Chapter Six

HEARTS OF DARKNESS

TROPICAL LOWLANDS

Frederik Hendrik Island—the Olmec Heartland—Low Amazonia—the Lowland Maya Lands—the Valleys of the Khmer—Benin City

In tropical climes there are certain times of day, when all the citizens retire to take their clothes off and perspire. It’s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey because the sun is much too sultry and we must avoid his ultryviolet ray.

—NOELCOWARD,“Mad Dogs and Englishmen”

The assumption that civilization cannot exist at the equator is contradicted by continuous tradition. And God knows better!

—IBNKHALDUN,The Muqaddimah,

trans. F. ROSENTHAL,3vols. (Princeton,1967), vol. I, p.71

The Habitable Hell: Cultivating the Swamp

Where is the habitable hell—the place on earth where people live in the most deadly environment, with the most malign climate, the most intractable soil, the sickliest air, the foulest water? This book has already visited locations with every apparent qualification for the role. Who, unless born to the place orthe culture, would choose permanently to share the life of the Dawada of the Sahara, or the Samoyed of the Taz? Some of the penal colonies of history have been deliberately selected to torture their inhabitants, like Devil’s Island and the Revillagigedo group, where it is only just possible to wrench a living out of the land. Marchinbar Island, off the north coast of Australia, would attract many nominations as a living hell today: it has, by some methods of computation, the world’s highest death rate and highest crime rate, the highest rates of addiction, and the highest incidence of diseases associated with poor hygiene and sexual promiscuity. The inhabitants, descended from forced labor, brutally recruited, ruthlessly exploited, and callously abandoned, have, in effect, been left to rot.

My own nomination may, at first glance, seem marginally more hospitable, because it has been exploited successfully by sedentary farmers. Yet Frederik Hendrik Island, now also called Kolepom and Dolak, which lies off the south coast of New Guinea, has an evil reputation as a place of fetid swamp, unhealthy miasmas, shadeless brush, and painful extremes of heat and cold. The environment is bleaker and more dispiriting than that of the Fezzan or the Taz—or, at least, it has none of the enticing grandeur of the worlds of dunes and ice; and unlike colonies forcibly established, this is a place which—defying credulity—has attracted voluntary settlement. So it is a naturally habitable hell: habitable in a deeper sense than places where intruded populations have been condemned to survive. Seven thousand people lived on its forty-two hundred square miles in the late 1970 s, when the traditional ways of life and the methods of swampland exploitation which sustained them were still largely intact.

The island is like a plate with a beveled rim: almost all the high ground is around the edges, so that rainfall collects in the waterlogged interior. Here most of the soil is so swampy that the difference between land and water has been pronounced virtually meaningless by one of the leading students of the geography of the place.¹The rain batters when it falls but is so capricious as to make it hard to plan to plant and harvest. Mosquitoes pullulate. In the dry season there is too much mud to travel far on foot, nor can canoes operate on most of the usual village-linking waterways, which get clogged with viscous ooze, as thick as mucus. The cold season is so cold and abrupt that annual plagues of pneumonia are normal; yet the sun is so intense for most of the year, on an island almost bereft of tree cover, that traveling can only be done at night.

Modern anthropologists are wary of denouncing people for cultures of hygiene that reflect different standards from those of the modern West. But on Frederik Hendrik Island the mud which clogs the channels also covers the people, so thoroughly are they at one with their environment. The leading expert on native ways cannot forbear to mention the thick layer of dirt that the indigenous Kimam people like to keep on their bodies. It is occasionally scraped off with a knife “if it becomes a nuisance.” The men delouse their hair by caking it with mud, which they remove, when dry, with an inner crust of lice.²Thisis a mythic land of savagery, where human beings are seen as corralled into a life nasty, brutish, and short by nature at her most malevolent and human enemies at their most implacable. The deadly marshlands, it is traditionally (but falsely) said, have been settled only by people unable to live anywhere else, refugees cowering for safety in impenetrable coverts. The first European explorer to describe the island, in 1623 , never caught sight of the natives, but he assumed from what he saw of their homes and debris that they must be “stunted, poor and wretched.”³

Yet the people who came here to live did so by choice and worked wonders with the little nature gave them. Traditional swamp-dwellers’ villages, until they were replaced by the instantly derelict prefabricated government houses of modern times, impressed onlookers as a “tropical Venice,” which was navigated on canoes so narrow that you have to stand upright in them with one foot in front of the other. Artificial mounds were dredged from the swamp to accommodate separate huts for daytime and night use. Because trees are uncommon, the huts were built of sago palms and roofed with dry rushes laid on rattan rings. They were ingeniously and laboriously mosquito-proofed by layers of protective grass or plaited leaves up to two and a half feet thick.

The garden beds on which food is still grown are built up out of mud, like the platforms on which the houses rose. Clotted reeds provide layers of strengthening between the clods of clay. It takes years to build a mound—especially for yams and sweet potatoes, which require more elevation above the waterline than is needed for taro; they are prepared for cultivation bit by bit, year by year, to minimize wasted effort. Maintenance demands constant vigilance, for the mounds crumble when the weather is dry and collapse or drown when it is rainy. The work is cooperative. It is rewarded by libations of wati, the local intoxicant, and reciprocated between neighbors in need. Cooperation is laced tightly into the way of life by other customary and natural constraints. Taro, yams, and many other kinds of basic food are taboo during pregnancy, and expecting families then become dependent on collective charity. Wati cultivation is a highly specialized craft and supplies are controlled by a few individuals, on whose sense of social responsibility the whole community relies.

The wati cult, which has traditionally been very widespread (though absent-in the extreme west), shows both how exigent and how abundant is nature on the island. Frequent nights of near-paralysis by the effects of the drug mitigate the rigors of life; but it is in the nature of wati that, to be effective, it must be taken with plenty of food, which must be rapidly vomited—and therefore of slight nutritional value. Only people with a reasonable surplus of food to spare could be so profligate with it. Agriculture is not the only resource: wild products are vital supplements. The mapi fern can be crushed for a kind of flour which, unlike the staple tubers, can be stockpiled for a long time against dearth; kangaroos can easily be caught and clubbed to death when they huddle on the fewstretches of dry ground in the wet season; fish are abundant and easy to catch near the coasts, where they can be doped with liberal doses of poison in the water, which the tide then diffuses in the sea.⁴

If the people of Frederik Hendrik Island could achieve so much in such apparently adverse circumstances, we should not be surprised to find better-situated swampland playing a major part in the history of civilization. In highland regions, where rainfall drains into interior basins, it is not unusual for agriculture to originate in marsh or swamp, as in highland New Guinea (see page 247 ), or for waterlogged soils to provide the economic basis of a great empire, as in the case of the Aztecs (see page 240 ). Archaeologists of early farming have concentrated on drier lands, where specimens of early foods are well preserved, stratigraphically stacked, with cooking hearths well defined—like the legendary Mexican sites Richard MacNeish dug up in the early 1960 s when he was searching for the origins of cultivated maize.⁵In swampy environments, such evidence rapidly disappears, save for occasional haphazard traces which take a long time to reassemble. The evidence of early swampland agriculture is still only beginning to come to light in Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and parts of Africa.

Bog peoples in Europe, meanwhile, tend to have a bad reputation with their neighbors: the Pripet Marshes, for example, form a dangerous and primitive region in the minds of the Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians who live around it, and English contempt for the Irish is often beslimed with bogland imagery. Yet two regions of coastal marsh—the Venetian archipelago (see page 000 ) and the maritime Netherlands (see page 316 )—house some of the most glittering and monumental achievements of Western civilization. Civilization can be, and has been, built on sodden ground.

