9

Natives and the Americas

(1500 BC–1521 AD)

How people living outside civilizations maintained their veneration for nature, while others in the Americas grew dependent on maize

DESPITE THE MAYHEM and violence of the Mediterranean world and the massive rise of urban human populations around the Mediterranean and in India and China, human beings in much of the rest of the earth were still carrying on much as ever they had. One estimate suggests that of the 200 million or so people living 2,000 years ago, roughly seventy million still had a Stone Age lifestyle. Most of these people lived outside Europe and Asia. Their beliefs were based on nature as the essence of everything that mattered for their well-being and lasting survival.

Living within nature is historically mankind’s most robust form of existence (see page 83). The art was learned over millions of years of cohabiting with animals in the forests. The most resilient and ancient of all human societies have lived this way. Typically, they are not based on fighting nature or harnessing its forces to improve material standards of living. Nor do they tend to rely on over-exploiting the natural world. Today, it is only at the very edge of human civilizations that a few of these ancient systems hang on, mostly as fragments, but at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in about 476 AD, many of them still flourished.

One of the most ancient natural human habitats is in Australia. We know Homo sapiens arrived there more than 40,000 years ago, thanks to the discovery of Mungo Man. This poorly preserved skeleton, found at the bottom of a dry lake in New South Wales on 26 February 1974, is of an old man, about five feet seven inches tall, lying on his back. He had been sprinkled with red ochre, showing the existence even then of elaborate burial traditions.

Exactly what route humans took to Australia is hotly disputed. Land bridges are known to have connected Australia and New Guinea during the last Ice Age, although recent genetic evidence suggests that people came from a broad arc stretching across Africa, India, Japan, eastern Russia and even North America, as well as the closer Polynesian islands. These people believed that all living things shared a common spirit, a belief which has been called dreamtime since the beginning of the twentieth century. Animals were the ancestral beings of mankind, and their movements even shaped the earth itself. The Aboriginals’ creation story, called the dreaming, explains how the land was formed. All things, animate and inanimate, share the same dreamtime spirit. There are literally thousands of dreaming stories in Aboriginal folklore, covering all aspects of their relationship with nature and other living things.

Although the Aboriginal way of life was mostly untouched for thousands of years, archaeologists have recently discovered that by 500 AD some changes had begun to creep in as a result of contact with other encroaching civilizations. For example, the dingo, the Australian wild dog, was introduced from about 1500 BC by traders from New Guinea. These dogs had a significant impact on Australia’s ancient ecosystem, and are thought to have been responsible for driving several species of marsupial carnivores to extinction. The Aboriginals adopted them as companions, domesticating them to help them hunt. The introductions of eel traps, fish hooks made from shells and the development of smaller, more intricate stone tools, also help account for an overall growth in population, perhaps to as many as a million people by the time of the arrival of the first European settlers in 1788 (see page 268).

It is highly likely that the Australian Aboriginals’ deep respect for all life and the sacred earth helped them survive a series of enormous climatic changes during their 40,000 years of history. One important survival strategy was to divide small Aboriginal clans into different groups, with each one revering a particular animal or plant as its defining totem. A series of non-contact taboos between men and women of the same clan evolved, ensuring that marriages occurred between groups rather than within a single group, thus avoiding potentially disastrous incestuous matches. Reverence for specific natural resources also meant that in times of scarcity it was less likely for any one species to be unwittingly hunted or gathered to extinction. In this way Aboriginal people maximized their chances of survival in extreme conditions, and through marriage ties between groups established a network of obligations between clans to care for others and share precious resources.

Totems and taboos were not limited to native Australians. Across the Pacific Ocean, amongst the jungle tribes of the Amazon in South America, a system of living with nature evolved that was every bit as ingenious and resilient. The Huaorani were an Amazonian tribe whose responsible use of forest resources has few modern parallels. Their success was founded on an extraordinary expertise in carefully using animals, plants and trees to support a simple forest hunter-gathering way of life.

For these people the animals of the forest had a spiritual as well as a physical existence. They believed that when a person died, his spirit was challenged by an enormous python which guarded the domain of the dead. Victims were returned to the world as animal or insect spirits. Such beliefs gave these people a deep respect for non-human living things as previous human incarnations. Their diet was based on hunting only certain types of animals, such as monkeys and birds, leaving the rest of the ecosystem balanced, with sufficient predators and prey to avoid the overpopulation or extinction of other species.

