The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (58 page)

THE PROBLEMS OF BEING THE FIRST

The creation of all four of the kingdoms discussed in this chapter required the consolidation of formerly independent societies by force. But was force always required?

We have seen that several of the largest chiefly societies in the southeastern United States, such as the Coosa, were voluntary confederacies. Might not some early kingdoms have formed voluntarily as well?

Without closing the door to that possibility, we doubt it. We note that the Coosa—and the famous League of the Iroquois, for that matter—were not the first chiefly societies in their regions. By the time those confederacies arose, there had probably been rank societies in North America for more than 1,000 years. We suspect that once a particular type of society has existed for a while and the template for its organization is understood, more alternative routes to its creation are possible—including voluntary routes.

Anthropologist Robert Carneiro makes the point that most societies do not surrender their autonomy willingly. We have seen that every clan who tried to seize ritual or secular control of its society met with resistance from other clans. The various Catío villages of Colombia’s Cauca Valley did not submit to the authority of a single chief unless they were threatened by hostile neighbors. And many archaeologists suspect that the Coosa and the Iroquois formed their confederacies only after Spanish, French, or English colonists came to be seen as a threat.

The first rank society in each region had no template to follow; neither did the first kingdom. One of the problems of being the first kingdom in your region is that your neighbors see nothing to be gained by giving up freedom to become one of your provinces. The question of how the first kingdoms were created is, therefore, quite separate from the creation of second-, third-, and fourth-generation kingdoms.

Archaeologist Charles Spencer has presented mathematical support for the idea that the first state to form in a region will likely require the kind of territorial expansion we saw among the Hawai’ians, Zulu, Hunza, and Merina. Since a kingdom is one kind of state (almost certainly the earliest kind, with military dictatorships and parliamentary democracies arising later), Spencer’s work is worth discussing here. We will, however, leave out the mathematical details.

Borrowing an equation from the zoological literature on predator-prey relations, Spencer demonstrates that as a chief reaches the limit of the resources he can extract from his followers, and the growth curve of his society goes from steeply rising to horizontal, one of three things must happen. Such chiefs must either:

  1. Step up demand for resources from their own subjects, which may lead to revolt.

  2. Intensify production through technological improvement, which will likely increase wealth but not necessarily sociopolitical complexity.

  3. Expand the territory from which they get their resources, which will probably require the subjugation of neighbors.

When alternative 3 is chosen, and the expanded territory grows beyond the limits that a chief can administer through the usual methods, he is compelled to make changes in administration and political ideology, and a state begins to form. That change is less likely with alternatives 1 and 2.

The reason military force so often seems to be involved in the creation of the first kingdoms is because rival chiefs are unwilling to surrender their territory and independence voluntarily. In the four cases we saw in this chapter, state formation involved thousands of deaths, and thousands of other people were converted to slaves.

Sorry, but no one said that creating the first kingdoms would be pretty.

The Unanswered Question

Monarchies, as we have seen, can be created out of rank societies. And, as we learned from Irving Goldman, rank societies come in several forms. The chiefs of Tikopia relied on sacred authority. The wealth of the Quimbaya flowed from the expertise of their goldsmiths. The Zulu were secular warriors who took what they wanted by force. And the Tongan chief could wither a commoner with his glance, but his own sister could place her foot on his head.

It turns out that monarchies, too, come in several forms. Anthropologist Herbert Lewis once took a close look at the traditional monarchs of Ethiopia. The king of the Kaffa, he reveals, was considered a divine monarch. The king of Abyssinia was not considered divine, but he was surrounded by taboos and an element of the sacred. The king of the Galla (or Oromo) was considered only a powerful mortal.

These different forms of kingship, as we learn in later chapters, were widespread. The Egyptian pharaoh was considered divine. The Maya king had sacred qualities and was sometimes portrayed as the reincarnation of a mythological ancestor. The early Mesopotamian king, on the other hand, was only a powerful mortal, sometimes referring to himself as the “tenant farmer” of a patron deity. Only the later Mesopotamian kings sought to be considered divine.

Here, then, is an important unanswered question: Was there a logical connection between a particular type of monarchy and the chiefly societies out of which it was created? Did divine monarchs result from the unification of rank societies in which religious authority was paramount? Did secular kings result from the unification of largely militaristic rank societies, where religious specialists were little more than witch doctors? Or could any type of monarchy be created by uniting rank societies of any type?

We have no answer to this question, because social anthropologists and archaeologists are not working on it. But they should be.

EIGHTEEN

Three of the New World’s First-Generation Kingdoms

We have just described the birth of four kingdoms. Each was created by a series of ambitious leaders, who kept trying until they had unified a group of formerly independent rank societies. The leaders involved had no model to follow and no template to show them what a monarchy should look like. All four cases, therefore, qualify as first-generation kingdoms for their regions.

Admittedly, the reason we know so much about the Hawai’ian, Zulu, Hunza, and Merina cases is because there is written documentation. All four cases took place late in world history, while Western observers were watching. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some earlier cases, unaffected by Western contact?

In this chapter we go back more than 2,000 years in search of pristine cases of kingdom formation. The good news is that one can find such cases in the archaeological records of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. The bad news is that, precisely because those cases are so ancient, we lack eyewitness descriptions. We must therefore rely heavily on archaeological inference.

While we believe that most first-generation Mexican and Peruvian states were kingdoms, we will sometimes use the generic term “state” when we are not sure that actual monarchs were involved. Some early Mexican states—for example, the one centered on Teotihuacan near modern Mexico City—did not portray monarchs in their art. In contrast, we know that early Maya rulers were monarchs, because their hieroglyphic inscriptions use the Maya word for “king.”

