Mayan ruins in Central America dating from between the sixth and tenth centuries CE.
Much the same process occurred in the Andes, although the earlier cultures are less well known than those of Mesoamerica. Two city-states developed around 500 CE: Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca, by the Peru-Bolivia border; and Wari in southern Peru. Both states built on earlier Andean cultures—the Pukará, Huarpa, Moche, and Nazca. Both developed extensive trade networks throughout the region. The Wari developed a string of colonies that stretched for one thousand miles along the spine of the Andes. At its height, Tiwanaku’s population was approaching one hundred thousand in the city, with a quarter million in the surrounding countryside. (It would be another five hundred years before Paris could claim similar numbers.) Both states fell apart soon after 1000 CE, their lands and culture absorbed by other Andean cultures, ending with the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century.
Mezo-American cultures in the first millennium BCE
AROUND 1250 CE, A WARLIKE people calling themselves the Incas, or “lords,” entered the valley of Cuzco and settled among the tribes who had lived there for centuries. Their ruler was known as the Sapa Inca, or “sole Lord.” Under the leadership of men with names like “War Chieftain,” “Unforgettable,” and “He Who Weeps Blood,” they made and broke alliances with other tribes, conquering them one by one.
Andean cultures, 1250-1450 CE
In 1438, with the entire Cuzco valley under Inca control, the ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti (“Earthquake,” or “Earth Upside Down”), grew more ambitious. He conquered a swath of territory from Lake Titicaca to Ecuador, turning the Inca state from a regional power into an empire. His son, Topa Inca, the “Unforgettable King,” succeeded him. Topa Inca was the Genghis Khan of the Native American world. No Native American ruler before or since conquered so much territory in such a short period of time. Between 1471 and 1483, he expanded the Inca Empire beyond the boundaries of Peru into modern Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, then moved northward, conquering coastal Ecuador and the mountain kingdom of Quito.
Topa Inca did not always show mercy to those who surrendered. On one occasion, he promised the people of the coastal city of Huarco that they would be treated fairly if they surrendered. When they left the safety of their walls, he attacked. Thousands were killed. Their bleached bones littered the ground around the city for generations.
Topa Inca’s successor, Huayna Capac (“Young Man with Many Virtues”) was chosen from more than sixty of his father’s sons as heir to the throne. The last of the great Inca rulers, he expanded the empire’s borders still further, completing the conquest of Ecuador and advancing to what is now southern Colombia. When he died in 1527, the Inca Empire measured nearly three thousand miles from north to south, reaching from “Mother Sea” in the west to the Amazon jungles in the east. The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu—the “Land of the Four Quarters.”
Led by Pachacuti, the warrior prince of the city of Cuzco, the Incas built their empire in isolation—both the key to their success and the cause of their eventual undoing.
At its peak, the Inca confederation included the lands and tribal peoples of modern Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. Expert farmers, they produced a trio of high-energy superfoods: potatoes, maize, and peanuts.
QUIPU
The Inca had no written language, but they had a sophisticated system of keeping records based on knots, known as quipu.
The quipu was a rope with colored strings dangling from it. It could be as short as two inches or as long as ten feet. Each color had a different meaning. Yellow stood for gold, white for silver, green for cocao, red for soldiers, etc. Information was recorded on each string using a complicated pattern of knots that formed a binary code similar to modern computer languages. Quipu makers from every quarter, district, and province were charged with recording the details of life at each level of the empire. Each quipu gave a snapshot of the empire, a region, or a village at a given moment. A quipu could tell the emperor how many people had died in a village in a year and how many had been born. Different strings could tell him the ages of his villagers, the number of people working in each occupation, the size of the quinoa crop, and, most important, the number of men available in time of war.
Incan Quipu accounting device
EARLY PAIN RELIEVERS
The Native Americans of the Andeans discovered the results of chewing the leaves of the coca bush long before the Incas came to power. A mouthful of coca leaves would keep a man working through hunger and fatigue or relieve the pain of the wounded.