The most striking case is found in Mexico. More than three thousand years ago, the people who built the city known as La Venta entered or emerged from—we do not know which—the mangrove swamps of lowland Tabasco and adjoining regions. They founded a civilization which prefigured much of the rest of Mesoamerican history and, in the opinion of some scholars, nourished with its influence all later civilizations in the region. The La Venta culture is conventionally called Olmec. This is a misleading term, because archaeologists and art historians have used it to mean so many different things. The word denotes a style of figural and relief sculpture—or, rather, a number of such styles, since the unity of objects classified as Olmec over the last century or so is by no means well established. “Olmec” is also used to name a cultural “syndrome” found in a wide variety of Mesoamerican environments and is not specific to the swamps. But it is too well established to discard. And though there are almost as many opinions on the subject as experts, it is likely that Olmec civilization started in swampland: the signs of longest occupancy are low-lying, among mangroves, in sites near the edges of marsh, rain forest, beach, and ocean. Like some highland civilizations, the founders of the Olmec world lived on an environmentalfrontier, where they could feed off a number of microenvironments, with enriching effects. Although the earliest known monumental center was built towards the end of the second millennium B.C. on a rise above the River Coatzacoalcos, early development of the agricultural potential of the swamps would be consistent with the history of other civilizations.

The swamps of Tabasco had supported agriculture for a thousand years before-the first monumental art and ceremonial centers that we dignify with the name of Olmec civilization. There were always plenty of food sources for people to harvest or kill. On the surfaces of marshy lakes, aquatic life and bird flocks met to feed and be preyed on. What is surprising is not that human populations throve in this lush habitat, but that they should have built on a large scale and developed strenuously complex urban ways of life—constructing on unsuitable soils, engaging in monumental labor in torrid humidity. The transition coincided with the adaptation of forms of high-yielding maize suitable for the environment. With beans and squash—excellent products for swampland mounds—it formed a hallowed trinity of plants depicted in divine and chieftainly headgear.⁶In its earliest phases in this region, agriculture was confined to the natural ridges formed by accumulation; potentially, artificial mounds could be built up to supplement the growing space or, at the least, dredgings could be piled on the natural levees to raise them above the flood mark. Fish, clams, turtles, and perhaps caimans could be farmed in the channels between platforms or ridges or, before the creation of artificial mounds, in natural pools. The notion is still widely held that builders of elaborate ceremonial centers in stone could have produced the manpower and generated the spare energy demanded by such tasks by slashing forest clearings, setting fire to the stumps, and planting seeds directly in the ash (cf. page 136 ); but this is profoundly unconvincing. As far as is known, no society relying on such methods has ever prospered to a similar degree anywhere else. By the end of the second millennium B.C., the Olmec city of San Lorenzo had substantial reservoirs and drainage systems, integrated into the plan of causeways, plazas, pyramids, and artificial mounds.

Even at this early period, New World civilizations already shared a common-culture which remained characteristic of the hemisphere: mound-building; symmetrical aesthetics; ambitious urban planning around quadriform temples and plazas; specialized elites including chieftains commemorated in monumental art, scribes, and priests; rites of rulership involving bloodletting and human sacrifice; a religion rooted in shamanistic tradition with many bloody rites of sacrifice and a flair for ecstatic performance by kings and priests; a ball-game rite; an agronomy based on the great trinity of crops; trade over large distances, already approaching the full extent of the Mesoamerican culture area at its height—if it is true, as is commonly supposed, that the jade the Olmecs used came from Guatemala, and if the diffusion of art objects in Olmec style is anything to go by. None of this means that the Olmecs were the progenitors of allMesoamerican civilizations, much less all those of the New World. Diffusionist models are nearly always overthrown by the discoveries of archaeologists working to apply them; and the Olmecs were part of a complex story of a constellation of civilizations emerging in widely separated places. The range, however, of Olmec influence cannot be denied; it worked on communities already experiencing similar histories of their own.⁷

The image we have of the Olmecs is defined by their most striking works: the oldest monumental sculptures of Mesoamerica—colossal heads, usually of basalt, procured by what might be called bravura commerce. Stones and columns of up to forty tons were dragged and floated over distances of up to a hundred miles to be transformed by sculptors in two styles: one resembling a jaguar; the other wholly human, usually with a squat head and almond eyes. The best of them are highly expressive: tense, frowning brows; sneers of cold command; parted lips. When you stare into the cold, hard eyes of the face called, with typical academic indifference, Colossal Head Number Eight, you sense the presence of some Olmec Ozymandias.⁸Some of the heads date from as early as about the thirteenth century B.C. They are part of an inventory which collectively distinguishes what might be called an Olmec sensibility: the human form is favored to a degree unequaled in other early Mesoamerican civilizations; the delight in rounded and naturalistic forms is remarkable, compared with the almost unrelievedly angular aesthetics of most of the Olmecs’ successor cultures.

The ritual spaces and platforms of the same period are best exemplified by the site at La Venta, built on what is now an island surrounded by mangrove swamps, with stones toted and rolled from more than sixty miles away. The focus of the cityscape is a mound more than one hundred feet tall. One of the courts is dignified with a mosaic pavement in a form usually said to resemble a stylized jaguar mask, deliberately buried by its creators. Similar offerings were placed under other buildings, perhaps in the manner of saints’ relics secreted in the foundations of churches.

An exquisite model of what seems to be a ceremony in progress—buried in sand, perhaps with a votive intention—encourages us to imagine what happened on the platform tops. Before groves of standing stelae, figures with distended heads, suggestive of deliberate deformation of the skull, wear nothing but loincloths and ear ornaments for their gathering in a rough circle. Their mouths are open, their postures relaxed; their purpose is—to us—unfathomable. Similar figures represented in other works present a were-jaguar child—a small creature, half jaguar, half human—or carry torches or phallic staves. Or else they kneel or sit in a restless, fluid posture, as if in preparation for the kind of shamanistic transformation into a jaguar that is depicted in other works.⁹

Rulers were buried in sarcophagi that clad them in death, in permanent materials, in the sort of disguises they wore in life: a creature with a caiman’sbody and nose, a jaguar’s eyes and mouth, and feathered eyebrows that conjure raised hands.¹⁰This face resembles the heavily whiskered were-jaguar widely depicted in Olmec art, not least in sculptures which capture the moment of transformation of shaman into beast.¹¹The rulers lay in pillared chambers with bloodletters of jade or stingray spine among their finely worked accoutrements. Their images can still be seen, carved on the benchlike thrones of basalt from La Venta, on which they sat to shed blood: their own and that of such captives as the submissive figure shown languishing on the pedestal of a throne, roped to a majestic central character in an eagle headdress, who leans outwards from the composition as if in admonition of his audience.

These mediators between man and nature presided over a privileged environment, but not such as to sustain civilization indefinitely. The last buildings on a grand scale in La Venta and San Lorenzo were probably made in the fourth century B.C. In its next phase in Mesoamerica, civilization withdrew into the hinterland of the swamps, to the rain forest where Maya cities raised their gleaming roof-combs above the treetops. Before we follow it there, I propose an excursion to the world’s greatest and most representative rain forest, around the Amazon, to evaluate the suitability of this type of environment for ambitious experiments in sedentary life. This excursion should help to demonstrate how, beyond the immediate riverbank world, rain forest is even harder to reshape to human purposes than swamp.

