A History of the World in 100 Objects

by MacGregor, Neil

  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.

  There’s a lot of mystery still to unravel about this grim but gripping material. The Moche stopped making these horror-movie pots and indeed pretty much everything else in the seventh century – roughly at about the time of the Sutton Hoo ship burial (see Chapter 47). There are no written records to tell us why, but the best bet seems to be climate change. There were several decades of intense rain followed by a drought that upset the delicate ecology of their agriculture and wrecked much of the infrastructure and farmlands of the Moche state. People did not entirely abandon the area, but their skills seem to have been used above all for the building of fortresses, which suggests a world splintering in a desperate competition for diminishing natural resources. Whatever the cause, in the decades around AD 600, the Moche state and civilization collapsed.

  To most of us in Europe today, the Moche and other South American cultures are unfamiliar and unnerving. In part, that’s because they belong to a cultural tradition that followed a very different pattern from Africa, Asia and Europe; for thousands of years, the Americas had a separate parallel history of their own. But, as excavation unearths more of their story, we can see that they are caught in exactly the same predicaments as everybody else – harnessing nature and resources, avoiding famine, placating the gods, waging war – and, as everywhere else, they addressed these problems by trying to construct coherent and enduring states. In the Americas, as all over the world, these ignored histories are now being recovered to shape modern identities, as Steve Bourget details:

  One of the fascinating things that I am looking at when I look at Peru today is that they are in the process of doing what also happens in Mexico, perhaps in Egypt, and eventually I would believe China, where these countries who have a great ancient past build their identity through this past and it becomes part of their present. So the past of Peru will be its future. And eventually the Moche will I think become a name just as much as the Maya or the Inca, or the Aztec for that matter. Eventually it will become part of t
he world legacy.

  The more we look at these American civilizations the more we can see that their story is part of a coherent and strikingly similar worldwide pattern; a story that seems destined to acquire an ever greater modern political significance. And next we’re going to see what events of 1,300 years ago meant in contemporary Korea.

  49

  Korean Roof Tile

  Ceramic tile, from South Korea

  700–800 AD

  If you use a mobile phone, drive a car or watch a television, the chances are that at least one of those objects will have been made in Korea. Korea is one of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies, a provider of high technology to the world. We tend to think of it as a new player on the global stage – but that is not how Koreans see themselves, for Korea has always been pivotal in relations between China and Japan, and it has a long tradition of technological innovation. It was Korea, for example, that pioneered movable metal type, and it did it well before it was developed in Europe. Besides its technology, the other thing which everybody knows about Korea today is that, since the end of the Korean War in 1953, it has been bitterly divided between a communist north and a capitalist south.

  This roof tile comes from Korea around the year 700, when the newly unified state was enjoying great prosperity. It is a moment in Korea’s history that is now read differently by north and south, but it is still central to any modern definition of Korean identity.

  By 700, Korea was already a rich, urbanized country, a major trade player at the end of the famous Silk Road. But this object isn’t made of precious silk; it’s cheap clay – but clay that tells us a great deal about Korea’s ‘golden age’.

  One of the fascinating things about this period is that on both edges of the Eurasian landmass similar political developments were under way. Tribes and little kingdoms were coalescing into larger units that would eventually become some of the nation states that we know today: England and Denmark on one side, Japan and Korea on the other. For all these countries, these were the critical centuries.

  Lying between north-east China and Japan, the Korean peninsula was, like England at the same date, fragmented into competing kingdoms. In 668 the southernmost kingdom, Silla, with the backing of Tang Dynasty China – then, as now, the regional superpower – conquered its neighbours and imposed its rule from the far south to somewhere well north of what is now Pyongyang. It never controlled the far north (the border with modern China), but for the next 300 years the unified Silla kingdom ruled most of what is now Korea from its imperial capital in the south, Kyongju, a city splendidly adorned with grand new buildings. The ceramic roof tile in the British Museum comes from one of those new buildings, in this case a temple, and it tells us a great deal about the achievements and apprehensions of the young Silla state around the year 700.

  The tile is about the size of a large old-fashioned roof slate – just under 30 centimetres by 30 (12 inches by 12) – and it’s made of heavy cream-coloured clay. The top and the sides are edged with a roughly decorated border, and in the middle is a fearsome face looking straight out, with a squashed nose, bulging eyes, small horns and abundant whiskers. It looks like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a Pekinese dog. The tile is very similar to ones made in Tang China at the same time, but this is emphatically not a Chinese object. Unlike the broad grin of a Chinese dragon, the mouth here is small and aggressive – and the modelling of the tile has a rough vigour that is very un-Chinese.

  It looks a bit like an oriental gargoyle – and that is pretty well what it was. It would have had a similar position to a gargoyle, high up on a temple or a grand house. The features of the face are quite rough, and it’s obvious that it has been made by pushing the wet clay into a fairly simple mould. This is clearly a mass-produced object, but that is why it’s so interesting; this is just one of tens of thousands of tiles designed to cover roofs that would once have been thatched but in prosperous Silla were now tiled with objects like this.

