztec power base soon reduced their neighbours to ‘tribute’ states, until the empire extended across central Mexico from the Caribbean to the Pacific, around 500 miles at its widest.
The capital of this new empire was the fabled city of Tenochtitlan, on the present site of Mexico City. When Tenochtitlan was founded, this region was covered by the shallow waters of Lake Texcoco. The land chosen for the city was a marshy offshore island – hardly a promising location, despite its protection by the surrounding waters. The island was drained, easily defensible causeways were linked to the mainland, and terracotta ducts brought fresh water from surrounding springs and rivers.The city itself was built on a semi-grid pattern, with well laid-out canals, causeways, streets, plazas, temples and pyramids. Within just over a century, this city had become one of the wonders of the world. Its population was said to have been over 300,000, making it far larger than any city in Europe, matched only by the likes of Hangzhou and Cairo.
To anyone mounting the hillside overlooking the lake for the first time, Tenochtitlan appeared like a dream, or at least a mirage island in the midst of the still waters of the lake. Inside the city, the streets were filled with a people whose migrating ancestors had parted over seventy millennia ago from the Homo sapiens who had evolved to become the European variety of the species.
In the marketplaces, the short, stocky stallholders had square, light-brown faces, fringed, straight black hair, and wore rudimentary clothes made out of dried maguey (agave) leaf-fibres. Their stalls were heaped with colourful foodstuffs seen nowhere else on earth: maize, peppers, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cocoa beans, vanilla pods. The citizens lived with their families in small huts made of wattle and daub, along with their domesticated dogs and pet turkeys. To entertain themselves, they sat on the ground playing flutes, whose whistles were echoed by the exotic-coloured parrots who perched on the rooftops.
Most amazing of all was the palace of the king, which contained over a thousand rooms, each with its own bath. His gardens contained no less than two separate zoos – one containing eagles and birds of prey, whilst the second housed large wild cats with leopard-like markings on their fur (ocelots) and ferocious-looking black dragon-like reptiles with crests on their backs (iguanas). Elsewhere in the garden, ducks with all manner of colourful plumage swam in more than a dozen ponds.
Yet at the heart of this wondrous city lay its ceremonial centre, complete with sacrificial pyramids, where the citizens would gather to watch the gruesome blood-letting for the gods. Curiously, the victims who took part in these horrific ceremonies appear to have been led up the steps quite calmly, and to have accepted their living disembowelment with an equanimity that is all but impossible for us to conceive. It has been suggested that they must have been drugged beforehand, but contemporary evidence contradicts this.
Following the sacrifice, the victims ‘were sent rolling down the steps of the temple, and the steps were bathed in blood’. The gore and bodies tumbling down the steps of the pyramids towards the population below seem to have evoked similar alien emotions. One would expect the assembled crowd to experience a mix of strong contradictory feelings. Fear and empathy, reinforcing the dominance of the authorities – such as was experienced at public executions in empires elsewhere. Or a warped exultation at the death of so many enemies. Perhaps catharsis even, as was experienced by the audience at an Ancient Greek tragedy. No, the Aztecs appear to have accepted that such bloodshed was necessary to feed the gods, as well as to maintain the all-important business of assisting the sun on its course, in order to prevent any catastrophe such as might bring their present era to an end.
After the ceremonies, the skulls of those who had been sacrificed were stacked in racks outside the temples. As to the precise numbers of those sacrificed, figures remain uncertain. When a new temple to Huitzilopochtli, the fear-some god of the sun and war, was dedicated in 1487, it is said that 80,400 people (including women and children) were sacrificed. This is certainly an exaggeration. On the other hand, scholars agree that as many as 20,000 victims may have been sacrificed each year throughout the empire, both around this time and during the preceding decades.
Yet now that the three main city states had formed an alliance, there was less occasion for war, and consequently a lack of captives for the human sacrifice ceremony. And even a succession of minor wars against nearby vassal states could only provide an increasingly inadequate supply. In 1450 there was a severe famine, and according to the twentieth-century Mexican anthropologist, Miguel Leon-Portilla, the priests declared that ‘the gods were angry at the empire and to placate them it was necessary to sacrifice many men and this had to be done regularly.’
To overcome this problem, the authorities arranged so-called ‘Battles of the Flowers’. Far from being as innocuous and enchanting as their name might suggest, these consisted of ritual battles between chosen members of the different city states. Lethal weapons were substituted with flat wooden clubs, which could batter the enemy into submission, perhaps even render him unconscious, so that he could be captured without sustaining serious injury. These battles had the added advantage of providing military training, as well as supplying sacrificial victims.