Amazon Lands: The Challenge of the Rain Forest

In 1596 , recalling his futile first expedition to Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh imagined how, with better luck, he might have

gone to the great city of Manoa, or at least taken so many other cities and towns nearer at hand, as would have made a royal return: but it pleased not God so much to favour me at this time: if it shall be my lot to prosecute the same, I shall willingly spend my life therein, and if any else shall be enabled thereunto, and conquer the same, I assure him thus much, he shall perform more than ever was done in Mexico by Cortes or in Peru by Pizarro . . . and whatsoever prince shall possess it, that prince shall be lord of more gold, and of a more beautiful empire, and of more cities and people, than either the king of Spain or the grand Turk.¹²

There was no such “great and golden city” as Raleigh proclaimed, nor were there any cities in the Guiana rain forest, or any evidence of the presence of the displaced Inca court which he professed to locate there. But this is an old ex-plorer’sdream: stumbling on a lost civilization in the “jungle.” No one has actually had the experience as often as John Lloyd Stephens, the journalist who launched modern Maya archaeology in pioneering expeditions of the 1830 s and 1840 s. The sensation was brilliantly captured in the engravings of his collaborator, Frederick Catherwood, who showed Maya buildings and statues looming and peering from forest which clung so closely that it seemed to have been smeared over them. Stephens, who was a masterful writer, heightened the account of every discovery with a sense of excitement and an expression of selfcongratulation. The reader works his way through the undergrowth, strains with the explorer’s eyes for a glimpse of objects almost invisible until one gets close up. At Mayapan, for instance, in 1841 , according to Stephens, “ours was the first visit to examine these ruins. For centuries they had been unnoticed, almost unknown, and left to struggle with rank tropical vegetation.”¹³When Pierre Loti, the self-styled “pilgrim of Angkor,” completed his pilgrimage in 1912 , the site was already renowned, but he managed to capture the sensation of a sudden discovery discerned beneath the overgrowth of forest: “I looked up at the tree-covered towers which dwarfed me, when all of a sudden my blood curdled as I saw an enormous smile looking down on me, and then another smile over on another wall, then three, then five, then ten, appearing from every direction. I was being observed from all sides.”¹⁴When, in 1814 , H. C. Cornelis was directed to Borobudur, the massive Buddhist monument in Central Java, it took two hundred men six weeks to cut away the vegetation and reveal the outlines of the structure.¹⁵

Yet our standard notion of “jungle”—the dense forest that clusters in tropicallowlands—is of an environment hostile to building, planting, and every prerequisite of civilized life. Alongside the lure of the secret city, a contradictory image of tropical-forest life prevails. According to a popular myth, it is a lush, easy-living environment, where the fruit drops into gaping mouths; its edible products are so abundant that it encourages lazy habits incompatible with the strenuous challenges which are essential to the building of a civilization. It takes an “English sahib,” indifferent to creased garb, or some other outsider who does not truly understand the jungle, to fight off inertia and reshape the environment with plantations and cities. This view is so far removed from the truth that it is hard to see any merit in it, except from the nakedly racist perspective of exploiters and exterminators who have abused the theory to class their forestpeople victims as inferior beings, immobilized in arrested development.

Better-informed opinion is aware that tropical-forest fertility does not easily produce human food in abundance: the intense concentration of competing species means that edible plants occur only at infrequent intervals. That is why forest gatherers must keep on the move, and why inexpert explorers die of starvation in apparently luxuriant regions. In heavily rainy forests, indeed, fertile soils are quite rare: beneficial minerals get depleted rapidly by leaching; trees suck out nutrients; organic layers tend to be thin, and levels of acids, aluminum,and iron oxides are high.¹⁶Intensive farming even in the rain forest demands irrigation channels and carefully built-up planting beds, such as were created by the Maya in Mesoamerican lowlands; or else it must rely on alluvial muds, like those on which the food of Angkor was grown in the slightly less drenched climate of the shores of the Tonle Sap, where the dry season is longer.

Either way—whether lush or deadly—tropical forests appear unconducive to civilization. They are even thought to be actively uncivilizing. That is the message of the Tarzan myth—the born aristocrat turned ape-man by jungle life. At another level, Tarzan evokes another forest theme: the inversion of normalcy. The image of the Amazon has the same function. The first Spanish explorers named the river after the warrior women who, they believed, lurked under the rain, deeper in the forest than their firsthand research could reach; when Sebastian Cabot mapped their reports, he showed them in battle against this legendary enemy, like the heroes of so many Greek-temple friezes, taming the Amazons, contending with a sphere so savage that it lay beyond nature.¹⁷

It is true that civilizations have matured more slowly in tropical forests than in other environments in which they occur. The Amazon rain forest, for instance, is still a laboratory of specimen peoples apparently suspended by nature in a state of so-called underdevelopment. Some of them have remained undisturbed in a way of life unchanged for millennia and are only now being recorded by the Brazilian government’s “first-contact” program. Yet, less than half a millennium ago, even the Amazon demonstrated the possibilities of civilization in the offing. At the end of 1541 , the first Spanish voyagers arrived: fiftyeight men, borne on a raft built on the spot, with nails battered out of scrap metal, and a few canoes scrounged or stolen from Indians. They were part of a typical ill-fated expedition in search of chimerical wealth: the “land of cinnamon” supposed to lie inland from Peru. Desperate for food, they reached the Amazon by toting and paddling down the Napo River. “It turned out,” wrote Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, “otherwise than we all expected, for we found no food in 200 leagues.” Instead, “God gave us a share in a discovery new and unheard of,” the first recorded navigation of the Amazon from its junction with the Napo to the Atlantic Ocean. The riverbank world the navigators observed on their way was a protean civilization, captured in its moment of emergence.

The adventure unfolded by accident. It makes too good a story to omit. The navigators did not intend to abandon their companions back at camp. At first they were driven by hunger. Then, when their search failed, they were too weak to turn back against the current. For days they were borne on the torrent, unable to reach the banks, and Friar Gaspar said mass “as they do at sea,” without consecrating the host in case it should be lost overboard. On January 8 , 1542 , after twelve days afloat, they made the shore and were fed by Indians who took pity on them. This gave them the strength to decide to continue the navigation as far asthe sea and to build a brig for the journey. Their biggest want was of nails. Two soldiers with engineering experience were deputed to build a forge; they made bellows out of the old boots of men who died of hunger; they burned wood to charcoal for smelting. By collecting up every bit of metal they had, apart from essential weapons and ammunition, they made two thousand nails in twenty days. Thus, the Iron Age came to the Brazilian rain forest.

They had to postpone building the brig until they got to a place with better food supplies. They never developed expertise in finding their own food, but, coming to a densely populated stretch where the Indians practiced turtle-farming, they secured ample provisions of turtle meat, supplemented by “roast cats and monkeys.” Here it took thirty-five days to build the vessel and caulk it with Indian cotton soaked in pitch, “which the natives brought because the captain asked them for it.”