  The Korean specialist Dr Jane Portal explains why the Silla wanted to build such a grand capital as Kyongju, and why they needed so many new houses:

  The city of Kyongju was based on the Chinese capital Chang’an, which was at the time the biggest city in the world, and Kyongju developed hugely once Silla had unified most of the Korean peninsula. A lot of the aristocrats from the kingdoms which were defeated by Silla had to come and live in Kyongju, and they had magnificent houses with tiled roofs. This was a new thing, to have tiled roofs, so this tile would have been a sort of status symbol.

  Tiles were sought after not only because they were expensive to make but, above all, because they didn’t catch fire like traditional thatch; burning thatch was the greatest physical threat to any ancient city. By contrast, a tiled city was a safe city, and so it is perfectly understandable that a ninth-century Korean commentator, singing the splendours of the city at the height of its prosperity, should dwell lyrically on its roofs:

  The capital, Kyongju, consisted of 178,936 houses … There was a villa and pleasure garden for each of the four seasons, to which the aristocrats resorted. Houses with tiled roofs stood in rows in the capital, and not a thatched roof was to be seen. Gentle rain came with harmonious blessings and all the harvests were plentiful.

  But this tile wasn’t intended merely to protect against the ‘gentle rain’. That was the job of the more prosaic, undecorated tiles covering the whole roof. Sitting at the decorated end of a ridge, glaring out across the city, our dragon tile was meant to ward off a teeming invisible army of hostile spirits and ghosts – protecting not just against the weather but against the forces of evil.

  The dragon on our roof tile was, in a sense, just a humble foot soldier in the great battle of the spirits that was being perpetually fought out at roof level, high above the streets of Kyongju. It was only one of forty different classes of protective beings that formed a defensive shield against spirit missiles, which could be deployed at all times to protect the people and the state. But, at ground level, there were other threats: there were always potential rebels within the state – the aristocrats who had been forced to live in Kyongju, for example – and on the coast there were Japanese pirates. A dragon would provide security for the household, but every Silla king had to negotiate one great and ongoing political predicament that even dragon-faced house tiles could not deal with: how to maintain freedom of action in the looming shadow of his mighty neighbour, Tang China.

  The Chinese had supported the Silla in their campaign to unify Korea, but only as an intended preliminary to China taking over the new kingdom itself, so the Silla king had to be both nimble and resolute in holding the Chinese emperor at bay while maintaining the political alliance. In cultural terms, the same subtle balancing act between dependence and autonomy has been going on for centuries and continues to this day to be a key element of Korean foreign policy.

  In Korean history the united Silla kingdom, prosperous and secure at the end of the Silk Road, stands as one of the great periods of creativity and learning, a ‘golden age’ of architecture and literature, astronomy and mathematics. Fearsome dragon roof tiles like this one long continued to be a feature of the roofscape in Kyongju and beyond, and the legacy of the Silla is apparent in Korea even today, as Dr Choe Kwang-Shik, Director-General of the National Museum of Korea, tells us:

  The cultural aspect of the roof tile still remains in Korean culture. If you go to the city of Kyongju now you can see in the streets that the patterns still remain on the road, for instance. So, in that aspect, the artefact has now become ancient, but it survives through the culture. In a sense, I think Koreans feel that it is an entity, as if it’s a mother figure. So in that sense Silla is one of the most important periods in Korean history.

  But, in spite of surviving street patterns and strong cultural continuities, not everyone in Korea today will read the Silla legacy in the same way, or indeed claim the Silla as their mother culture. Jane Portal explains what it means now:

  What Koreans thin
k about Silla today depends on where they live. If they live in South Korea, the Silla represents this proud moment of repelling aggression from China, and it meant that the Korean peninsula could develop independently from China. But if they live in North Korea, they feel that Silla has been overemphasized historically, because actually Silla only unified the southern two thirds of the peninsula. What Silla means today depends on which side of the Demilitarized Zone you live.

  Not least among the many questions at issue between North and South Korea today is what was really going on 1,300 years ago. As so often, how you read history depends on where you’re reading it from.

  50

  Silk Princess Painting

  Silk painting, from Xinjiang province, China

  600–800 AD

  Once upon a time, in the high and far off days of long ago, there was a beautiful princess who lived in the land of silk. One day her father, the emperor, told her she must marry the king of the distant land of jade. The jade king could not make silk, because the emperor kept the secret to himself. And so the princess decided to bring the gift of silk to her new people. She thought of a trick – she hid everything that was needed – the silk worms, the mulberry seeds – everything – in her royal headdress. She knew that her father’s guards would not dare to search her as she left for her new home. And that, my Best Beloved, is the story of how Khotan got its silk.