A History of the World in 100 Objects (10 page)

In early Egypt, cows were probably also kept as a kind of insurance policy. If crops were damaged by fire, communities could always fall back on the cow for nourishment as a last resort; perhaps not the best thing to eat, but always there. They were also socially and ceremonially significant, but, as Fekri Hassan explains, their importance went even deeper:

Cattle have always had religious significance, both the bulls and the cows. In the desert a cow was the source of life, and we have many representations in rock art where we see cows with their calves in a more-or-less religious scene. We also see human female figurines, also modelled from clay, with raised arms as if they were horns. It seems that cattle were quite important in religious ideology.

The cattle from Grave A23 don’t show any outward signs of being particularly special. On closer inspection, however, they don’t look like the cows you find on the farm today, anywhere across Europe, North America or even modern Egypt. Their horns are strikingly different – they curve forwards and are much lower than those of any cows that we know.

All the cows alive in the world today descend from Asian stock. Our Egyptian model cows look different from the ones we know today because early Egyptian cows were descended from native African cattle, which have now become extinct.

Along the Nile Valley, the cow, a source of blood, meat, security and energy, eventually transformed human existence and became such a central part of Egyptian life that it was widely venerated. Whether actual cow worship started as early as the time of our little model is still a matter of debate, but in later Egyptian mythology the cow takes on a prominent role in religion, as the powerful cow-goddess Bat. She is typically shown with the face of a woman and the ears and horns of a cow. And the clearest sign of just how far cattle rose in status over the centuries is that Egyptian kings were subsequently honoured with the title ‘Bull of his Mother’. The cow had come to be seen as the creator of the pharaohs.

In the heart of the British Museum we have a god of maize. He’s a bust, carved from limestone using a stone chisel and a basalt hammer, and the features are large and symmetrical, the eyes closed, the lips parted – as though this god is in communion with a different world, quietly meditating. The arms are bent, the palms of the hands face outwards – one raised, one lower – giving an impression of serene power. The head of the god is covered with an enormous headdress in the shape of a stylized corn cob, and his hair is like the silky strands that line a cob, inside the wrapping leaves.

Some archaeologists argue that food must always have had a divine role even for our earliest ancestors – just think of the cow-goddess of Egypt from the previous chapter, or Bacchus and Ceres in Classical mythology, or Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food. But there’s a particular time, after the end of the latest Ice Age, roughly between five and ten thousand years ago, when a range of new foods seems to have been accompanied by a range of new gods. As we saw in
chapter 6
, across the world, people began to identify particular plants that would provide them with food: in the Middle East it was wheat and barley, in China millet and rice, in Papua New Guinea taro, and in Africa sorghum. And as they did so, everywhere stories about gods emerged: gods of death and of rebirth, gods who would guarantee the cycle of the seasons and ensure the return of the crops, and gods who represent food itself, which were, or became, the food their devotees would eat. This bust is part of that worldwide process. He is a myth made material – a food god from Central America.

Originally the statue would have sat with many other similar gods high up on a stepped pyramid temple in western Honduras. It was found in Copán, a major Mayan city and religious centre, whose monumental ruins can still be visited today. The temple’s statues were commissioned by the Mayan ruler of the day to adorn a magnificent temple that he built at Copán around
AD
700. Between the head and the body of this one you can very clearly see a join, and if you look carefully the head actually seems rather too big. When the temple in Copán was destroyed, all the statues fell. Heads and bodies were separated and had to be pieced together later, so this head may not have originally belonged with this body. But that does not affect the statue’s meaning, for all these gods are about the central power and the pivotal role of maize in the lives of the local people.

Our statue of the maize god is comparatively new – he was made as late as
AD
715 – but he comes as part of a very long tradition. Central Americans had been worshipping him and his predecessors for thousands of years, and his mythic story mirrors the annual planting and harvesting of the corn on which all Central American civilization depended. In the myth the maize god, like the maize plant, is decapitated at harvest time and is then reborn – fresh, young, and beautiful at the beginning of each new growing season. John Staller, an anthropologist and the author of
Histories of Maize
, explains why the maize god was so appealing for rich and powerful patrons, like the rulers who commissioned our sculpture:

The elite in ancient societies focused on corn as having sacred kinds of properties which they then associated with themselves. This is pretty obvious in the young maize god – the sculpture was apparently a manifestation of mythological beings resulting from the third cycle of creation by the gods. There were eight mythological beings, four women and four men, who were believed to be the ancestors of all the Maya people. The Maya believed that their ancestors essentially came from corn, and they were formed of yellow and white maize dough. Maize was certainly a primary focus of ritual and religious veneration by ancient Meso-American people, going back all the way before the Maya and even into the Olmec civilization.