It soon became a warship. For much of May and June, they battled their way through hostile canoes, relying for most of the time on crossbows, since powder would not stay dry. During this period, they lived on supplies seized by sallies against native villages ashore. On June 5 , they experienced the encounter which gave the river its name. In one village they found a fortified sanctuary, presided over by carvings of jaguars. “The building was something worth seeing and, impressed by its size, we asked an Indian what it was for.” His explanation was that there they adored the insignia of their rulers, “the Amazons.” Farther downriver, they picked up rumors which they interpreted to mean that there was a powerful empire of female warriors to the north, seventy villages strong, rich in gold, silver, salt, and llamas. The story must have been created by leading questions from the Spaniards and garbled native replies. Soon after the expedition emerged into the Atlantic, after an estimated eighteen hundred leagues’ voyages downriver, stories were circulating in Europe about the Spaniards’ heroic battles with the Amazons.¹⁸

Though the Amazons were presumably a fantasy, belief in the proximity of a great civilization was consistent with the Spaniards’ real experience of the river. Carvajal’s account has important lessons for the student of the ecohistory of the river. This was not an environment which could support much human life without adaptation—but it could be productively modified by civilizing ambitions. Those ambitions were already at work. Although the Spaniards could find no naturally occurring food “in four hundred miles,” they did see densely populated states and towns of thousands of inhabitants, living in substantial wooden buildings. This promising society was fed by turtle- and fish-farming and by cultivation of bitter manioc—a plant lethally poisonous when improperly prepared but exceptionally nutritious, albeit entirely in carbohydrate form, once the venom is pressed out of it.¹⁹Archaeology has confirmed the possibilities disclosed by Carvajal’s text. On Marajo Island, at the mouth of the Amazon,a similar environment housed, between the fifth and fifteenth centuries A.D., a society of builders of large mounds and earthworks who have left too little evidence for a convincing evaluation but whose remains—including dense clusters of hearths and elaborately painted ceramics—invite comparison with peoples commonly classified as “civilized,” such as the Olmecs or Mississippi Mound Builders (see page 131 ).

The river’s behavior is, in some ways, exemplified, from a riverside cultivator’s-point of view, in the floodplains known in Brazil as varea. Unlike the Nile, it rises slowly, giving the farmer time to harvest his crop, then falls rapidly—returning to its minimum level within a few days—to allow planting at leisure.²⁰If the platforms and levees are reasonably high, maize, which matures in 120 days but will not tolerate flood conditions after germination, can be harvested twice in a year. The staple throughout the Amazon Basin, however, throughout recorded history, has been manioc, “one of the most productive and least demanding crops ever developed by man.”²¹In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Jesuit Samuel Fritz—“the apostle of the Amazon,” who devoted his career to the defense of his riverside mission against Portuguese slavers—recorded what survived of the protocivilization of the varea. The riverbankers known as the Omagua had garden plots for manioc, and houses

generally situated on islands, beaches or banks of the river; all are low lying lands liable to be flooded; and although continual experience teaches them that at times, when the river is in high flood, they are left without a garden-mound and not seldom without anything to live upon, nevertheless they cannot make up their minds to place their dwellings and make their plantations on elevated ground away from the river, saying their forefathers had always had their habitations on the great river.²²

Fritz’s frustration has been echoed by many Westerners who have tried to work with the inhabitants of waterlogged tropics: the same mistaken conviction that the people would fare better on drier ground cost many lives on modern Frederik Hendrik Island. Fritz himself almost starved to death during the floods of 1689 . At the time, he was living farther downriver among the Jurimagua, whom he identified as the river’s link with the Amazon myth, because of their warlike traditions, which sent warriors of both sexes into battle. But Fritz’s deprivations were the result rather of his own inexpertise as a tropical survivor than of the deficiencies of native agronomy: he was reduced to begging.²³

He observed that the locals harvested their produce in January and February, before the floods, which were high from March till June; they kept their stockpiles of maize in their houses, burying manioc and cassava in pits where the food lay underwater for much of the time, for one or two years, and

although this sweet and bitter manioc may rot, when it is pressed it becomes better and of greater sustenance than when fresh, and from it they make their drinks, flour, and cassava bread. While the flood lasts, the people live on elevated floors made of the bark of trees, going out from and entering into their houses in canoes. Nor is there anything strange in this, since their life is perpetually spent upon the rivers and lagoons to fish and to row, in which arts they are more skilled than any other nation.

Most of the people recorded by the first visitors had already vanished when the next expedition drifted downriver a generation later. Their fate is unknown: probably they had been wiped out by diseases the explorers left behind. Indeed, rain-forest cultures tend to be precarious at the best of times.

In the forest hinterland, beyond the strip of Omagua-style riverbank management, civilization-building is an even more dangerous strategy. Western critics of native agriculture used to maintain that permanently cleared forest would yield cultivable land; now they tend to prefer to promote ecologically responsible, “sustainable” arboriculture, tolerating low yields and concentrating on harvesting natural products. Rain Forest Crunch is the deliciously politically correct sweetmeat which summons this endeavor to the tastebuds: it is sold in the United States, in a mixture with ice cream or in bars, under chaotic labels, of the colors of toucans and parakeets, which turn the image of the gloomy forest into a bright burst of color, inspiring optimism. Yet the traditional indigenous agronomy is as displeasing to advocates of sustainable-forest exploitation as to the land-hungry forest-flatteners who want to replace the jungle with pasture or strip mines. Slash-and-burn is an almost universal method of preparing land for planting. Representative practitioners, the Munducur Indians of the Tapajos River, spend three days felling a 350 -foot-wide swathe of forest. They leave it to dry for two months and set it alight. Planting is done by prodding the soil with a stick, inserting a cutting or seed, and treading it in. Burning restores some nutrients to the soil. Some of the detritus of the felled forest is deliberately left lying around to divert pests and create further phases of the release of nutrients, which never, however, compensate for the fast rate of exhaustion of exposed soil, where no humus gets a chance to accumulate. The system commits the community to keep on the move, as no hinterland plot is cultivable for more than three years.²⁴

It is hard to resist the impression that most peoples of the rain forest have been as aggressive and ambitious in managing the environment as nature permits. There are peoples who restrict themselves to foraging for their diet and who can be said to lead lives of genuine submission to nature, but much of the region “bears man’s smudge.” Talk of “virgin” or “primeval” forest is often overhasty.²⁵Some cultures in the region approached a level of ambition and manipulation of nature recognizable as civilized by such fastidious onlookers as thefirst Spanish explorers. Against this background, it is unsurprising—or, at least, less surprising than would otherwise appear—to find two civilizations, magnificent by any standards, which survived for many centuries in forest belts of tropical lowlands, where rainfall exceeds or approaches ninety inches a year. The Maya of what are now southern Mexico and northern Central America, and the Khmer of the central Cambodian lowlands show how extraordinary splendor can be combined with heroic endurance in this demanding environment.

The Tongue in the Stones: The Lowland Maya

In a long period of intense creativity, between about 200 B.C. and 900 A.D., Maya communities made hundreds of cities rise above the roof of the rain forest. They also created—or perhaps developed from Olmec prototypes—the only currently intelligible system of writing in the New World capable of expressing the whole of human thought. They used it to keep historical records so detailed that we are more certain of the dates of kings of the Macaw dynasty of Copan in present-day Honduras in the fifth century A.D. than of European monarchs who were their contemporaries. The Maya numerical system, which included zero, was used to make astronomical calculations extending over millions of years. Their professional artists produced work of breathtaking quality by any standards: carving as fine as filigree in jade so hard that no material except itself could make any impression on it; deeply undercut portrait sculpture in soapstone; lavishly molded censers from Copan; earthenware and plasterwork; delicate vase-paintings; murals glowing with the color of the fresh blood of war and human sacrifice; painting in many styles, from dashing realism to meticulously exact geometry.

