Glimpses of a lost civilisation

Many years ago, during my student days in Spain, I met some descendants of Meso-American Indians and was impressed by their intelligence and warmth. Meso-America is also a vast territory which consists of most of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, parts of Honduras and El Salvador. I had wanted to write a similar article on the Meso-American Indians but did not get an opportunity to travel to this area until last winter. What I found was truly fascinating -- thousands of miles away from the other centres of ancient civilisation like Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, a group of isolated people had developed writing, art, architecture, mathematics and astronomy.

The ancestors of the Meso-Indians, like the Plains Indians were of Mongoloid origin and crossed into North America from Asia through the Bering straits, many centuries ago. While the Plains Indians were essentially a nomadic people and hunters, the Meso-Americans, with the rise of atmospheric temperature around 7000 BC gave up hunting and started becoming agriculturists. However, their agricultural technique remained rather rudimentary -- they used to burn and clear the land to use it for two or three seasons and then abandon it for a time. They did not have any ploughs either. In spite of this rudimentary technique, gradually over centuries, they learnt how to grow maize, beans, squashes , chilli peppers and cotton. With the consolidation of agriculture as the primary means of subsistence, the Meso-Americans started living in large settled communities like villages and towns by the waterways and developed a simple peasant-like culture. The villagers knew how to weave simple cloth and make pottery. These villages were economically self-sufficient and most probably had an egalitarian social order.

But around 1200 BC, along the southern Gulf coast of Mexico, near the modern towns of San Lorenzo and La Venta, there rose a civilisation called the Olmec civilisation, which could easily be compared with that of Mesopotamia. Ceramics and pottery became more and more sophisticated. Great artistry was devoted to Jade, producing fine carvings of figures. Wood carvings developed, although most of them have now unfortunately disappeared because of extreme humidity. Some important pieces like the huge wooden lintels of Tikal, Guatemala have luckily survived. Villages developed into fairly large towns as in the "fertile crescent" of Mesopotamia. A class-structured and centralised society emerged. A land-owning class, took control of the most fertile cultivable lands. The serfs performed menial tasks. A merchant class established trade routes with other Meso-American areas -- north-westward, towards the valley of Mexico and South-eastward to central America. At about this time in Monte Alban, a few dozen miles to the west of San Lorenzo, another Meso-American group, the Zapotecs, invented writing of the most elaborate character ( they did not get any help from Mesopotamia) and produced a written calendar. They also started building temple-pyramids , colossal sculptures and great ceremonial centres to worship their gods and to honour their dead rulers. Anyone who visits La Venta or San Lorenzo can visit the ruins of some of these impressive monuments, especially the human heads of giant proportions. These are made of stone and some of them weigh more than 40 tons. It is worth mentioning here that the Meso-Americans carried out these building projects without neither draught animals nor the wheel.

What extraordinary circumstances gave rise to such a brilliant civilisation? Tropical climate, plenty of rainfall , rich alluvial soil deposited for centuries, abundant food supply and relative social peace were probably the main reasons for such high level of intellectual activity for such a prolonged period. The Olmecs worshipped several deities like the fire god, rain god , corn god , feathered serpent and of course, a deity which was half animal and half human -- a hybrid between jaguar and human infant. Whatever architectural site I visited in this area, the presence of this hybrid deity in different shapes and forms was immediately visible. Most impressive of them was, in my opinion, the Jaguar throne buried inside the huge pyramid at Chichen Itza in Yucatan.

No one is exactly sure as to why the Olmec civilisation at San Lorezo and La vent declined, but around 400 BC, the Olmec tradition was picked up by the Mayan people in the west. The exact origin of the Mayan people is unknown. Some believe that they were Olmecs, who had fled to the west after the collapse of San Lorenzo. Others think that they came from other Mayan centres like Peten in Guatemala and settled in Belize, Campeche and Yucatan. Be that as it may, it was at this time that the Mayans produced the most advanced Meso-American civilisation of its time, which lasted for a thousand years , during which period important city-states like Nakabe, El Mirador, Tikal, Copan, Uxmal , Chichen Itza, Mayapan and many others rose, prospered, expanded and then fell. Highly complex architectural monuments of enormous size like temples, observatories, tombs, pyramids, palaces, rectangular ball courts were built.

By the way, this game must have been very popular among the Meso-American elite because the courts could accommodate thousands of spectators. Special places were reserved for the rulers.. The ball was made of solid rubber and used to move fast. The players had to be very agile. Unlike present-day football or volleyball, the Mayan ball could not be touched by hand or foot but with the hip. Therefore, leather padding on the heap was absolutely essential. I visited several of these courts. I must say, I was quite impressed by their architectural design. But my enthusiasm somewhat waned when examining some of the reliefs on the walls of the courts, I found that the captain and several players of the losing side had their penises pierced or heads cut off. The early Mayans were a peaceful people but at a later stage, under the influence of Toltecs, who came from the valley of Mexico, warfare and sacrifices for divine favour became quite common.

Leaving aside art, architecture, sculpture, etc., the fields in which the Mayans excelled most were mathematics and astronomy. The priests, besides being religious leaders , were also brilliant mathematicians and astronomers. It took us in the Asian-European civilisation so many centuries to invent Zero. Neither the ancient Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Iranians had any knowledge of the Zero. It was the Arabs who invented Zero , the decimal system and algebra in the twelfth century. ( The Indians of Asia also claim to have invented zero and the decimal system ) But the Mayans had invented positional numeration and zero long before us. According to Prof. J.M.Roberts of Merton College, Oxford, " Through the calendar, enough of Maya thinking can be grasped to make it evident that this people's religious leaders had an idea of time much vaster than that of any other civilisation of which we have knowledge; they calculated an antiquity of hundreds of thousands of years. They may even have arrived at the idea that time has no beginning". They also conceived the idea of time being eternal and like the Zurvanites -- a version of Zoroastrianism -- of third century Iran, worshipped time.

Mayan political structure was based on alliances among city-states which were governed by local rulers. By the eleventh century, either due to shortage of food , peasant uprising or inter-tribal fighting or a combination of these factors, Mayan political order had declined. It lingered on for several centuries. By the end of the sixteenth century, when the Spaniards arrived on the coasts of Yucatan, there were still important city-states like Tulum, Tayasal, Utalan and Iximache , many of which after prolonged siege and subsequent massacres were captured and their people subjugated by the invaders. Others collapsed from within. Thus the once brilliant Mayan civilisation reached its tragic end.