So our maize god is not just a hauntingly beautiful statue: he gives us a real insight into the way ancient American society thought about itself
and its environment. He represents both the fact of the agricultural cycle of planting, harvesting and replanting, and the faith in a parallel human cycle of birth, death and rebirth. But even more than this, he is the stuff of which the Central Americans are made. Where the Hebrew god made Adam out of dust, the Mayan gods used maize to make their humans. The mythical story is told in the most famous epic in the whole of the Americas, the Popol Vuh. For generations, this was passed on through oral traditions before finally being written down in the seventeenth century.

And here is the beginning of the conception of humans and of the search for the ingredients of the human body … So they spoke: the bearer, begetter, the makers, modellers – and a sovereign plumed serpent – they sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon and stars were to appear above the makers and modellers. Split place, bitter water place, is the name, the yellow corn, white corn, came from there. And this was when they found the staple foods, and then the yellow corn and white corn were ground. After that they put into words the making, the modelling of our first mother-father, with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh, food alone for the human legs and arms for our first fathers, the four human works.

Why did maize become the favoured food and the revered grain of the Americas rather than wheat or some kind of meat? The answer lies not in maize’s divine connections, but in the environment that Central America offered. In that part of the world around 9,000 years ago, other food resources were very limited. There were no easily domesticated animals, such as the pigs, sheep or cattle you would find elsewhere in the world, and the staples were a trinity of plants that were slowly cultivated and tamed – squashes, beans and maize. But beans and squashes didn’t become gods. Why did maize?

The plant from which maize derives, the teosinte, is wonderfully adaptable. It’s able to grow in both the lush wet lowlands and the dry mountainous regions, which means that farmers can plant crops in any of their seasonal dwellings. Constant harvesting of the grain encourages the plants to grow larger and more abundantly, so maize can quickly become plentiful – farmers generally got a healthy return on their invested labour. Crucially, maize is a rich carbohydrate that gives you a rapid energy hit. Unfortunately, it is also pretty stodgy, and so from very early on farmers cultivated an ingenious accompaniment – the indigenous chilli. It has very limited nutritional value, but it is uniquely able to liven up dull carbohydrates – and its development and widespread use across Central America is a resounding demonstration that we’ve been foodies for as long as we’ve been farmers.

By
AD
1000, maize had spread north and south, virtually through the whole length of the Americas, which is perhaps surprising given that, in its earliest form, not only did maize have little taste, it was practically inedible. It couldn’t just be boiled and eaten straight away as it is today. The easy digestibility of modern maize is thanks to the selective breeding of the crop by generations of farmers, each choosing seeds from the ‘best’ plant to cultivate for the next crop. But 9,000 years ago the maize cob was very hard, and eating it raw would have made you seriously ill. The raw kernel needed to be cooked in a mixture of water and white lime. Without this elaborate process, the two key nutrients in the cereal, the amino acids and vitamin B, would not be released. After that, it had to be ground into a paste and then made into an unleavened dough. The god of maize expected his disciples to work hard for their supper.

Even today, maize still dominates much of Mexican cuisine and carries a surprisingly powerful religious and metaphorical charge, as the restaurateur Santiago Calva knows only too well:

The continuous spin-offs of maize into daily life are vast and complex. There will always at some stage be maize around, and it jumps any class barrier or identity. Everybody eats it and drinks it, from the richest to the poorest, from the most indigenous to the least indigenous, and that’s one thing that unites us more than anything else.

Maize culture faces two new problems, one being the use of maize as a bio-fuel, which has caused an increase in prices. That directly affects the Mexican population. The other problem concerns genetically modified maize. It’s almost personally, and religiously, offensive that you are playing God. When you take corn to be used for purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, even to be put into a car, it becomes a highly controversial issue.

For some Mexicans it’s unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank. And far beyond Mexico the idea of genetic modification of crops also causes deep unease, often as much religious as scientific. The habit of seeing something divine in the crops that sustain us, formed all over the world around 10,000 years ago, is still stubbornly alive. Whatever may be the benefits of modifying plants to improve yield or to resist disease, many still have an uneasy sense that the natural order is being disturbed, that humans are trespassing on territory that’s properly reserved for the gods.

I know that it’s scientifically unrespectable, but it is sometimes nonetheless irresistible, to speculate how the great leaps forward in human object-making may have first occurred. So here is a very unscientific, very unrespectable guess about one of the biggest leaps of them all. Thousands of years ago, we can imagine that a lump of wet clay somehow ends up in a fire, dries out, hardens and forms a hollow shape; a shape that could hold things, in a tough, enduring material. By the time that the wet clay has hardened, a whole world of culinary possibilities, alcoholic delights and ceramic design has opened up. Mankind has made its first pot.