The Maya world was of city-states ruled—at least during the bestdocumented periods—by warrior-kings. We can still get an extraordinarily lively impression of what some of them were like.²⁶Pacal of Palenque (r. 615 – 84 ) was buried deep under a towering pyramid carved with the records of his dynasty’s victories. On his burial slab he is shown as the progenitor of a divine race of kings. From his loins sprouts a sacred ceiba tree—which seems to lurch with drunken roots, bulge with fertility at the trunk, and spread its branches over the world. Cauac Sky, king of Quirigua (r. 725 – 84 )—Copan’s sometime tributary and sometime rival— ruled only a small state; but he laid out in his capital the biggest ceremonial plaza in the Maya world, adorning it with at least seventeen huge monuments to himself. In Copan, the longest stone inscription in the world, carved on the reveals of a monumental stairway, celebrates the ancestry and conquests of the kings. With a little imagination, you can still reconstruct, from fragments in the British Museum, the scene of King Yax Pac (r. 763 –c. 810 ) withdrawing into a chamber, decorated with cosmic images, to draw blood fromhis penis. Part of the purpose of this rite was to induce the dreamlike visions through which all Maya kings used to commune with the gods. Kings’ wives had to celebrate a similar communion, drawing a spiked thong through their tongues. When monarchs emerged to don their regalia—like Shield Jaguar of Yaxchilan on February 12 , 724 A.D., accepting his jaguar mask from his wife, whose face is still smattered with sacrificial blood—they became representatives or impersonators of the gods, leading their communities in ceremonies or campaigns.²⁷

The greatest of all Maya cities was probably Tikal, in a vast, flat expanse of rain forest in the Peten region of Guatemala. Thanks to its remarkably detailed archaeological and historical records, its trajectory can be followed from origins through greatness to sudden, final catastrophe—a trajectory essentially similar to those of all the great centers of lowland Maya civilization. Historical inscriptions at Tikal record legendary dates as early as 1139 B.C., but the evidence of monumental buildings began about 400 B.C., and the ruler cult commemorating kings in images and inscriptions began only in the third century A.D. Kings are known by name from 292 A.D.

A population of perhaps fifty thousand clustered around the gleaming templesand palaces of the ceremonial center. Most of these people lived in huts of thatch supported on tightly packed poles, such as are depicted in reliefs on the walls of the aristocratic palaces—and such as can still be seen housing most of the rural population to this day. They were fed by snail- and fish-farming in narrow canals dug between raised earth platforms for the cultivation of squashes, chilies, breadnuts perhaps—the fruit of the ramon tree, which nowadays tends to occur mainly as a prized garden plant—and, above all, maize.²⁸

Maize is an exceptionally nutritious and energy-efficient source of food. Almost-every New World civilization, before the arrival of settlers from Europe, depended on it absolutely. In common with many indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Maya treated it as divine: the tillers of the fields were the servants of the maize god; in recompense, the god sacrificed himself for them in the form of food. Sacrifice was demanded in return. When not performing his duties as a war leader, the king’s vital role was as a propitiator of nature, offering blood of his own and the lives of sacrificial victims—human and animal—captured in war or hunt: a peccary or deer, perhaps, borne home, slung between hunters’ shoulders, in an unusually relaxed relief in a museum in Merida, or young jaguars, whose bones have been found at sacrifice sites.

In the last century, and for most of the present one, the Maya were imagined by most scholars as a uniquely peaceful race of stargazers, ruled by philosopherpriests. The only surviving deciphered literature from the lowlands was calendrical, and the highland literature which disclosed bloody dynastic conflicts was thought to be late and irrelevant. The sanguinary excesses of the decoration of late-built cities in Yucatan was eloquent enough, but scenes like those which adorn the ball court of Chichen Itza, where the victors are shown repeatedlystriking off their victims’ heads, could be dismissed as the results of the corrupting influence of central-Mexican peoples, or even as symbolic scenes which expressed nothing about the realities of life. In the same city, walls painted with episodes of warfare could plausibly be classified as representations of some myth. The statues and stelae of kings at lowland sites were thought to represent gods. In 1946 , however, the eighth-century murals of Bonampak, on the Usumacinta River, were rediscovered—vivid scenes of warfare and of the ritual slaughter of captives, depicted with loving realism and immediacy. It was impossible to see them convincingly except as part of the tradition which produced, for example, the records of “war artists” at Chichen Itza some three hundred years later.

When scholars began to make progress in deciphering Maya writing in the 1950 s, the true nature of Maya society was exposed. First, it became apparent that the glyphs included huge numbers of real place names: they were records of real events in recorded time in this world, not only in the superlunary world of the stars and planets. The purpose of the meticulous chronology, the elaborate mathematics, the astronomic rapture was all subordinate to secular ends: it provided the framework for dynastic histories. The details of the inscriptions yielded the names and reign dates of kings, their acts of self-sacrifice, their ancestries, their wars, and the immolations of the captives they took. The ball courts could now be seen as the exercise yards of a warrior elite instead of arenas for the re-enactment of celestial motion. In 1973 , at a congress held at the site of Palenque, the whole recorded history of the city, encompassing most of the seventh century A.D. and part of the eighth, was disclosed at a single session.²⁹It has recently been suggested that the revelation of the historical nature of Maya record-keeping has been misleading in its turn, and that scholars have missed legendary and propagandistic elements in the inscriptions.³⁰Nevertheless, the disclosure of an entire lost history of a vanished civilization—as if a tongue had been loosed from inside the stones—has surely been one of the most exciting episodes in modern scholarship. The unfolding of a record of unremitting warfare has been one of the most chastening lessons.

Tikal’s efficiency in producing food—and, therefore, mobilizing warriors-—gave it an edge over its neighbors in the continual wars waged for territorial-resources and sacrificial victims. The effects were equivocal: Tikal became a magnet for invaders, and a prize for the indigenous aristocracy to fight over. What seems to be an act of imperial aggression was recorded in 378 A.D., when a noble from Tikal, known to historians from the appearance of his name glyph as Smoking Frog, was installed as ruler of the nearby city of Uaxactun. Tikal’s own politics were turbulent. Smoking Frog’s elevation coincided with a coup d’etat by a ruler called Curl Nose, but in 420 , Curl Nose’s son, Stormy Sky, had to recapture the throne from another intruded dynasty. He decorated his monuments with elaborate texts justifying his accession. Another revolution, in 475, was accompanied by a change in the style in which kings were portrayed. Writersof propaganda tampered anew with the genealogical record.³¹Dynastic instability became a feature of the system; it was hard to reconcile with the divine responsibilities of the king, who had to keep nature appeased.

Perhaps in consequence, rapid turnover of rulers in the sixth century seems to have been connected with a period of economic decline. Tikal was conquered in 562 by the rival city of Caracol. Monuments were destroyed, The city shrank during more than a century in which the problems of exploiting the rainforest environment appeared insuperable. In 682 , however, a king arose who reversed the decline. Ah Cacau’s name glyph was a chocolate pod: chocolate was a prized commodity, much in demand in lands far to the north, where it would not grow naturally. The new prosperity of Ah Cacau’s time may have been based on a new approach to the exploitation of the soil, adapted for the production of a high-value export. Ah Cacau boasted a strong sense of Tikal’s history. He began a cult in memory of Stormy Sky, and shed his blood on the anniversaries of great days in Tikal’s remote past. He was a patron of the arts: what may be the only classic Maya poem to survive is carved on an altar he dedicated in 711 in praise of spectacular astronomical conjunctions which occurred in his reign. Above all, he was a tireless builder, to whom much of the beauty of Tikal is owed. When the sun is in the west, the faded glory of his vast effigy can still be seen looming over the city, from the top of the pyramid he built as his mausoleum. He was buried beneath it with 180 pieces of fine jade and bones carved with scenes of his journey to the underworld, ferried by gods.³²

No dates at Tikal were recorded, no monumental art created, after 869 . Though other theories have been suggested—including revolution, foreign invasion, or some collective psychological trauma—it seems that the city was finally overcome by the struggle to survive in a hostile environment. The remains of the inhabitants show marked signs of malnutrition towards the end. Within about a hundred years, all the other great cities of the lowlands were engulfed by the same, or a similar, fate.

