by Andrew Marr
Some of the lost kingdoms may well have been more interesting and surprising than the civilizations that had the luck to build in stone, to write, and thus be remembered. Hundreds of languages, ideas, systems of art and belief, have gone for ever. In a few areas, archaeologists are still turning up remarkable evidence of forgotten peoples. We could choose to look more closely at any of many examples of peoples at the edge of history during the age of the Romans and the Han, but one of the most intriguing was a people living on the Pacific coast of South America – the Nazca.
As the Chinese were struggling with their anti-barbarian walls and the Romans were enduring a spate of incompetent emperors, the Nazca were building a holy city of pyramids and plazas called Cahuachi. Today much of it looks simply like a series of small hills in the desert, a wilderness of grit and stone. There is an excavated central pyramid that has been unpleasantly ‘restored’ with strips of concrete and plaster. But as you tramp around the area, you notice small holes everywhere, then human bones, scraps of beautifully woven clothing and splinters of brick-red pottery. These are the leavings of grave-robbers. Lying exposed to the air, they date back to roughly the time when the Romans left Britain. Not far away are graves still containing huddled Nazcan figures, who look as if they died a week or two ago.
The deserts on the coastal plains of Peru are among the driest in the world. Hardly anything rots. But among the corpses and the skulls have been found some that look hardly human at all. Priests the world over have favoured odd-looking hats or headdresses to distinguish themselves from the rest. Nazca priests went one step further. From childhood their skulls were tightly wrapped between boards to push the bones upwards, producing elongated craniums – the original eggheads. These skulls are eerie enough, looking more like space aliens or the originals of Munch’s painting of a scream. In life, they must have inspired awe, if not downright terror.24
Like other early cultures, the Nazca were created by the special advantages provided by an unusual landscape. For though the desert is very dry, there are river valleys, and underground water is surprisingly close to the surface. Even today the transition between bone-dry, lunar desert and lush green is as dramatic as can be found anywhere on earth. It is reminiscent of the Nile valley, and of parts of southern Iraq; and indeed, like the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Nazca were a river civilization. Like them, the Nazca had to learn to control the river flow and use it with maximum efficiency for irrigation. In their case the key was not canals, as in Egypt, or fields with sluice-gates and raised borders as in Mesopotamia, but underground water channels and filtration galleries, connected to the surface by beautifully made spiralling holes known now as ojos, or ‘eyes’. These allowed people to keep the underground channels clean and the water flowing, for drinking, bathing, washing and farming.
As in the river cultures elsewhere, this system depended on large numbers of people working together under direction, and on the development of special stoneworking skills. As in Egypt, this helped shift a farming culture towards a more centralized and hierarchical one. As in Egypt, this led to towns and the rule of a priestly caste – who even practised mummification and built pyramids. So it is hard not to see the Nazca as later, littler, American Egyptians. And for a long time for them, life was good. In these lush crinkles in the desert modern farmers grow cotton, avocados, asparagus and much else for the world market. The Nazca people lived off maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, beans, manioc, llama and guinea-pig meat, and squash.
They also fished at sea with nets and inflatable skin boats and used llamas as pack animals. The Nazca produced beautiful cotton and wool textiles and kept themselves working hard with the help of coca leaves, the chewing stimulant still popular in South America today. For wilder times, they used hallucinogenic drugs from a cactus plant. They made sophisticated pottery pan-pipes and trumpets based on a common frequency and standardized pitch, and, for personal decoration or trade, they particularly valued the shell of a thorny oyster, coloured a startling red. Their clothing included tunics, mantles, turbans and sandals. And according to the pottery record, these people survived and thrived for some seven hundred years – about the same time as elapsed between the rise of the Roman republic in its early encounters with Carthage and the death of the Western Empire, when Rome fell to the Vandals. They may not have developed (or needed) the great engineering skills of the Romans, but their system of aqueducts and ojos was a considerable achievement; some of it still works today.
In some ways they were an attractive culture. Their pottery was sensational, beautifully coloured and increasingly complex as their society developed. Some idea of the fantastical gods and creatures of their pantheon can be grasped by modern scholars’ names for them – Spotted Cat, Mythical Harvester, Horrible Bird and Fan-headed Mythical Killer Whale. (Pottery figures suggest Nazca women had killer whales tattooed around their genitals – a formidable warning sign, presumably.) Their famous desert drawings show a high level of artistic skill. Some of their mummified bodies, found in local museums, are quite poignant, almost calling out to the visitor.
In other ways, however, they seem fearsome. Like the Celts and many other ancient people, the Nazca practised human sacrifice. Clearly, they regarded severed human heads as a source of power. Victims were decapitated, then their skulls were drilled through and roped together, cactus thorns often being stuck through the lips. The heads still abound in the area, with their braided hair and features hardly touched by time. Recent research by American university teams suggests that these heads were of the Nazca themselves, and therefore unlikely to be war trophies. The head-severing habit is fiercely debated by scholars, who are mostly stabbing in the dark. Towards the end of the Nazca period it seems to have become a kind of mania, until around a tenth of people, according to recent estimates, were decapitated. Why?