The belief that animals and plants as well as humans have souls is known as animism. It is striking how common and how widespread such beliefs were before the major monotheistic, people-centred religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam took root. Animistic beliefs account for a great deal of the considerate and often cautious relationships between man and nature found throughout most indigenous peoples still living in the world today.

About the interconnectedness of all things

Animism includes the belief that all forms of life and other natural materials are inextricably connected by an invisible force or spirit. A vast trove of detailed information about indigenous societies and their animistic beliefs was the subject of The Golden Bough, written around the turn of the twentieth century by a Scottish scholar called Sir James Frazer (1854–1941). This massive study of myth and religion caused outrage when it was first published because it compared the Christian story of Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the timing of Christian festivals such as Christmas, Easter and All Saints’ Day, with heathen festivals.

Frazer gathered evidence from hundreds of missionaries and officials throughout the British Empire who were working with, or ruling over, many native tribes. The book is packed with examples of animistic beliefs – an all-encompassing ideological glue that once stretched across the entire globe, from the Celtic druids of Europe to the Aboriginals in Australia, with Asian, American, African, Middle Eastern, Polynesian and even Arctic tribes echoing a similar belief in the one spirit force that touches all nature.

On the Polynesian island of Timor, in the South Pacific, it was sometimes deemed necessary for one tribe to wage war against another – perhaps for self-defence, or owing to a dispute over resources. When a tribe’s victorious warriors returned home the leader of the expedition was confined to a specially prepared hut, where for two months he would undergo thorough bodily and spiritual purification. During this time he was forbidden to visit his wife or feed himself – food had to be put into his mouth by another person. Sacrifices were offered to appease the souls of their dead enemies, whose heads had been taken as a means of communicating with their spirits. Part of the ceremony consisted of a dance accompanied by a song, recorded by Frazer: ‘ “Be not angry,” they sang, “because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky our heads might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us in peace . . .”’ It was through elaborate customs and taboos that violence was usually limited to being a last resort and, thanks also to such taboos, the chances of its escalation were minimized by the necessity of an expedition leader undergoing the laborious process of purifying his body and soul.

Tribes living so close to nature ensured that nothing ever went to waste. The Sami are a people who still live in northern Europe, on the fringes of the Arctic in Finland, Norway and Sweden. At the end of the last Ice Age they moved northwards from central Europe, pursuing herds of reindeer which dwelt in the forests that had replaced snow and ice. By 500 AD the Sami had learned how to domesticate reindeer to supply them with just about everything they needed for survival – from dragging sleighs to providing meat and milk. Clothes and tents were made from their skins, arrowheads and needles from their bones.

Sharing resources between all living things, animals or people, was central to the lives of animistic people. Some of the most common taboos didn’t prohibit things at all – rather they prompted obligations of generosity. The Penan tribe belongs to the Dayak people of Borneo. They are thought to have been part of the Austronesian expansion which took place about 1000 BC, eventually leading to the populating of Polynesia. A distinctive element of their culture is the requirement of always sharing wisely. This is called molong, a word meaning ‘never take more than necessary’. To molong a sago palm is to harvest the trunk with care, ensuring that the tree will sucker up from the roots. Molong is climbing a tree to gather fruit rather than cutting it down, or harvesting only the largest fronds of the rattan, leaving the smaller shoots so that they reach their proper size in another year. Whenever the Penan molong a fruit tree they mark it with a knife – a sign that means ‘Please share wisely.’ The greatest taboo in Penan society is see hun – a failure to share.

The tougher the living conditions, the more generous the human spirit. In Timbuktu, a city in present-day Mali that lies on the southern edge of the scorching Sahara desert, there’s an ancient tradition that still survives amongst some camel herders. It demands that any guest be given what he needs – even if it means slaughtering the last goat whose milk feeds the nomads’ children, or sharing the last drop of drinking water.

Some cultures venerated trees as much as animals, and for them the forests were the holiest of holies on earth. They were the sacred places of Celtic European pagans long before the onset of Christianity gave them a new, more abstract God to worship. The pagan beliefs of the Nordic people, who came from southern Scandinavia, the Netherlands and northern Germany, led them to worship their gods in woods, not temples.

