The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The second remarkable belief that developed among the Inca was that the divine ruler himself should not die, moreover that his spirit should be kept alive by adoration of his royal mummy. This was an idea that had been originally conceived among the Chimu (in the Moche Valley of Trujillo, which Yupanqui conquered early in the fifteenth century), but was taken over and elaborated by the Inca.46

  One can see how this idea of ancestor worship might have begun, and may have happened in one of two ways. We saw in chapter fifteen that some people in the dry deserts of western South America did not die in the accepted way but became, as we would say, mummified, apparently inhabiting a strange (and therefore sacred) half-way world between living and dying, when their body did not decay as ‘normal’. Alternatively, in a catastrophe, an earthquake, say, some people would be ‘taken’ by supernatural forces, people who, almost by definition, would become ancestors chosen to join the gods. Whatever the reason, there grew up among the Inca the strange cult of royal ancestor worship. What was so idiosyncratic about this was that the central element was the concept of ‘split inheritance’ (again a Chimu idea originally). Under this system, when a ruler died, one of his sons inherited his position as ruler, his right to govern, to wage war, and to levy taxes. But, and it is an all-important ‘but’, he received no material goods from his father. All the recently deceased ruler’s land – his buildings, chattels and servants – were held to be his property still and were entrusted to his panaqa, his other descendants in the male line. ‘Panaqa members served the departed king, acted as his courtiers, maintained his mummy, and were fed by his perceived generosity.’48 On this system of beliefs, an Inca ruler never died but continued to maintain a lavish court through the hands of his panaqa, his descendants. ‘It was customary for the dead rulers to visit one another, and they held great dances and revelries. Sometimes the dead went to the houses of the living, and sometimes the living visited them,’ wrote Pedro Pizarro in 1571. Fires were lit before the royal mummies, and food burned for them to consume; maize beer was offered and in one case the figure had a hollow stomach into which was placed a form of paste made of gold dust and the ashes of Inca kings’ hearts. This particular mummy was held to govern meteorological phenomena, such as thunder, rain, hail and frost.49

  More than that, during important ceremonies, the royal mummies – several of them, in order of seniority – were placed in special wall niches in the Coricancha temple in Cuzco, alongside images of Inti. Here too food was laid out for them to eat and they were venerated by everyone.

  Because of this system, the new leader, who had inherited no material goods, had to acquire new wealth, and in a society with no money that meant land and compulsory labour. Inca law was based on the mit’a tax, an obligation whereby individuals provided to the state a certain amount of labour every year, in return for which the state provided produce. If a new leader were to be a success, therefore, he needed above all new land in order to fulfil his obligations. The institution of split inheritance for the rulers meant that, as time went on, more and more new land was almost by definition marginal and more and more fertile land was owned by the dead, and unavailable to the living rulers. Likewise, with more and more people working panaqa land, there was less and less labour available to work any new land that an Inca ruler might conquer.

  Closely allied to ancestor worship was huaca, ‘the great integrating concept of Inca religion’.50 A huaca was a person, a place or a thing with sacred or supernatural associations and in practice applied to anything odd or unusual. According to some accounts, there were 328 huacas in the Cuzco area alone, each of which had to be ‘fed’ once a year.51

  What advantages did such an apparently maladaptive system bring? It seems it was designed to keep the powers of the nobles in check. A noble who was faithful to a successfully expansionist Inca was rewarded with land, servants and other privileges such as being able to wear the headbands and ear plugs of nobility. (Commoners were forbidden to own luxury goods such as gold objects, anything excess to their immediate needs.) As with the Aztecs and in other societies, prowess on the battlefield was the key. The nobility, many of royal blood, held all important government posts in the military, priesthood and bureaucracy. As with the Aztecs, the Incas felt they had divine patronage, which helped strengthen their national identity, set them apart from their neighbours and assigned them a special place among the inhabitants of the Earth.52

  Once fresh lands were conquered, the Incas would send out from Cuzco a range of trained officials, who would inventory everything, using their knotted tallies, or quipus, capable of storing very precise information. If the population was 100 or thereabouts, the Incas would install a hereditary curaca, a governor, often of local birth. For larger foreign populations, Inca nobles were sent in.

  By the time of the Conquest, the Inca empire consisted of millions of people living all over the long strip of land, scattered in villages and larger political centres. This makes them sound successful and in many ways they were, judging by their population levels. But – another important ‘but’ – as with the Aztecs, there was an instability built into the Inca system. The practice of keeping a dead Inca’s land in his panaqa, and requiring the new ruler to conquer fresh territory, worked only as long as there was land to conquer. As time went by, however, more and more land was in the hands of dead rulers, leaving only evermore marginal and/or distant land available. To the east it was worse. On the far slopes of the Andes, the Amazonian rainforest began, for which the Incas were constitutionally unsuited. They could not cope with the humidity, the insects, the vegetation – the forest itself – or the style of guerrilla war waged by the Amazonian Indians who did not fight set pieces, as the Incas preferred and were used to, but attacked in ambushes and then melted quickly away. Campaigns there were a disaster.