This was not, however, the end of Maya civilization, which seems, rather, to have retreated to more favorable environments in the Guatemala highlands and the limestone hills of Yucatan, where impressive city life continued or was soon revived. Despite periodic ecological catastrophes, some centers, like Iximche and Mayapan, remained important until the arrival of Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century; they have left wonderfully romantic sites, but they never reproduced all the features which made the “classic age” of the lowlands so impressive. They made no epigraphic inscriptions and little sculpture in stone. Theirs was a slimmer operation than that of their forebears’, and they spent less on luxurious artworks and otiose scholarship. They were, however, the same people, with a heritage of myths and memories that went back to the classic period. Their bark-paper books recorded the same calendar and the same mixture of history and prophecy, until—beginning in the 1540 s but incomplete until 1697 —the Spanish Conquest finally ruptured the continuity of the history of the Maya.

The splendors of the lowland cities were never repeated: settlements tended, as time went on, to get fewer and smaller. The manpower for spectacular monuments was never again available in necessary quantities, or the wealth to support the specialized artists and craftsmen of the former age. The greatness of Maya civilization became a folk memory, and the lowland cities were smothered by the forest—like the enchanted castles of some Sleeping Beauty myth—to await rediscovery by archaeologists. In this respect, as in many others, the Maya example makes one think of Angkor.

The Beloved of the Snake:
Khmer Civilization on the Mekong

Angkor is its own document: one of the world’s most glamorous and potent ruins, a city built nearly a thousand years ago, abandoned for half a millennium, almost choked by the enveloping forest, and wrested into the light by archaeology in the twentieth century. It summons Cambodians to a sense of ancestral pride: the great temple of Angkor Wat is the only building in the world to be profiled on a national flag. Angkor has also helped to inspire a destructive modern ideology. To the Khmer Rouge, it symbolized the heights to which an isolated agrarian society could aspire in torrid forests, where industrial technology would be outlawed and the bourgeoisie exterminated. To anyone who visits it today, the site summons up a convincing definition of civilization: the triumph of monumental imaginations in unconducive terrain.

The culture area centered on Angkor was huge, with Khmer monuments scattered from the Gulf of Siam to Vientiane, and from Saigon to the Menam Valley. It was consciously a lowland culture, shadowed by fear of the highland peoples north of the Dangrek Mountains, or locked in combat with them. A long history of monumental building was sustained from the sixth century A.D., and intensively from the late eighth—most of it concentrated in and around Angkor, which was continuously the home of the kings from the mid-tenth century on. An environment, denatured with a light-handed touch, was recrafted according to urban standards of excellence, like the landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England. The result was enshrined in laws which made hunting parks, flower gardens, and reserved groves sacred to the gods, where deforestation was banned, and desecrators—defecators and urinators— condemned to one of the thirty-two hells depicted in the city’s temples.³³All the prosperity of the region of Angkor derived from agriculture. The Khmer state, unlike many others in East, South, and Southeast Asia in what we think of as the163 Middle Ages, had no mines, no great commercial fleets, and no great industries. The wealth that sustained the great city was the result of a peculiar hydraulic feature of the Mekong River. When swollen by monsoonal rains, the river becomes, in effect, too heavily charged for its own delta and begins to flow backwards, flooding the plain of the Tonle Sap. The soil is so rich, in consequence, that, provided the waters are well managed and channeled into reservoirs, it yields three rice crops a year.

Like those of the Maya, the great monumental complexes of the Khmer grew by accretion, as the centers of gravity of the cities shifted with the designs of kings and the changes of dynasty. For ecological reasons, the Khmer capital could only shift within a fairly narrow compass, but the area of Angkor was sprinkled with sacred reservoirs, ceremonial centers, and ritual complexes, as successive kings re-sited royal sanctuaries and palaces, often after bloody contests for the throne. The effect is reminiscent of the Maya world: travelers are continually surprised as they stumble on unsuspected enclosures of superbly wrought stone, separated from others by forest. There are other similarities. Though the architectural forms of Angkor tend to be heavily dressed in thick layers of carving, which seems to ripple down the towers in sumptuous folds and drapes, the stark geometry of the basic construction is revealed in glimpses: everything is angular, upright, precise, and is spread over a kind of dense scaffolding of stone—thousands of vertical pillars and horizontal entablatures are the framework of every great building. Like Maya cities, those of the Khmer seem built for outdoor life and outward display. Most interiors are low, gloomy, and secretive, whereas vast plazas and causeways, open to the sky, are lavishly adorned and encourage the eye to widen and rise. Sacred chambers are elevated to the tops of precipitate stairways to make access laborious and descent dizzying. In both cultures, monuments monitored astronomical events and reproduced the divine mathematics of the universe. Maya sculpture and epigraphy in the classic age were focused on two subjects: the maintenance of the calendar and the glorifi-cation of kings. In Khmer tradition, by contrast, art was reserved for the depiction of heaven until the twelfth century A.D., when King Suryavarman II, in a daring act which conservative subjects must have deplored as sacrilegious, had himself carved in the walls of his greatest foundation, the biggest temple in the world, Angkor Wat. Previously, only dead monarchs or royal ancestors had been honored by monumental sculptures. Now the cult of living kings began to replace that of immortal gods.

Suryavarman is repeatedly depicted in one of the temple galleries; in a particularly beautiful image, he appears surrounded by all the environment-defying paraphernalia of Khmer kingship: parasols against the sun, fans against the humidity; the artificial breeze is suggested by the curl of the wisps of rich textiles at his hips.³⁴A dead snake dangles from his hand, perhaps in allusion to an anecdote about his accession: he seized the throne in his youth from his aged predecessorby leaping on the royal elephant and killing the king, “as Garuda, landing on the peak of a mountain, kills a serpent.” Angkor Wat, its harmonies and perfections, embodied the ideology which justified his kingship. He had inaugurated a new era; the creation of the world is re-enacted in the reliefs, together with the cosmic tug-of-war between good and evil gods and the churning of the elixir of life from the ocean, initiating the propitious age of the cycle of Brahmanical cosmology, the Krta Yuga.³⁵

According to Hindu tradition, the propitious era should have lasted 1 , 728 ,000 years. Suryavarman’s was over by 1128 , probably less than a decade after his coronation, when a long series of military and naval failures began against the Vietnamese and Champa. Yet the grandeur of Angkor could be revived over and over again. Chou Ta-kuan, the Chinese ambassador who took part in a mission to the Khmer in 1296 , captured the appearance of Cambodia in a stillbrilliant era; the “single white parasol” of King Srindavarman was being spread over a country where many parasols of contending pretenders had been rapidly opened and closed in a period of disputed succession. Chou found that, “ although this is a land of barbarians, they know how to treat a king.” Srindavarman rode in a gold palanquin, behind curtains which girls parted at the sound of conches, to reveal the monarch on his lion-skin throne. The people all knocked their heads on the ground until the conches ceased and the theater of power had moved on.

Chou approved of such displays of due deference, but his disgust was aroused by some barbarous habits. He deplored the open display of homosexual preferences, which, he claimed, were expressed with particular importunacy in soliciting Chinese. He condemned the inconstancy of Khmer wives, whose fidelity could not outlast a fortnight’s separation. He was fascinated by reports of the ritual deflowering of virgins by the intrusive fingers of specially hired monks—though monastic frolics were a topos of Confucian literature, and Chou’s information on this point may not have been true. His appreciation of everything was marred by the insufferable heat, which, he thought, encouraged excessive bathing, with a consequent increase in disease. He shared Khmer alarm at the savage tribes of the forests and mountains, who spent their time killing each other with bows, spears, and poisons. On the other hand, his admiration for the essential urbanity of the Khmer shines through his account of their capital.