Other changes came, around the same time, in the mysterious drawings and lines that were created by removing red stones lying on the desert floor, revealing the brighter, whiter soil below. Earlier, Nazca drawings had been patterned and sometimes representational – such as birds, monkeys and fish, a hummingbird and a mysterious goggle-eyed humanoid. Later the lines evolved into long, straight strips pointing for miles in different directions, so like a modern airport that some have suggested they must have been created by aliens to guide UFOs. When you study them from nearby hilltops, they look as if they have been drawn with an engineer’s metal ruler and pencil; and they cover an area of over 190 square miles. What were they for? How were they drawn? They can best be viewed from the air, which is why they were not much noticed until the 1930s. It was proposed earlier that the Nazca had some kind of smoke-filled air balloon, but this theory has now crashed to earth.
It has now been shown that the lines and images could have been created by scaling up drawings, using coloured twine and sticks, which seems far likelier.25 The academic consensus today is that the lines probably had something to do with the presence of water under ground, those all-important aquifers, and the religious rituals practised to preserve them. But this is a consensus based on some heroic assumptions. What does seem to be the case is that later in their story the Nazca both increased the number of head sacrifices and drew longer and longer lines.
Something was changing their world.
It all coincides with big shifts in the weather. The year AD 535–6 was known around the world as the ‘year without sunshine’, when crops failed and the skies stayed dark. Probably a volcano or a meteor impact was the reason, but the effect was devastating, and it was followed by decades of heavy rain. In 500 there had been an El Niño weather event which dramatically worsened the coastal Pacific climate and also caused flooding and crop failure. Periodically, there are natural catastrophes – the earth’s plates grinding, and causing earthquakes and tsunamis; the eruption of super-volcanoes or meteorite hits – for which no society has found a remedy. About how to deal with them, history has little advice.
Yet the El Niño, th
e events of 535 and the long rains, destructive as they were, ought not to have destroyed the Nazca. Even though there was a subsequent drought, the rains would have helped refill the all-important underground water supplies. Research by a Cambridge University team now suggests that the reason the Nazca failed was at least partly because they had cut down forests of huarango trees.26 These had not only provided shade, fuel and building materials but had also underpinned the flood plain with their huge root systems – the largest by far in the Americas. Fixing nitrogen and helping fertilize the soil, these trees have been described as the ‘ecological keystone species’ for the area. Once the trees were cut down, perhaps to free up more land for cotton and maize, these unusual lush valleys were left to the mercy of the floods the Pacific brought – floods so bad, they washed away not only villages and fields but many centuries of painstaking human cultural development.
The Nazca religion with its stuffed human heads, its pointy-skulled priests, its hummingbirds, monkeys and arrow-straight lines, had told its people nothing useful about their deadly mistake. They were martyrs to their limited understanding – a far cry from the comfortable notion that ‘indigenous people’ always understand nature best. They had the wrong information and they made the wrong choices; instead of busying themselves with cutting off more heads they should have been worrying about cutting down their trees. They can stand for many other earlier civilizations which, far from living in harmony with nature, destroyed their own environment, and never made it.
The Triumph of the Christians
Christians had picked up the idea of martyrdom from Jewish thinking, but they extended it much further. There are numerous accounts of early Christians actively seeking death, urging uncertain Roman governors to insist on the penalty, which in the Roman Empire meant a painful and humiliating exit. The images of Christians being torn apart by wild beasts for the amusement of crowds are not simply products of the overheated imaginations of later painters or film-makers; early lives of the saints contain extremely detailed accounts of such horrible deaths, as well as roastings, flayings, disembowellings and burnings. Roman law was juster than many, but its punishments were designed to be public and to serve as deterrents: there is no reason to doubt that Christian martyrs experienced such terrible ends, alongside criminals and military renegades.
A rare record of the actual words of an early martyr comes in a ‘passion’ found in Greek and Latin, purporting to be the account of Perpetua, a twenty-two-year-old woman from a well-off family in Carthage who was killed in 203, with her pregnant slave Felicitas. They had been arrested for taking instruction in the new religion, and refused to recant, even though Perpetua was suckling her baby boy when they were imprisoned, alongside several male converts. The ancient text has a ring of truth, perhaps either having been written by Perpetua herself or dictated to one of the free Christians allowed to visit her. It was preserved in Greek monasteries throughout classical times and is therefore probably the earliest first-hand account of a Christian woman.
Dragged to the dungeon, Perpetua says, ‘I was very much afraid, because I had never felt such darkness. O terrible day! O the fierce heat of the shock of the soldiery, because of the crowds! I was very unusually distressed by my anxiety for my infant.’ Her father repeatedly tried to persuade her to recant, but failed. Her husband seems to have deserted her earlier on. She has visions in prison, of paradise and of a golden ladder, and of her brother who had died of cancer of the face but who was now, in the vision, healed.27 She dreamed of fighting with a serpent and with an enraged Egyptian, whom she associated with the Devil. Her maid Felicitas so wants to be martyred that she prays that her baby be delivered before the execution date, because pregnant women were not killed.