  This sparked a crisis and the idea gained ground – among some – to change the panaqa system. But this of course went directly against the interests and wishes of the warrior nobles.

  In 1525, Pachakuti’s grandson Huayna Capac died while making the last of the Inca expansions, in Ecuador. A bitter power struggle erupted between two of his sons, the half-brothers Huascar and Atahualpa. This too highlighted the at times idiosyncratic nature of Inca society, because royal succession was not determined by primogeniture: instead, the emperor was supposed to bequeath his position to his most competent son by his principal wife. However, in an effort – in a rigidly hierarchical society – to keep as much power as possible in the royal line, the practice had developed whereby each emperor took one of his sisters as his principal wife, an incestuous cult that may have been an extension of the endogamous practices that existed in the ayllu (see above) and paralleled the system among the Mixtec (see chapter twenty). However it happened, it clearly carried dangers though in the case of Huascar and Atahualpa faulty genes do not appear to have played a role in what transpired.

  Huascar was the legal heir, being the fruit of Huayna Capac’s marriage to his sister, whereas Atahualpa was the progeny of a second marriage. Despite his genes, Huascar well understood that the state was overextended and he proposed ending the mummy cult. Incensed, the warrior nobility took Atahualpa’s side and in the civil war that lasted for three years (1529–1532), he gradually beat down his rival.

  As with the Toltecs, and the Aztecs, then, the warrior nobility won the day among the Inca, which shows how forcefully the nobles would strive to maintain their privileges in what was obviously an unstable – and ultimately unsustainable – system. As with the Aztecs, however, the Inca system was never played out towards its logical end because the victorious Atahualpa, on his way to Cuzco for his coronation, encountered none other than Francisco Pizarro and his 168 Spaniards, some of them mounted on horse-back.

  CONCLUSION

  THE SHAMAN AND THE SHEPHERD: THE GREAT DIVIDE

  THE IBERIAN MOMENT

  Towards the end of the fifteenth century, various historical forces came together to create a situati
on in which Europeans in general and the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula in particular felt impelled to venture overseas as both explorers and conquerors. They did so as a result of a complex of motives, of which two stood out: acquisitiveness and religious zeal. The search for a new route to the spices of the East was one factor but, as Bernal Díaz wrote, he went to the Indies, as he thought, ‘to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do’.1

  Spanish nobles were especially familiar with this ideology, if such it can be called, because they were accustomed to a long and successful war against the Muslim states in Spain that had offered both ‘occasion and excuse’. The rest of Europe (i.e., Christendom) had by that time enjoyed a long respite from Muslim pressure on its eastern and southern edges due to the conquests of Genghis Khan whose swift victories, with a highly efficient cavalry operating over a vast area, and a remarkable religious tolerance, had made travel to the East safe and stimulated trade. The great monarchies of northern Europe had by now lost interest in crusading and had abandoned the fight against Islam to those who had Muslim neighbours in the Balkans and Byzantium, and the Iberian Peninsula.

  The advent of the Ottoman Turks, who took Constantinople in 1453, was however a dangerous development. Newly Islamised, and a proud people who had also converted from being horsemen to sailors, the emergence of the Turks as the most powerful state of the Middle East (they invaded Italy in 1480), made them a distant but still menacing threat that required the Spanish to fear the only Muslim state surviving in Europe at the time, the ancient and highly civilised kingdom of Granada.

  Within the Iberian Peninsula, Christian and Muslim states had coexisted side-by-side for centuries and had often formed alliances when it suited them. Moreover, the peninsula had become the principal point of contact between the two cultures, notably in Toledo where Jewish, Arab and Christian scholars had collaborated on a seminal series of works which ensured that the best of Greek thought survived and was translated and glossed into the languages of the new universities that sprang up from the twelfth century on. Philosophical, astronomical and medical works featured strongly in this tradition.

  But Granada was not as strong as she looked – by now she paid tribute to Castile and the rulers of the Spanish/Christian state knew that it was only a matter of time before the former entity was incorporated into the latter. That moment came with the accession of Isabella, in 1474. Intensely religious, ascetic, fearful of the lurking danger in the East, Isabella set about subduing her Moorish neigh-bour, village by village and town by town, beginning in 1482, a campaign that took a decade to complete but finally succeeded when the capital fell in 1492.

  There was also, as J.H. Parry has pointed out, a curious parallel between the Ottoman Turks, in the East, and the Castilians of Spain. ‘The Castilians had never been as parasitic upon the horse in the same degree as the Turks, but they too, in Andalusia and elsewhere, employed mobile and largely mounted forces against sedentary communities. Among them, in the arid uplands of Castile, pastoral pursuits, the grazing of semi-nomadic flocks and herds, had long been preferred to arable farming . . . The man on horseback, the master of flocks and herds, was best adapted to such conditions . . . As the work of the conquest proceeded, the Castilians, or the upper classes, the fighting classes among them, retained their pastoral interests and possessions, their mobility and military effectiveness, and their respect for the man on horseback.’2

  These were the people who settled the New World and it helps explain why small bands of mounted Spaniards could achieve such remarkable victories and could then settle as quasi-feudal overlords, retaining their pastoral interests and relying on conquered peasants to grow grain for them (because of course they had no domestic mammals of their own).