All this would seem to indicate a population with an all-pervasive aura of collectivity, to the point where it seemingly obliterated any ill-defined remnant of individuality amongst its citizens. Yet this was far from being the case: the Aztecs had developed their own unique sense of self. According to George Orwell, writing of his contemporaries: ‘By the age of fifty every man has the face he deserves.’ Well over half a millennium previously, the Aztecs had refined this casual generalisation into a profound individualistic philosophy of their own. This way of thought had originally been developed by the privileged class of ‘wise men’ amongst the priesthood, who claimed that it stemmed from ‘the legendary symbol of Nahuatl knowledge – the great figure of Quetzalcoatl’. The latter god appeared in the form of a feathered serpent and was responsible for the creation of humanity. According to his teachings, it should be the aim of all men ‘to have and develop in themselves a face’. This eliminated the anonymity into which they had been born, and enabled them to ‘put a mirror before their fellow men’. It enabled each human being to develop self-knowledge, wisdom and care – both for himself, his family and his people.
So profound was this message that it was said its implications were embodied in the Nahuatl language itself. Western philosophers will recognise a poetic version of the teachings of Socrates in the initial urge to self-knowledge. As for the second part, the idea that the very language we learn leads us to the philosophical conclusions we reach, is astonishingly modern. Not until the twentieth
century would the Austrian linguistic philosopher Wittgenstein suggest this paradox.
In 1502, the thirty-six-year-old Montezuma II succeeded as the ninth ruler of Tenochtitlan, holding sway over the entire Aztec Empire. Montezuma II was renowned as a warrior and is said to have extended the influence of his empire to its greatest limits. Others speak of him as being indecisive and overwhelmed by a foreboding of his own tragic destiny. The early years of his reign witnessed a number of omens prophesying disaster. Then a comet was observed, marking for many the end of the fifty-two-year cycle of the Aztec calendar, and the imminence of the end of the fifth sun.
When Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas in 1492, this isolated landmass was once again reunited with the outside world. The Spanish immediately launched a full-scale search and conquest in the hope of extracting precious metals and other valuables. Backed by such motives, the Spanish conquistador, Hernân Cortés, made landfall in February 1519 on the Mexican coast at what is now Puerto Cruz. He was accompanied by just five hundred men. According to an ancient belief stemming from the Tolmec era, the gods had sailed from Mexico, promising that they would one day return.
Cortés and his men seemed to fulfil this prophecy. To the Aztecs they even resembled gods: the Europeans had white skin and fearsome beards, some were giants with two arms and four legs (men on horseback), and they could kill people far away from them with a bang and a puff of smoke (musket-fire). Amazingly, the Aztecs had built their huge and precisely constructed monuments without the use of pack animals or the wheel.
Just as the Europeans had never seen tomatoes, potatoes and the like, the Aztecs in their isolation had developed no immunity to such common European diseases as smallpox, cholera, bubonic plague, ’flu and even the common cold. On the other hand, Spanish sailors returning to Europe brought with them the scourge of syphilis. The collapse of the already ailing Aztec Empire was as swift as it was spectacular.
Within two years, Cortés and his few hundred men had, by means of trickery, propaganda, superior weaponry, disease and so forth overcome the Aztec Empire. In the process Montezuma II was held hostage and killed, Tenochtitlan was destroyed, and Cortés inadvertently became the first European to set eyes on the western Pacific Ocean. Up to three million Aztecs are said to have died, and the rest were converted to Christianity by Catholic priests, with results we have already described. To this day, in remote jungle regions of the Yucatan Peninsula, Honduras, and Guatemala, isolated tribes of Mayan and Aztec people are known to continue with their own indigenous cultural practices.
Sequence
Concurrent with the Aztec Empire was the Inca Empire, which at its height occupied the remote east coast and hinterland of South America from the southmost tip of Colombia as far as mid-Chile, a distance of some 2,500 miles. In isolation, this too had developed into an original civilisation, quite independently of the Aztecs. The Inca’s wealth, and their downfall, resulted largely from Potosi, the so-called ‘mountain of silver’, which soon attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizzaro, who led just 160 men and conquered the empire in two years. However, he never discovered the empire’s masterpiece, the so-called ‘lost city of the Incas’. This was Machu Picchu, built over 8,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, by a civilisation that had only llamas (worthless as pack animals over mountainous terrain), and like the Aztecs had yet to discover the wheel. Machu Picchu would remain ‘lost’ for another 400 years.
However, in 1553 the Spanish did discover an ancient artefact, which remains as impressive and perplexing as any yet found on earth. Some 1,700 feet up in the Peruvian Andes they came across a long, permanently dry, windless, arid plateau covered in drawings known as the Nazca Lines. These depict in outline vast geoglyphs – drawings of plants, animals, even spiders, and primitive representations of human-like creatures with round heads, eyes and legs. And a number of seemingly unknown creatures. As well as these there are a series of undeviating straight lines, some over 1,000 feet long, which have been drawn across the desert floor.