“It is such monuments, we think, which, from the first, inspired Chinese merchants to praise Cambodia as a land rich and noble,” he wrote as he described the seven-mile wall and the five gates. Wherever he looked, he was dazzled by the gleam of gold, which testified to the value of Cambodia’s exports, for none was produced locally. On the east side, golden lions flanked a bridge of gold, resting on gigantic piles covered with Buddhas. A golden tower at the center of the city was exceeded by another of copper. In the royal palace, the sleepingchamber was at the top of a third tower, again of gold, where political stability was reputedly secured by the king’s nightly copulation with a nine-headed serpent. The legend seems easily traced to a genuine Khmer custom: the royal persona —the essence of royal legitimacy—was treated as residing in a sculpted phallus, symbolic of the power of the creator god who bestowed it. It was kept in a tower at the center of the royal city—the symbolic central mountain of the universe, where the communion of king and god took place in secret. The abundant serpent imagery of Angkor would have been enough to convince Chou Ta-kuan of the identity of serpent and god.³⁶

Much of the recent history of the Khmer could be read in Chou’s observations. Most of the monuments he admired dated from the reign of the great king Jayavarman VII, who had died about three-quarters of a century before. The walls, moats, south gateway, and towers of Angkor Thom, on which Chou’s description focused, were only the centerpiece of a great building campaign which surrounded the capital with shrines and palaces, way stations, and—it was said—more than a hundred hospitals, decorated with gigantic human faces. A stela at Ta Promh is engraved with a proclamation of Jayavarman’s public-health policy:

He felt the afflictions of his subjects more than his own because the suffering of the people constitutes the suffering of the king, more than his own suffering. . . . Full of deep sympathy for the good of the world, the king expresses this wish: all the souls who are plunged in the ocean of existence, may I be able to rescue them by virtue of this good work. May all the kings of Cambodia, devoted to the right, carry on my foundation, and attain for themselves and their descendants, their wives, their officials, their friends a holiday of deliverance in which there will never be any sickness.³⁷

The allocation of resources for the hospitals hints at both the scale and the basis of Khmer wealth: 11 ,192 tons of rice annually, contributed by 81 ,640 tributaries in 838 villages, with 4 , 682 pounds of sesame, 231 pounds of cardamom, 3 , 402 nutmegs, 48 ,000 fever medicines, 1 , 960 boxes of salve for hemorrhoids, and corresponding amounts of honey, sugar, camphor, black mustard, cumin, coriander, fennel, ginger, pungent cubeb berries, aromatic vetiver grass, cinnamon, bitter myrobalan plums, and vinegar squeezed from jujube, the reputed lotus-eaters’ fruit.

The most effective prophylactic was prayer, and the foundation stela of the temple of Ta Promh gives an account of the wealth of a temple dedicated in 1186 to house an image of Jayavarman’s mother as “the Perfection of Wisdom.” The tribute of 3 , 140 villages was assigned to the temple. Its endowment included a setof golden vessels weighing more than 1 , 100 pounds and a similar set in silver, 35 diamonds, 40 ,620 pearls, 4 , 540 precious stones, an enormous golden bowl, 876 Chinese veils, 512 silk beds, 523 parasols; daily provisions for a permanent establishment of over 5 , 000 residents included rice, butter, milk, molasses, oil, seeds, honey. The maintenance of the cult required annual supplies of wax, sandalwood, camphor, and 2 , 387 sets of clothing for the 260 images. “Doing these good deeds,” the inscription concludes,

the king with extreme devotion to his mother, made this prayer: that because of the virtue of the good deeds I have accomplished, my mother, once delivered from the ocean of transmigration, may enjoy the state of Buddhahood.³⁸

The triumph of Buddhism as the state religion may be linked with the devotion of Jayavarman’s wife, who sought consolation from her grief when he was away on campaign “in the serene path of the sage, who walked between the fire of torments and the sea of sorrows.”³⁹

The Bayon—Chou Ta-kuan’s “tower of gold”—had a solid central mass to evoke the central mounds of ancient Khmer capitals; its inner chamber, however, contained not the Hindu Devajara-image of previous reigns, but a Buddha intended to symbolize the apotheosis of the founder-king, whose images “stared in all directions” from the outer friezes. The transition to a predominantly Buddhist court culture, initiated by Jayavarman, was still going on in Chou’s day, for Hindu roots were strong.

The city has the same plan as a temple. Both evoke the divine design of the world common to Hindu and Buddhist cosmology: the central mountain, the concentric ranges, the outer wall of rock, the circumambient waters. As if left rough-hewn by the gods, nature had to be regularized by human hands to make it conformable to divine ideals. Ramacandra Kaulacara, an eleventh-century architect from Orissa, where the best Hindu temples under Muslim dominance were built, captured the essential principles on which Angkor was built:

He the creator . . . lays out the plan of the universe according to measure and number. . . . He is the prototype and model of the temple builder, who also unites in his single person, the architect, the priest and the sculptor. . . . This small universe has to be situated with ) respect to the vaster universe. . . . It has to fall into line with . . . the course of the sun and also the movements of the planets. . . . Far from being a simple arithmetical operation to be achieved by applying the measuring rod, the lay-out of a temple . . . inasmuch as it incorporates in a single synthesis the unequal courses of sun, the moon and the planets . . . also symbolizes all recurrent time sequences: the day, the month, the year.⁴⁰

The eleventh-century courtly city erected by King Udayadityavarman II centered on a tower which bore the characteristic inscription: “He thought the center of the universe was marked by Meru and he thought it fitting to have a Meru in the center of his capital.”⁴¹The inscriptions Jayavarman VII placed at the corners of Angkor Thom hallow the central tower, outer walls, and surrounding moat with a comparison in the same tradition: “The first pierced the brilliant sky with its pinnacle, the other reached down to the unplumbed depths of the world of serpents. This mountain of victory and this ocean of victory built by the king simulated the arc of his great glory.”⁴²In Jayavarman’s reign, a Brahman scholar from Burma could still travel to Cambodia to take instruction from the many “eminent experts on the Veda” to be found there. Sanskritic inscriptions, which disappeared from the neighboring kingdom of Champa in 1253 , continued to be made in Cambodia until the 1330 s.⁴³

By then, monumental building in Angkor had ceased more than a hundred years earlier. One should resist the myth of the Khmer Rouge: the Angkor state was not just an inward-looking agrarian society. One of the Bayon reliefs displays the maritime world of Southeast Asia, of which it was also part: seas abounding in fish, full of fishing vessels, parasol-decked pleasure boats, battleships and merchant vessels with deep hulls. But the Khmer were not committed to long-range trade in the manner of such really successful states of the region in the late Middle Ages as Srivijaya and Majapahit. Nor could the elite of Angkor continue indefinitely to pay for armies, any more than for lavish building projects, on the old scale. It got harder, as time went on, to trade rice for gold. From the twelfth century onwards, vast extensions were made to the ricelands in Southeast Asia, as forests less naturally favored than that of Angkor were cultivated by new techniques, under the patronage of rulers and religious establishments. The Thai state grew in wealth, dynamism, and aggression while the Khmer stagnated. Eventually, in the 1430 s, the Khmer withdrew into a more compact defensive ring, centered on Phnom Penh, and left Angkor, after the Thai had carried off whatever booty could be carried, to the forest.