There is a reason we have chosen to begin our search in the New World. Many archaeologists working in the Mexican highlands, the Peruvian coast, and the Maya lowlands have specifically designed their research to determine how and when the earliest kingdoms arose. In other words, they have prepared the way for us.

THE CREATION OF THE ZAPOTEC STATE

Roughly 2,500 years ago Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley was occupied by at least three rank societies, seemingly in conflict with each other. To the north lay the chiefly center of San José Mogote, in command of a society with at least 2,000 inhabitants. To the south lay San Martín Tilcajete, the chiefly center for a society of 700 to 1,000 persons. To the east lay Yegüih, the chiefly center for another society of perhaps 700 to 1,000 persons. Despite the differences in population, none of these rank societies were able to subjugate their rivals; they therefore left a sparsely occupied buffer zone between their territories. They periodically burned each other’s temples, or commissioned stone monuments to portray the sacrifice of enemy leaders. These chiefly rivalries remind us of those on the Big Island of Hawai’i before it was unified by men such as ‘Umi, Alapai, and Kamehameha.

Eventually the leaders of San José Mogote did something that gave them an advantage. Gathering up 2,000 people from their paramount center and its satellite villages, they moved to the summit of a mountain in the buffer zone just mentioned. This mountain, rising 1,300 feet above the valley floor, was protected by steep slopes on the south and east. On the more easily climbed slopes to the north and west, the new arrivals began building two miles of defensive walls. They turned the mountain into a stronghold from which they could subdue their rivals.

As so many other rank societies did, the first occupants of the stronghold had created a new chiefly center in an unoccupied buffer zone. Some 200 years after its founding the mountaintop community had grown to an estimated 5,000 people, probably through a combination of internal population growth and the attraction of additional immigrants. It became Oaxaca’s first city, whose ruins we know today as the archaeological site of Monte Albán.

It is probably no coincidence that the pottery of this newly created city shows us the first use of the
comal,
a griddle for mass-producing corn tortillas. We suspect that the workers building and maintaining the city received rations of tortillas from their leaders.

Thanks to archaeologists Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond, we know a lot about Monte Albán’s ongoing conflicts with San Martín Tilcajete, the rival chiefly center one day’s travel to the south. Both communities laid out rectangular civic-ceremonial plazas, reminiscent of the ones at Lapaha and La Venta. Monte Albán’s plaza, however, was laid out true north-south, while Tilcajete’s was laid out 25 degrees east of true north. The chiefly lineages of these two communities evidently disagreed on which astronomical alignment was appropriate, suggesting that leadership was based at least partly on celestial authority.

Tilcajete’s response to the growth of Monte Albán was to double its own size, from 60 to 130 acres. This increase may have included the deliberate drawing in of defenders from its satellite villages. About 2,280 years ago, however, Monte Albán raided Tilcajete and torched the buildings on its plaza.

Tilcajete refused to capitulate. Between 2,250 and 2,000 years ago it increased its size to 177 acres and moved its plaza uphill to a more easily defended ridge; the new plaza defiantly maintained the same orientation as its predecessor. Tilcajete also added defensive walls to its most easily climbed slopes.

Monte Albán, however, was prepared for a long campaign. Its leaders concentrated thousands of farmers, craftsmen, and warriors into a ring of 155 satellite villages, most of them within a half-day’s walk of Monte Albán. Many of these villages occupied piedmont settings, where canal irrigation could be used to intensify the production of corn. This strategy was reminiscent of Kamehameha’s terracing of O’ahu’s Anahulu Valley.

Eventually Monte Albán attacked Tilcajete again, burning its ruler’s palace and the community’s major temple. Charcoal from the destruction of both buildings dates to about 2,000 years ago. Tilcajete did not recover from this second attack. It was abandoned, and on a mountaintop nearby its conquerors built a Level 2 administrative center linked to Monte Albán. It would seem that by this point Monte Albán had subdued the entire Oaxaca Valley and turned its former rivals into the districts of a first-generation kingdom.

The palace at Tilcajete measured 52 feet on a side and consisted of eight large rooms around a central patio (
Figure 50
). The walls were of adobe brick, set on a stone masonry platform several courses high. This elite residence appeared to have been built by corvée labor. At least three different work gangs must have been involved, because Spencer and Redmond could distinguish bricks of three different sizes, colors, and clay sources.

During this same period, Monte Albán carved a series of stone monuments that reflected its military unification of the valley. One of the most important structures on the west side of Monte Albán’s central plaza was Building L. Its façade was covered with a display of slain enemies analogous to those at Cerro Sechín, Peru, though not as numerous or gruesome. The largest of these carved stones depicted sprawling corpses, some with evidence of heart removal or genital mutilation. A few of the smaller stones showed severed heads. Several monuments appear to include the hieroglyphic names of important victims (
Figure 51
).

FIGURE 50.
   Competition between Monte Albán and Tilcajete ended with the conquest of Tilcajete and the burning of its palace. The palace, measuring 52 feet on a side, consisted of eight rooms around a central patio. It had been built by multiple work gangs, using adobe bricks from different clay sources.

Set in the southeast corner of Building L were two more carved stones that provide an inscription eight hieroglyphs long. Included are glyphs for dates in the two known Zapotec Indian calendars, a 365-day secular calendar and a 260-day ritual almanac. This text seems to refer to a ruler who, in addition to commissioning Building L, claims credit for the slain enemies depicted. Such credit-taking by one man strengthens the likelihood that the early Zapotec state was a monarchy rather than an oligarchy.