It appears that these all date from around 200 and 600 BC. Yet despite all manner of ingenious explanations, no serious investigator has yet managed to provide any entirely convincing explanation of their existence. By contrast, the irrepressible Erich von Däniken has asserted that these markings were created by ‘ancient astronauts’. Despite such tomfoolery, there is no denying that the full beauty and art of these markings can only fully be appreciated when they are viewed from high in the sky, and are even visible from satellites.
Such pre-modern imperial wonders appear all the more amazing when seen in the larger historical context of the migration of Homo sapiens to the very limits of the habitable globe. The challenges encountered on these migrations had led to Homo sapiens mastering a series of entirely new cognitive skills. As we have seen, the manifestations of these developments bore both perplexing similarities and astonishing differences. Yet in a profound sense, they were common throughout the species. They involved traits capable of abstract, symbolic and religious behaviour. This was the beginnings of art, science and writing. Humanity as we know it had been born.
But this new variant species was far from being any Nietzschean ‘superman’ in comparison with his fellow hominids. Homo sapiens may have been taller than Homo erectus and others, but many of these – especially Neanderthals – were much stockier and physically stronger. Threats from early hominids, climate change, geography and all the ‘accidents of history’ ensured that the family groups and tribes of these new, more advanced beings were constantly on the move, driven further and further from their home continent. Yet their developing superior faculties, ingenuity in adapting to their surroundings, and imagination, ensured that they thrived and continued to evolve.
On attaining the furthest habitable limits of our planet, they often found hominid predecessors in residence. These two ‘cousin’ species would live alongside each other, on occasion for many thousands of years. Yet in every known case, Homo sapiens seems to have outlived its hominid predecessors, who became extinct. The speed with which this new Homo sapiens spread across our planet is remarkable. A brief (and much simplified) list will suffice to illustrate this.
Although the first human immigrants crossed the Beringa Land Bridge from Eastern Siberia some 25,000 years ago, within 9,000 years they had reached Patagonia at the tip of South America. Just 2,000 years after this, a second wave of migrants crossed the bridge, peopling the North American plains with groups of indigenous tribes-people. It was another 10,000 years before a third wave, the Inuits, arrived and took possession of the icy wastes of northern Canada.
Homo sapiens arrived comparatively early in western Australia, some 65,000 years ago. Yet it was just 3,000 years ago that a late wave of seafaring people set off into the Pacific, travelling north of Australia via New Guinea. After this they split, populating the Pacific islands. The northern group reached Hawaii around 1,000 years ago, the southern group reached New Zealand around the same time. These latter people then continued east along a distended line of islands until finally they reached the very last of the chain, now known as Easter Island, around AD 300, but possibly as late as AD 1200.29
Here they started erecting almost a thousand tall stone heads (Moai), all facing east. These remain only one of the many unsolved mysteries concerning this island, which is around 1,000 miles from the nearest islands (the Pitcairns) and over 2,000 miles from the coast of South America, making it one of the most remote inhabited spots on earth. It would be at least half a millennium before the island was rediscovered by Europeans, who arrived to find the natives harvesting sweet potatoes, which originate from South America, suggesting that the inhabitants, had American origins. On the other hand, the Europeans’ ship also had a Hawaiian crew member, who was able to communicate with the locals by means of his own language.
This now brings us up to date with the population of the earth by Homo sapiens. However, this in itself leads to an intriguing questi
on concerning our species. Namely, its ability to produce art: an impulse that would increasingly characterise individual human development from this period on in far-flung regions ranging from Renaissance Europe to Moghul India and Ming China.
Once again, it is necessary to return to prehistoric times. As we have seen, the impulse to create pyramids was not universal. Yet Homo sapiens does appear to have been driven by a compulsive need to leave behind him a precise trace of his existence, which can be seen as the beginnings of art. And what is most striking is the very particularity that this impulse first took: hand stencils. These were created by placing a hand on a cave wall and blowing coloured pigment (such as red ochre) through a pipe so that the outlined imprint of the hand remained. This is arguably the earliest form of individualised art, yet its widespread and spontaneously independent appearance in vastly disparate locations is revelatory.
Such stencils appeared in caves in France and Spain (dating from some 35,000 years ago). Identical stencils appear as far apart as Indonesia (40,000 years ago) and Patagonia (9,000 years ago). But there is a sting in the tail. Such artefacts appeared to demonstrate a quality unique to Homo sapiens, until in 2018 hand stencils were found in caves in Spain, which predated the emigration of Homo sapiens from Africa by some 20,000 years. And these hands were unmistakably Neanderthal.
Homo sapiens is certainly unique amongst the hominids30 in having survived extinction. Which begs the question: what else is unique about the evolution of this species apart from its survival, along with the lasting monuments of empire that it left behind?
27 Indeed, many present-day global features were radically different. Japan was joined to Korea and China, and a land bridge between Europe and Asia separated the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. These and other geographical transformations give pause for thought concerning early racial development, as well as the future sea-level rise that will be caused by global warming. The world was not, and will not, always be the same. Either geographically, or politically.
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