The City of Death: Benin

To the disappointment of explorers, there is nothing like Tikal or Angkor in tropical Africa. But there is Benin. In the early centuries of European overseas expansion, the splendor of Benin restored white men’s easily lost faith in the ability of black Africans to create civilizations of their own. The dazzling image of medieval Mali, which had gripped imaginations in the Latin Christendom of the fourteenth century A.D., was dispelled by contact. In Congo, though Portuguese monarchs treated its kings on terms of equality, and Congolese of sufficient nobility were able to become priests and even bishops, familiarity bredcontempt, and the Portuguese on the spot affected to find the natives despicable. Even the grandeur of Ethiopia seemed disappointing after the excitement aroused in Europe by the legend of Prester John. Mwene Mutapa proved unconquerable by Portuguese invaders in the 1570 s but was regarded rather as a place of strange and exotic barbarism in Western literature.

Benin, on the other hand, was, for a long time, exempt from the general contempt. When a Dutch engraver illustrated it in 1668 , he made the city look vast and regular, dignified with lofty spires on which perched great images of squawking birds, recognizable as the celestial messengers well known from surviving examples of Benin bronzework. One such survival, a native model of Benin’s royal palace, with richly decorated walls and an elegant conical roof above a central chamber, shows that the engraver’s version, albeit exaggerated, was rooted in fact.⁴⁴

The renown of Benin had grown gradually, since the first emergence of the city out of a cluster of smaller communities by the beginning of the fifteenth century.⁴⁵It is surprising that the place attracted European respect, albeit deservedly: it was unpleasantly hot and humid, an incubator of fever, with the sort of climate which was conventionally thought unconducive to civilization. Nearly eighty inches of rainfall a year rattled into the rain gutters of the royal palace; when it was raining, royal audiences became almost inaudible.

According to reports from 1538 onwards,⁴⁶the court stank with the detritus of human sacrifice. Its buildings, though substantial and spectacular, with stamped reliefs and ornamental brass plaques, were made of mud—a material traditionally underappreciated by European arbiters of architecture. Yet Benin had the advantage of becoming known to Europeans in the late fifteenth century, when the power of the state of Benin was nearing its height. Prowess in war and art gave the city its prominence among the city-states of the Lower Niger. Art and war were linked in the royal cult, in which the divinity of the ruler, who was said to need neither food nor sleep, was celebrated.

The two arts in which Benin craftsmen excelled were combined in altar offerings: expressive brass heads depicting stylized kings and queen mothers, to which, from the mid-eighteenth century, were added elaborately carved elephants’ tusks, rising like plumes from hollows in the heads. No writing was known, but the palace plaques—cast with reliefs of courtly scenes and historic battles—were kept “like a card index . . . and referred to when there was a dispute about etiquette.”⁴⁷

On altar rings, made for a now-forgotten purpose, vultures feast on the bound, gagged, and dismembered bodies of vanquished enemies. Spears, shields, swords, and severed heads decorate altar furniture. The massive earthworks formed by dumping from now-vanished ditches are “an earthen record of a long process of fusion of semi-dispersed communities . . . into an urban society requiring defence at an urban level.”⁴⁸This consolidation, around the middle ofthe fifteenth century, marks Benin’s inception as a conquest state, gradually acquiring subjects, tribute, and slaves from an increasingly broad area, extending, by the early seventeenth century, more than five hundred miles, touching the Niger and the sea, colonizing the swamp forests of the Benin River, and founding subject communities as far west as Lagos.⁴⁹

Apart from human victims, the sacrifices that made for success in agriculture-and war were crocodiles, mudfish, kola nuts, palm leaves (signifying palm wine), cattle of a small species specially bred for the forest,⁵⁰and kids. These are ceremonial foods, elaborately packaged and, presumably, eaten sparingly. Kola nuts, borne by royal attendants with great reverence, had a bitter taste and stimulating effects; they were distributed by kings to visiting chiefs and used as a luxurious condiment.⁵¹At least from the early sixteenth century, the staple food was the yam. The wealth of Benin came not from agriculture but from commerce. Slaves were rarely important in Benin’s trade—never as much so as in the neighboring kingdom of Dahomey, perhaps because, when they had a surplus of captives, the people of Benin preferred to keep them for their own use. In addition, European slavers were deterred from Benin by the relatively high incidence of disease, compared with coastal trading factories. Nor was the kingdom rich in metals: it imported most of the copper and all the ready-made brass used in preparing the alloys of which the artworks were created. A native cotton cloth was esteemed at times, and the condiment known as tailed or benin pepper played an initial part, at least, in attracting European trade to Benin.⁵²Until the palm-oil boom of the late nineteenth century, ivory was the region’s highestvalued resource and Benin was the main source of Europe’s supplies in the eighteenth century.⁵³

By then, the kingdom had experienced its greatest age. During the seventeenth century, faineant rulers called obas withdrew from warfare, retreated into ritual, became effectively confined to the palace, gambled away mountains of coral beads, and submitted to the distractions of a harem of five hundred concubines. A revival was inaugurated by Akenzua I, an oba of unusual ambition, in the 1690 s, but it cost a civil war and a further weakening of Benin’s influence over its subject communities.⁵⁴Some of the best artworks hint at recovered prosperity in the eighteenth century. Benin had never relied on the export of slaves and so was protected from the effects of the trade’s decline. While other states crumbled in the mid-nineteenth century, it survived; while some rivals prospered on the basis of the growing demand for palm oil, Benin retreated into isolation.

Indifference to trade created a motive for British intervention. Human sacrifice, which increased in frequency and grew more refined in cruelty during the nineteenth century, created a pretext. Oba Ovonramwen, who seized the throne in 1891 , attempted to fend off British imperialism by defiance; but his control over his own kingdom was crumbling, and he was powerless to countermandrecalcitrant chiefs. The massacre of a British mission in 1896 was certainly instigated without Ovonramwen’s approval.⁵⁵But the British riposte was inevitable. Newspapers proclaimed the conquest and annexation of Benin “a holy war . . . a glorious work” against “the city of death.”⁵⁶Photographs taken by members of the punitive task force show the city in decline and the palace decayed and sagging—even before British artillery pummeled it into a shapeless wreck.

Every civilization or protocivilization in tropical lowlands has been stifled in immaturity or declined from grandeur. Their monuments have been choked by jungle or sunk into swamp. Although some lowlands in the tropics provide abundant means of life, in most the balance of the environment is precarious and civilization is fragile. Yet almost every civilization in almost every
environment has ultimately been reconquered by nature and reduced to ruins; the longevity and magnificence of some of the greatest efforts in the tropics are more surprising than their ultimate failure. The solutions which builders of civilizations have adopted in rain forests and swamps show marked similarities: in some ways, Angkor recalls a Maya city; the mounds of the Olmec and Majaharo resemble each other; the political framework of civilization in Benin was that of a competitive world of city-states, reminiscent of the political universe of the Maya. Yet the diversity is more conspicuous. It may be impossible ever to contrive a satisfactory explanation of why the performance of peoples with civilizing ambitions varies so much in the tropics: why the Omagua or the people of Majaharo never built on the scale attained by the Olmecs, or why the islanders of Frederik Hendrik Island never approached a comparable level of achievement; how the Maya transcended the limitations of an exceptionally difficult environment in a way unparalleled in any other rain forest, except at Angkor, where conditions were markedly more favorable; or, more generally, why some rain forests house great civilizations, others are lightly modified by their inhabitants, and a few patches are home to foragers who settle for what nature gives them without trying to improve on it. Though these problems remain unresolved, one conclusion can be emphasized: the civilizing ambition keeps recurring in tropical lowlands and often encounters success. The rain forests and swamps are environments where civilization takes us by surprise, like a “lost city in the jungle,” but it is the sort of surprise which happens often enough to make us half expect it.