  This account continues the theme of The Great Divide, that the domestic mammals of the Old World have had an important effect on the course of history, but it is not by any means the whole picture. There were many other factors which came into play: the plague, which shifted the centre of gravity of Europe to the west and north; the development of the north, due to the wool industry in the Netherlands and Britain, the routes between the Mediterranean and the English Channel being one of the elements in opening up the Atlantic; navigational and shipping innovations, introduced partly a result of the Crusades; the Crusades themselves, which sent men abroad to convert the unbelievers; the rediscovery of Ptolemy and his underestimation of the size of the earth; inaccurate and outdated travel literature which reinforced that view; the discovery that sailing in the tropics was easier than had been anticipated; deep-sea fishing exploits that had also helped familiarise and accustom sailors to the Atlantic; the discovery of islands in the ocean, which promised yet more land available to the brave.

  All of these psychological and technical matters came together to produce what we might call the Iberian Moment, why it was that the Spaniards and Portuguese were the first to cross the Atlantic going from east to west, to discover the Americas, rather than the other way round, with Moctezuma’s admirals travelling to Africa or Europe (or Japan, for that matter).

  PATTERNS IN LA LONGUE DURÉE

  The narrative of this book is not a straight line, not by any means; also, we must be careful not make it read like a ‘Just So’ story. We began, in the Introduction, by saying that we were to conduct a natural experiment, but one in which it would be impossible to verify all the details. Even so, as should now be clear, we are able to offer, in broad terms, a hypothesis as to why the two hemispheres diverged from each other. No less important, our theme also suggests a view on what, ultimately, it means to be human – it is, in a sense, a new version of what influences affect the broad sweep of human history.

  Human societies developed in very similar ways, according to certain criteria. As several surveys confirm, they include the fact that most societies are egalitarian – and villages undefended – until they reach somewhere between 150 and 300 inhabitants; nowhere have foragers developed ceremonial architecture; above the level of the village, hereditary leadership, ceremonialism and warfare emerge, with approximately 25 per cent of males being killed violently; with warfare male ‘superiority’ emerges; elites everywhere cultivate a distinctive lifestyle. And so on. The fact that such similarities exist across the world is remarkable testimony to the underlying unity of human behaviour.3

  It has not been my aim in this book to deny either the existence or the importance of the many similarities that exist across the range of human societies scattered over the Earth. Not at all. But it has been my aim, unlike earlier authors, to focus on the differences, and to show how fruitful contrasts can be, alongside the parallels. The work of Joyce Marcus is instructive here. It will be recalled from chapter twenty-one that she looked at hieroglyphic scripts in four Mesoamerican cultures and concluded that they were not literate in the accepted use of that term. Literacy, she decided, was not the aim of the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Mayans and Aztecs, and that may have been true of all cultures with hieroglyphic script: its use was chiefly as propaganda, to boost a society’s self-esteem, confirming the genealogy of the ruling regime and reinforcing social stratification. So all societies with writing are not necessarily literate. This is a useful gloss, and an advance.

  We can now see that some profound differences have grown up between the peoples of the two hemispheres and we are at last in a position to put those differences into context.

  We may say that, at its most basic, people ‘become human’ – become the rounded, integrated, reflective observers that they are – by means of a three-stage process.

  The first element in this three-stage process is that people are placed, unavoidably, in a landscape, an environment. They live – or settle – on mountainsides, or in valleys, in the jungle, by rivers or next to the sea. They inhabit arid deserts, cold, tundra-like forests, or extensive grasslands. Some move between different landscapes. They are surrounded by animals – by birds or fish, by
predators perhaps. They share their landscape with plants – grasses, shrubs, trees and flowers, some more nutritious, more medically useful and more psychoactive than others. And people live among weather: they live surrounded by different and systematic admixtures of sunshine, rain, wind, hail, lightning, they suffer natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis. They live under the heavens – the sun, the moon, and the stars including the Milky Way. And finally they live on land, on continents, that are scattered randomly across the spherical globe and are in different relationships with the great oceans. That land is primarily north-south in orientation, or east-west, configurations that are basic to weather and climate and to the history of weather and climate. All of these factors, we can now see, come together to create, broadly speaking, two great entities across the world, two configurations whose similarities and differences help explain the separate development of mankind on the two great hemispheres.

  What is also clear from the story this book has told is that these combined factors – let’s call them environmental factors – operate on human beings to produce in them, and this is the second stage of the three-stage process, an ideology, a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding and interpreting that world, a way of making sense of the Earthly phenomena that manifest themselves and surround human beings everywhere. It is straight away evident from this book that ideologies vary much more in the Old World than they do in the New, in ways that are discussed later.

  In the third stage of the process, the ideologies that people adopt as a result of their surrounding environment, and the technologies they develop, continue to interact with that environment, which of course itself continues to change, partly as a result of the evolution of the Earth, of cosmological, astronomical and geological events, and partly as a result of the changes that overtake humankind itself as a result of the first two stages.4