Under the Incas, coca production became a royal monopoly and coca use a royal prerogative. All plantations belonged to the Sapa Inca. Only royal favorites were allowed to chew the leaves. It was a great honor to receive a mouthful of coca leaves from the jeweled bag the Sapa Inca wore at his side.
When the Spaniards gained control of Peru, they established commercial coca plantations to supply the demand among workers in the silver mines.
They had no writing, so oral history served as the primary glue for their amalgamated culture and religion. Nor did they have access to iron, so most Incan tools were made of stone. Most amazing, given the scale of their engineering feats, the Incas had no large draft animals; it was their manpower and advanced architectural design that gave them a permanent place on the list of the world’s most wondrous human-built achievements.
How did the Incas build twenty-five thousand miles of roadway to link their empire through the rugged Andes mountains?
Nobody knows.
More perplexing still, how did they achieve the great pre-Columbian engineering feat that is Machu Picchu? Again, we are left to wonder.
Made up of 140 buildings, 600 terraces, and more than 100 stone stairways, Machu Picchu took an estimated workforce of five thousand to build. Each of its granite stone blocks weighs fifty tons, stacked and arranged with nothing to attach one block to the next. Still, these blocks fit together so snugly, not even a knife blade can fit between them. And not even an earthquake (in an active seismic zone) can move them from their assigned places.
Some anthropologists believe the Incas built Machu Picchu as a form of psychological warfare against any potential invaders. Perhaps its sheer size would ward off any human predators. Yet within a hundred years, Machu Picchu was abandoned, as the New and Old Worlds ended their separation and came into lethal contact.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their isolation, the Incas constructed one of the great wonders of the world. The same isolation left the Incas unprepared for more powerful technologies and weapons in the form of European gunpowder and biological warfare.
AMERICAN CULTURES OF THE thirteenth through fifteenth centuries were so heavily populated and energetic that Spanish reformer Bartolomé Las Casas, writing in 1542, described them as “a beehive full of people.” By the time Las Casas wrote his history of the Aztecs, Eurasian diseases had emptied the beehive.
The newly discovered American continents-insulated from the plague and possessing vast new resources for mankind—offered unimagined opportunities to Old World colonists brave or desperate enough to travel across the Atlantic.
On the horizon, Africa beckons, tantalizing with its vast deposits of accessible gold. As Africa becomes a trading partner to Europe and Asia, ideas and merchandise are also exchanged and human knowledge is enriched. The search for another precious mineral, salt, becomes a driver for forging global connections; like gold, salt shapes new trade routes, builds up new cities and states, and destroys others.
As human civilization becomes more sophisticated and acquires new foods, ideas, and weapons, man again places himself at a precipice. In front of him lies modernity. The tendency to fall backward into chaos and unchecked violence is the only thing that can stop him from making the next big leap forward for mankind.
Machu Picchu, the center of Inca culture, dates from the fifteenth century CE.
6
NEW ERA
The Forbidden
City, in the center of Beijing, was the Imperial Palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
RISING FROM THE WASTELAND OF PLAGUE-RAVAGED EUROPE, HUMANITY REGAINS ITS FOOTING AND ITS WANDERLUST. IT IS A TIME OF MOVEMENT, REBUILDING, AND REBIRTH.
Italians and Portuguese sail around the Horn of Africa into the Indian Ocean in search of silk and spice. Traders in camel caravans go overland, risking the suffocating heat and sandstorms of the Sahara to exchange salt for gold. New ideas travel the same routes: Hindu mathematics and Greek philosophy are reinterpreted in the course of their passage through the crucible of the Muslim world. Ideas that had been greeted with suspicion in the twelfth century are embraced by the West, leading Europe to its rebirth.