Wyrd, from which the modern English word ‘weird’ originates, was an animistic concept of fate common to pagan beliefs. It explained the interconnectedness of all things, linking past actions to future events. Yggdrasil is a gigantic mythological ash tree that connects the nine worlds of Nordic cosmology. Its trunk forms the axis of the world. Beneath one of its roots lies the sacred Well of Wyrd, next to which reside the three Norns who engrave the Wyrd on the bark of the tree and look after it. So revered were trees that it was customary to offer sacrifices (both human and animal) to the gods by hanging them from tree branches.

Evidence of such rituals emerged in 1950, when a well-preserved body, now known as Tollund Man, dating back to the fourth century BC, was discovered in a Danish peat bog. A rope made of two twisted leather thongs was drawn tight around his neck and throat and then coiled like a snake over his shoulder and down his back. Copious quantities of a hallucinogenic fungus called ergot were found in his stomach, leading some experts to believe he was strung up in the branches of a nearby tree as part of a ritualistic sacrifice before being buried in the mud.

Animism was mankind’s natural global system of beliefs. Oral taboos gave human societies that did not dabble with agriculture sufficient strength, resilience and adaptability to survive the harshest of natural disasters. Tribes that believed in what most modern people consider magic or superstition fostered a spirit of resourcefulness, conservation and a hatred of waste that modern societies are only just beginning to appreciate should be, at the very least, second nature.

Civilizations in the Americas

Imagine an alien scientist looking down on his latest and greatest experiment – planet earth. More than three billion years have passed since he first sowed the seeds of life, wondering what on earth would happen and how they would take root. Now, literally millions of different life forms have emerged to sustain and take advantage of the planet’s living systems. So far, so good.

Right at the end of this epic horticultural experiment, just a tenth of a second before midnight when seen on the scale of a twenty-four-hour clock, he notices that in one part of the world a certain species, a biped ape called Homo sapiens, has made a rather sudden and dramatic change of lifestyle. By mastering the art of mass food production, this species has started to build enormous new nests, in the form of cities and civilizations, and in the process has been clearing vast tracts of natural forests for fields in which to cultivate crops and keep animals. What’s more, his experiment with agriculture has led to an explosive growth of populations which shows no sign of abating. As a result, a great deal of innovation, aggression and killing has emerged in a vicious competition for resources and power. Perhaps, thinks the alien, it would be a good idea to conduct a control experiment on the other side of the planet, just to see if the same thing happens there . . .

Some 5,000 years after adverse climate conditions caused the Natufians and others in the Fertile Crescent to dabble with agriculture (see page 95), hunter-gathering people in the Americas were just beginning to reap their first annual harvests. They had absolutely no idea that people on the other side of the world were building huge civilizations based on crops such as wheat, barley and rice, and farm animals like pigs, sheep, cows and goats. Thebes, Jerusalem, Jericho and Babylon were completely unknown to people in North, Central and South America.

For thousands of years these people lived by sharing in the state of nature. Native American people faced several challenges that made their attempts at civilization like no others. In south-central Mexico, where the river valleys provided the right soils for cultivation and the climate was conducive to growing annual crops, the only grass capable of domestication was a rather weedy and unappetizing wild bush called teosinte which grew along the banks of the Balsas River. In this part of the world there was no wild wheat, barley or rice.

To begin with teosinte had just five to ten seeds, each of which was encased in a hard shell designed by nature to survive the most acidic of animal stomachs. By choosing those plants with abnormally numerous seeds and those with the softest shells, the patient people of Central America eventually engineered the crop we know as maize or corn. It took as long as 5,000 years of painstaking artificial selection to convert unappetizing teosinte into a nutritious cob suitable for harvesting on an annual basis.

By 1100 BC a few Native Americans in central Mexico had begun to start their own experiment in living in a settled society. Stores, houses and fixed settlements were followed by terraced fields, annual harvests and seasonal cycles. Enough food was produced to allow former hunters and gatherers to become priests, rulers and artisans, freed up to worship, administer and trade.

