Ancient South American Cultures

Back in grade school in Bavaria, when studying geography, our teacher asked us to draw maps using colored pencils. In consequence we learned our geography—and for most of us, I think, going by Brigitte’s and my memories, delighted in such homework. Today I engaged in such a task again—having learned how to learn. I didn’t draw the maps but I colored them, all in an effort to sort out the three largest by-gone South American cultures, the Mayans, Incas, and the Aztecs.

But why would I bother? Well, this is a forward-looking venture. We’re approaching an important date, December 21, 2012. On that day, supposedly, according to the long-count Mayan calendar, a Great Age will come to an end. That projection, in its turn, has induced scores of people to predict a Great Change on that day, call it Doomsday, End Times, Apocalypse, what have you—possibly the collision with an alien celestial body! And I plan to make a posting on that day here on Ghulf Genes—provided, of course, that Doomsday is delayed. But to say anything meaningful about that event, I thought it wise, minimally, to know where the Mayans actually lived—and, surprise, I didn’t have the foggiest. Unless you are yourself extraordinarily learned, with fantastic memory, you’ll know the feeling: faint images of pyramids, strange stonework, very high mountains. But was that the Mayans? The Aztecs? The Incas? Let’s sort it out. I’ll do that today in terms of space and time.

Above you see an image of Middle and South America, the virtue of which lies in suggesting that Mexico is shaped like a whale; to the right of that I’ve colored in, if only approximately, the regions where the Aztecs, Mayans, and the Incas once flourished. Now I had the Mayan’s location, in the whale’s right flipper, where, going roughly clock-wise from 9:00 o'clock, we find today the cities of Campeche, Merida (the largest, 11:00), Cancun (2:00), and Chetuma (4:30). Not a region of great extent. The Aztecs dominated a region to the east and north. And the Incas had the West Coast of today’s South American continent all to themselves.

Now let us fix the time dimension:

• Mayans. They came first; scholars put their beginnings into very ancient times, 2000 BC. We are, of course, not talking about civilizations yet—unless the Mayans had more than one. The classical period of the one we know, thus analogous to the Greek classical period, extended from 250 to 900 AD. Thereafter the Mayan culture entered its “post-modern period,” meaning that its coherence, cultural and political unity shattered.
• Incas. They came next. They are dated from roughly 900 AD, but their expansion, and therefore the Inca empire, is dated to 1438; it ended in 1533 by conquest from Europe. The empire spread to the Atlantic from Cuzco (the current Cusco in Peru, thus roughly halfway in the illustration), spreading north, south, and west. This civilization had a very sophisticated numerical record-keeping system, using knotted string, but no writing.
• The Aztecs. They were last to get going. Their beginnings are put around 1300 AD; their period of empire, centered on Tenochtitlán, today’s Mexico City, began in 1427 and lasted until 1519. They too succumbed to the conquistadores.

Enough for a start. But there will be other posts as, driven by the clock, we approach the End. But the impatient among you might wish to look at this quite superb and short slide-show (link), produced by Angie Matheny. It has multiple virtues, among them a comprehensive summary, vivid images, and some information that might come as a surprise.

Montaigne and Moctezuma

It occurred to me by some untraceable set of associations that the erudite, reasonable, Michael Montaigne, a man who influenced such figures as Descartes on the one hand and Isaac Asimov on the other, coincided on the map of time with the Aztec Empire more or less—roughly as my life coincided with that of Victorian England: as one disappeared the other began. In 1519, fourteen years before Montaigne saw sunlight, Hernándo Cortés arrived at the gates of Tenochtitlan; a year later, with his allies, the Tlaxcala Confederacy, he conquered the city. Twenty-five years later, when Montaigne was twelve (1545), the second wave of smallpox began the process of destroying the Aztec population in earnest. Such are the gifts of higher civilization to the lower as they roll benevolently across the world. The Aztecs are remembered chiefly for emperor Moctezuma and practicing human sacrifice—the Spanish for “discovering America,” the Inquisition, and that famous Spanish fly. Fate’s whip bestows its cruel blows on collective reputations without mercy, as it were. The destruction of enemy armies by ritual methods, as the Aztecs practiced it, is shameful; we assign the functionally identical activity, when it takes place as collateral damage, to the fog of war and glitches in technology.  

Through the Lens of History

It is very difficult to see one’s own cultural tradition in the clear, as it were. The western civilization is particularly awesome in that it balances its evils by its merits. It is easier to be objective, for example, about the civilization of which the Aztec Empire was the last decadent expression. In that case we can unhesitatingly abhor the practice of ritual human sacrifice. And it really helps our objectivity that virtually nothing of that civilization’s thought and poetry survives. As I ponder our own, its root beliefs as well as its culminating might, raining atomic bombs out of the skies, I find it eminently thinkable that in some very distant future our own will be viewed as aberrant. If my view strikes you as extreme or dubious, check with me in, say, 5,000 years; we’ll then go and have a look together.