While Europeans are ready to embrace new ideas, the Chinese turn inward, creating a culture defined from the start as “ming”—brilliant, founded by a leader armed with the first guns. By forging new global connections, mankind comes back from the brink and scales new heights. Banking is born. The printing press is invented. Mapmaking comes into its own. In the new era, there are winners and losers, conquered and conquerors, great wealth made and lost.
And what drives human progress? Mankind searches tirelessly for the traces of a nugget that fell to earth in a celestial shower some 4 billion years ago. But people of every tribe and nation soon discover that gold shifts the centers of power—and gives them new reasons to spill their neighbors’ blood.
Caravan crossing the desert.
SILENT TRADE
A true historical oddity, the “silent trade” was a wordless transaction that took place between traders in fourteenth-century West Africa. In this oft-repeated scene, African miners exchanged gold for salt and other merchandise without laying eyes on or saying a single word to their trading partners. Foreign traders would arrive at the marketplace and set their goods on the ground. Next, they would announce their presence by beating a drum. Then they’d leave. Hearing the drum, the local gold miners would return to the marketplace. After examining the merchandise, they would pour out a measure of gold dust next to each pile of goods, beat the drum to signal that a trade had been made, and they, too, would leave. It was then the foreigners’ turn. If they returned to find the amount of gold dust acceptable, they would take it and be on their way. If not, they’d beat the drum again so the miners could come back and make a counteroffer. Each group would go back and forth until they reached an agreement or decided against the trade. The locals did not want to give away the sources of their gold. And with no human contact, they made sure there were no slips of the tongue.
1324 CE. MANSA MUSA, THE KING of Mali, left his capital of Niani to make the hajj to Mecca, as all good Muslims should. He set off in great pomp, accompanied by sixty thousand of his subjects, great princes and soldiers among them. Five hundred slaves ran in front of him as he rode, each carrying a four-pound staff of pure gold. Led by a Tuareg guide, his caravan traveled across the invisible trade roads of the Sahara, through the salt mining city of Walata, to the northern oases in Tuar. Many among his entourage stayed behind at Tuar, laid low by a foot ailment. Mansa Musa continued on his pilgrimage.
He arrived in Cairo after eight months. The Muslim chroniclers of the city recorded his visit—and tried to guess how much gold the richest king of Africa carried with him. Each gave a number more outrageous than the last: One hundred camels laden with gold. Three hundred camels, each carrying three hundred pounds of gold. A thousand camels carrying one hundred pounds of gold apiece. So much gold, however you counted it, that the value of the precious metal dropped wherever he traveled. It took twelve years for the Cairo gold market to recover from his visit.
Mansa Musa was a big spender. He built a mosque everywhere he stopped for the Friday prayers. He paid for every service in gold and gave lavish gifts to his hosts. Beggars lined the streets when he passed, hoping to receive a gold nugget that would allow them to never beg again. His generosity and his princely display of wealth were so great that he ran out of money on the trip back to Mali and had to borrow in Cairo. Merchants eagerly lent to the king from the land that produced gold on such a dazzling scale.
On his return from the hajj, Mansa Musa erected a new mosque in Timbuktu, designed by the celebrated Andalusian poet and architect Abu Ishaq as-Sahéli al-Tuadjin al-Granata. The city’s first building made from brick and stone, the mosque was designed for learning as well as for prayer, complete with rooms for students and books.
Timbuktu was already a city of learning when Mansa Musa left for Mecca. A quarter of its population was students who had traveled from all corners of the Islamic world to study there. Scholars at Timbuktu wrote commentaries on the Qur'an that were read in Cairo. One scholar traveled with Mansa Musa from Cairo to Timbuktu, expecting to teach. He found the scholarly standards there so high that he was forced to return to North Africa to study further before he could teach in Timbuktu.
Mansa Musa’s extravagant spending drew Europe’s attention to West Africa for the first time. Venetian and Genoese merchants in Alexandria sent word home about the king of Mali and his immense wealth. Soon trading firms from Granada, Genoa, Venice, and the Flemish markets of the north sent merchants to establish new posts in Maghreb towns such as Marrakech and Fez, trading manufactured goods for gold. Timbuktu became a legend—and a goal.