The enormous and lengthy struggle to come up with easy-to-cultivate crops reaped huge rewards for these people, as it has for posterity. The labour of these New World agriculturalists eventually produced: chillies, sunflowers, pumpkins, peanuts, peppers, squashes, beans, courgettes, marrows, aubergines and avocados. Perhaps more significant today are tomatoes, potatoes and cacao beans for chocolate (the word comes from the Aztec xocolatl). Between them these crops, all of which originate in Central and South America, account for over half of all food grown throughout the modern world.

Early Native American agriculturalists also cultivated non-food crops like cotton, which they used to construct fishing nets and to make clothing. These were also the first people to extract latex from rubber trees, used to manufacture items that played an important role in their religious rituals. None of these crops spread outside Central and South America until Europeans arrived in the early 1500s.

The first settled people in the New World that have any kind of recorded history came from Mexico. They are known as the Olmecs, meaning ‘rubber people’. At first, their civilization looked very similar to those of other early settlers in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, their achievements were almost identical. Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, Olmecs developed a passion for arithmetic, driven by their desire to know when was the best time to plant and harvest crops. They used base 20 as their standard for counting. It was the considerable achievement of these Olmec people that they made the world’s first ever known use of the integer zero, allowing any number to be expressed simply by placing figures in a series of rows, with zero as a place holder.

The sky was their clock and, like the people of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Olmecs believed that the planets were driven by gods. Everything in their world moved in cycles depending on the sun, moon and planets, especially the bright morning star of Venus. Their annual calendar of 365 days (which had twenty months of eighteen days each, and five special days left over) was the most precise in the world, and the Olmecs are now thought to have been the first people to develop writing in the New World. Recently, road builders found a stone block in a pile of debris which shows sixty-two symbols of an ancient script, some of them representing animals, plants, insects and fish, which probably dates back as far as 900 BC.

Giant stone heads were hewn out of volcanic rock. Seventeen have been discovered to date, most near San Lorenzo and La Venta. Nearly four metres high and weighing up to forty tonnes, these were the Olmecs’ equivalent of the Egyptian Sphinx. The gods the Olmecs worshipped were based on representations found in nature and are not so different from the jackal-headed Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead. There was the feathered serpent and the rain spirit, represented in later Central American civilizations as Quetzalcoatl (Aztec) and Chaac (Mayan). Snakes were highly symbolic because it was believed they represented an umbilical connection between the earth and the spirit worlds.

Of Mayans and maize

The first Mayan settlements emerged in about 1000 BC, south of the Olmecs along the Yucatán Peninsula. Large-scale towns and cities, such as Tikal, Palenque, Copán and Calakmul, rose between 200 BC and 800 AD, rivalling settlements in the rest of the world both in size and sophistication.

The story of this civilization remained completely hidden from the modern world until 1839, when an American traveller and writer, John Lloyd-Stephens, went in search of ancient ruined cities that Mexican locals claimed lay buried deep in the jungle. With his English architect companion Frederick Catherwood, he discovered a number of ancient Mayan cities, including Copán and Palenque. Thanks to their accounts, historians have since been piecing together evidence of the people who built these cities, and what it was that made them tick.

Unfortunately, the task has been made a lot more complicated than it should have been. Although as many as 10,000 texts have been recovered from stone engravings and buildings, tens of thousands of precious books, written on paper made from the bark of fig trees, have been lost. The zeal of Christian Spanish invaders in the early sixteenth century, who regarded all Native American writing as the work of the devil, means that only three of the many original paper texts (called codices) now survive. One priest, Friar Diego de Landa, personally oversaw the destruction of hundreds of books and more than 5,000 precious works of art at a ceremonial bonfire on 12 July 1562. He later wrote about the event and the effect it had on the native people: ‘We found a large number of books . . . and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all. Which they [the natives] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’

One of the most precious surviving documentary sources, the Popol Vuh, was fortuitously written down by an unknown Spanish missionary in the 1540s. It sets out native beliefs that had been passed down orally over many generations. It reveals how crops lay at the very root of Mayan beliefs about how the world was created. Three divine creators in the form of water-dwelling feathered serpents decided to create humans to keep them company. First they tried to make them out of mud, but that didn’t work. Next they used wood, but that also proved unsuccessful. Finally, ‘true people’ were modelled out of maize, their flesh made of white and yellow corn and their arms and legs of corn meal.