Their martyrdom was delayed until the emperor’s birthday and her prayer was answered. Felicitas’s baby was born early and taken for adoption. Still with milk dripping from her breasts, the maid and her lady Perpetua were stripped, whipped, wrapped in nets and led into the arena. The male martyrs were attacked by panthers, bears and wild boar, the women by an enraged cow, before being killed by gladiators. Perpetua, says an anonymous observer who watched the slaughter, insisted on feeling the pain of a sword-thrust and then, helping the nervous young swordsman whose job it was to finish her off, ‘she herself placed the wavering right hand of the gladiator to her throat’ and so died. Among those watching, we must suppose, would have been her distraught pagan father and other relatives, as well as Christian supporters.
Martyrs seem to have volunteered for death and supported themselves as they made their way through the Roman legal system, gaining fame in the Christian communities while trusting that their inspirational stories would be passed around by the leaders later known as bishops. The Roman persecutions happened in spasms, with long intervals between them, and with variations of severity in different parts of the empire. In some areas, the people themselves so hated the Christians that they demanded their execution. There is some evidence from Gaul, for instance, that the Christians were mainly immigrants, craftsmen who had come to find work and were resented, and that this contributed to their deaths. In other places, they were largely left alone. When an empire-wide persecution was ordered, they might lose their jobs, or have their holy texts burned, but no worse.
The persecutions did not work. Christian communities continued to grow, though it has been estimated that by the year 300 only around one in ten people had converted. Most hung on to the old religions, but this made the Christian challenge no easier. Christians did not fit easily into the Roman world because they were determined not to. Their refusal to pay even formal homage to the cult of emperors and old Roman beliefs made it almost impossible for them to serve in the army, or take any state posts. They refused to attend the public baths, an unattractive decision for those around them. They kept knowledge of their practices, notably the Eucharist, secret, which spread lurid rumours about what they really got up to. They confronted Jews with their message, sometimes in synagogues, provoking fights and riots. So it is hardly surprising that they became occasional scapegoats for a fearful urban fire or a protest.
Christianity offered a moral law but it also offered personal salvation, a one-to-one relationship with a universal god available to anyone who wanted it, free of ethnic, racial, tribal or class barriers. Since the ancient world was familiar with the notion of sacrifice, both human and animal, Christ’s self-sacrifice on the horrific execution rack of the Cross was not so outlandish. In a world plagued by maniac and squabbling emperors and occasional famines, and with a class divide between the plutocrats and the masses, the idea of an imminent cataclysm, and the end of time, may have been almost appealing. The era when the Christians began to win over large numbers of converts despite persecution was precisely the time of strife and hunger already referred to, when new walls were being hurriedly raised in Roman cities, often to protect the rich, and farmland was being abandoned.
The emperors likely to persecute Christians were not mere sadists, but those who wanted to revive the old glories of the Augustinian age. They were trying to turn back the water clock. For men like Diocletian, possibly the son of a slave himself, the profusion of cults and unpatriotic, dissident religions was a prime example of the disorder that had to be stemmed. He was a notorious persecutor whose name was particularly damned by later Christian writers, but he was also a great political reformer: it was he who, in 285, divided the rule of Rome between two senior emperors (of which he was one), each called Augustus, and two junior ones, Caesars, and he greatly improved the tax-collecting system. He pushed back invasions and did indeed restore law and order. But it was out of his persecutions and the breakdown of his new imperial regime that the oddest character in Christianity’s early story emerges – the emperor who was proclaimed not in Rome, but at York.
Constantine the Great is remembered as the emperor who converted to Christianity and who, by protecting it and advancing it, turned it into the state religion of the Roman Empir
e. From that turning-point emerges the Christian Church as an institution of worldly power, based in the old imperial capital, its popes joining hands with later would-be ‘holy emperors’. The Christians changed Rome, and Rome changed Christianity; and the man at the centre of the deal was Constantine. For centuries the Church lauded his name: the greatest of leaders, a paragon of virtue and, in the Eastern Church at least, a saint. Some Christians today, however, revile him as the man who by making their faith a buttress to imperial power, politicized it and drained it of its revolutionary and redemptive message.
What would Perpetua have thought?
Constantine was undoubtedly a very strange kind of saint – indeed, a strange kind of Christian. He seized power on the back of his army, quartered at York, after his soldier-father Constantius suddenly died in 306. Declaring himself emperor of that part of Diocletian’s quartet covering Britain, Gaul and Spain, he built his court at Trier on the Moselle River in what is now Germany before invading Italy and finally seizing Rome from a rival, one Maxentius, after a bloody battle. He later told the propagandist Church writer Eusebius that he defeated Maxentius after seeing a vision of the Cross in the sky, accompanied by the words ‘By this sign shall ye conquer’, and ordering his troops to place a sign of Christ – a Greek monogram – on their shields and flags. It was the first time that the Christ of peace and of a heavenly kingdom had associated himself with the outcome of a battle. And there are good reasons to be suspicious of the story. Constantine had previously associated himself with Apollo, the ‘unconquered sun god’ (Sol Invictus), whom his troops followed; his victory arch in Rome refers to the sun god, rather than to Christ.