The West African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay were built on gold. For four centuries the region’s merchants had grown rich trading gold, slaves, and ivory for horses and cloth from North Africa, books and other treasures from the larger Islamic world, and salt from the Sahara desert, the dried-out remains of an ancient salty sea. North African Moors, Arabs, and Berbers traveled across the Sahara from Tangier, Tunis, and Tripoli in caravans of tens of thousands of camels, in search of African gold.
map of Venetian trade routes in the 14th century
FROM GOLD DUST
TO DUCATS
Gold arrived in Mali as gold dust. From there, North African traders carried it on camels from Timbuktu through the Sahara to Alexandria, where it was loaded onto ships bound for Venice.
In the thirteenth century, the city of Venice gained control of trade in gold and held on to it for the next four hundred years. The market was strictly regulated. All imported gold had to be registered at the official assay office in the Rialto, the economic and trade center of Venice, and could not be exported unless it had been refined to at least 23 carats. Beginning in 1266, officials at the gold office tested the weights and scales of all money changers at least once a month.
In 1273 refining imported gold was entrusted to two goldsmiths chosen and paid by the assay office. The price of gold was fixed officially every day on the Rialto. Unlike today’s financial markets, Venice had no newspapers to quote prices. The Rialto was the only place to gain information about gold—often by eavesdropping. Insider information was prized.
In 1284 Venice opened its gold mint and the next year struck the first gold ducat of 3.55 grams (0.114 ounces). The ducat soon became Europe’s premier currency and the most widely accepted coin since the Romans’ solidus.
By 1380 the officials regulating the world’s gold trade were no longer just money handlers. When they officially began taking deposits, the Venetians became the first bankers, as we recognize their job description today.
By 1490, one out of every thirty Venetians had bank accounts.
AFRICAN GOLD
Long before humans, or even dinosaurs, roamed the planet, millions of tons of rock from outer space struck the earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour, bringing an abundance of gold and burying it deep within the mantle layer. Over the billions of years that followed, volcanoes released this gold from the mantle and carried it up toward Earth’s surface.
Since gold is the only metal that can be found in the ground in its pure form, many scientists believe it was the first metal discovered by early Homo sapiens.
In most of the world, gold must be extracted from mines deep underground, with backbreaking
work performed by thousands of laborers. But in West Africa, the River Niger does the hard work, washing gold out of the bedrock and depositing it as dust across the flood plain. Gold is so abundant that people can scoop it out of the water and from the topsoil.
SALT
Life originated from a process of chemical transformation in Earth’s primeval waters. Today the concentrations of sodium, potassium, and chloride in our bloodstreams still mimic the seas from which life first sprang. In fact, human blood contains roughly the same percentage of salt as the ocean.
The chemical compound halite, consisting of sodium and chlorine, is the substance we know as “ordinary” table salt. Yet, there is nothing ordinary about it. Salt is as essential to life as water. No living thing can survive without it. Without salt, our bodies could not digest food, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart.
When we were hunter-gatherers, the salt we needed came from wild game. But as mankind settled and our diet changed, we had to find salt from other sources.
Salt is everywhere on Earth. But common as it is, salt was often difficult to obtain before modern industrial mining and salinization methods. Thus, the demand for salt became one of the driving forces of civilization. In search of salt, humans created new trade routes across the most inhospitable places on Earth. Desert caravans with as many as forty thousand camels carried salt across the Sahara and back again.
Many salt roads, such as the “Via Salaria” in Italy, were in place by the Bronze Age. Today salt is readily available: produced either by evaporating salt water or by mining. We take our salt shakers for granted. But not so long ago, cities and states rose and fell based on their proximity to accessible salt.
Mankind Page 16