This creation myth reveals why Central American civilizations evolved in very different ways from those on the other side of the world. The survival of their peoples depended completely on crops like maize, for the simple reason that they had no large domestic mammals. Since the arrival of humans at the end of the last Ice Age, nothing much larger than a turkey had survived (see page 86).

There were no pastoral nomadic people, like those on the Eurasian steppes, whose lives were built on tending domesticated herds of animals while constantly moving from place to place. The constant harassment such people inflicted on the settled civilizations of the Middle East, Europe and Asia never occurred in the New World of the Americas. There were no major military imbalances here – no haves versus have-nots – because no one had the ability to travel quickly on horseback to use the tactical advantages of surprise, height and speed in battle.

Carts were never invented, because there were no large animals suitable for domestication to pull them. No one had any use for the wheel, which although it has been found in Native American toys, was never deployed in real life. No wheels meant no gears, no pulleys or other civil engineering tools like treadmills, used by the Greeks and Romans to build their massive lighthouses, waterwheels and aqueducts, all of which were designed to make their worlds less vulnerable to the unpredictable forces of nature.

Without the arms race between nomadic and settled people that caused wave upon wave of war and destruction across Europe and Asia, these people never discovered how to smelt iron. Nothing so strong was necessary. Gold and silver were theirs in abundance, and copper too. These metals’ softness and suppleness made them ideal for crafting long-lasting jewellery and other artefacts for religious worship and ornamentation.

The effects of these differences between the New World and the Old became more profound as the centuries rolled by, not that Native Americans had any inkling that they were militarily inferior to others until Spanish explorers arrived in the early sixteenth century (see page 235). Without horses, chariots, roads and wheels, the relationship between these civilizations and the natural world travelled on a unique trajectory. Perhaps the history of Central America represents what might have happened to the Egyptian civilization were it not for the invasion of the Hyksos in 1674 BC, which dragged those ancient people reluctantly into the wheel world (see page 112).

Desperately seeking rain

For many years historians regarded Native Americans as essentially peaceful peoples because archaeological evidence suggests that until about 1000 AD most towns and cities in Central and South America were unfortified. It is now apparent that there was a much darker side to their way of life. Unable to rely on the enormous benefits of animal power, these people were totally dependent on their annual harvests of maize and other crops. Traditionally it was the king’s duty to convince the gods to bring sufficient rain. Government policy was therefore fixed on finding effective ways of contacting the spirit world to curry its favour.

The Olmecs came up with a unique form of dialogue with the spirit world which also dates the historical origins of competitive sport. It was constructed around a ball game called ulama. Dozens of prehistoric ball courts dating back to 1400 BC have been excavated in ancient cities all over Central America. The oldest yet discovered is at Paso de la Amada. It is approximately eighty metres long and eight metres wide.

Ancient rubber balls have been found perfectly preserved in swampy sacrificial bogs alongside other religious offerings, suggesting the game had a religious purpose. The object was to score by bouncing the ball through one of two vertical stone rings up to six metres above each end of the court. Two teams of between two and five players would try to accomplish this using their hips, thighs, forearms and heads, but without touching the ball with either their hands or feet. Hip belts, knee pads, headdresses and protective masks were all part of the players’ kit, and were often adorned with symbolic figures and pictures of the gods.

Although the game was sometimes played for fun, championships were usually held during religious festivals, when contests between rival kingdoms and states would be fought, quite literally, to the death. The members of the losing side were ritualistically sacrificed to the gods, their bodies buried underneath the court and their skulls sometimes turned into cores around which new rubber balls could be crafted. For the Mayans and their successors the Aztecs, this game symbolized a battle between the lords of the underworld and the peoples of the earth.

Kings and their priests gambled everything on their efforts to please the gods to ensure there was sufficient rain for their crops. The lengths to which they would go were horrifically revealed by a series of excavations that began in 1895. In that year the American archaeologist and diplomat Edward Thompson purchased, for seventy-five dollars, a Mexican plantation that he knew included the ruins of the sacred Mayan city of Chichen Itza.

The focus of his attention was the Sacred Cenote, a ninety-metre-long sacrificial pool that the Mayans believed provided a portal to the spirit world, possibly because the Yucatàn Peninsula is composed of porous limestone, which makes naturally occurring lakes and pools extremely rare.

Between 1904 and 1911 Thompson and his team recovered more than 30,000 objects from the pool, first by dredging it and then by donning diving suits and fumbling in the pitch dark twenty metres below the water’s surface. Among the thousands of objects recovered were knives, sticks, bells, plates, jugs, figurines, jewellery and ornaments.

Among Thompson’s discoveries was a sacrificial knife with a handle carved into the shape of two writhing rattlesnakes, which was used to gouge out the still-beating hearts of human victims. A gold plate dating to c.900 AD shows a Toltec warrior wearing an eagle headdress sacrificing a Mayan captive. His costume signifies a descending bird of prey. In his left hand he holds the sacrificial knife, while in his right he grasps the freshly extracted heart of his victim. Four assistants can be seen splaying the victim over the sacrificial stone slab. One looks directly outwards towards you – the witness.

Thompson found the bones of more than forty-two victims in the small lake. Half of them are estimated to have been younger than twenty when they were sacrificed, and fourteen were probably under twelve. The Mayans believed that the younger the victim, the more pleased the gods would be, because younger souls were considered purer. By the time of the Aztec dominion (c.1248–1521 AD) child sacrifice was especially common in times of drought. If sacrifices were not given to Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water, the rains would not come and the crops would not grow. Tlaloc required the tears of the young to wet the earth to help bring rain. As a result, priests are said to have made children cry before their ritual sacrifice, sometimes by pulling out their nails. The Mayans’ desperation for rain lay at the heart of the reason why, by about 900 AD, their civilization had fallen into decline. Increasingly severe droughts, exacerbated by the effects of deforestation, soil erosion and intensive farming, led to starvation, invasions and violent contests with neighbouring people over scarce natural resources.

The rise and fall of the Aztecs

In 1428 the Aztecs formed an alliance of three city states – Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan – centred in the valley of Mexico. This was the final native Central American civilization before European invaders arrived in the 1520s. It stretched from coast to coast, except for a small area to the south-east called the Kingdom of Tlaxcalteca. This state allied with the Spanish in 1521 to help destroy the Aztec King Moctezuma, bringing the history of independent indigenous American civilizations to a close (see page 238). Better access to remaining resources was at the heart of the Aztec triple alliance, which redoubled its efforts to get the gods on side by increasing the number of human sacrifices to prodigous levels. Aztec rulers such as Ahuitzotl (1486–1503) even went to war with neighbouring states specifically to acquire additional prisoners to use as fodder for sacrifices – conflicts known to history as the Flower Wars.

New buildings were erected in the magnificent Aztec island capital Tenochtitlan, which rose out of an enormous lake and was connected to the mainland by a giant retractable causeway. This remarkable metropolis lay on the site of the current Mexico City, although the lake has now been drained to make way for modern buildings. Little remains of the ancient city, which was destroyed by Spanish invaders in 1521 (see page 238).

The Aztecs believed that the sixty-metre-high Great Pyramid they built at the heart of the city would ensure that Tlaloc, god of rain and fertility, and Huitzilopochtli, god of war and the sun, looked more kindly on them. Each god had its own temple on top of the giant stepped structure. Consecration rituals for the Great Pyramid’s two gods in 1487 were reported to have involved several thousand human sacrifices in the hope of persuading the gods to send more rain.

From Nazcas to Incas

Other civilizations appeared along the coastal regions of South America because living by agriculture in the heavily forested interior was simply too difficult. Early Peruvian cultures such as the Nazca (c.300 BC–800 AD) and the Moche (c.100–800 AD) shared many cultural habits with the Central Americans further north. Gold and silver were panned from rivers flowing down from the vast Andes mountains and traded for Mexican maize. Commercial contact led to the exchange of similar systems of religious belief.

The Nazca were responsible for what are still regarded as almost superhuman depictions of their animal gods. On a 500-square-kilometre plateau these people created hundreds of perfectly straight lines and geometric patterns by painstakingly brushing the arid sand and grit to one side. Look down on the landscape from an aeroplane and more than seventy enormous pictures of animals, insects and humans reveal themselves, some of them as much as 270 metres long. Look at them from the ground, and nothing can be seen but paths in the dust. How on earth could these people have constructed such art (called geoglyphs) without being able to see what they were creating from above? It’s one of history’s big mysteries.

The most likely reason why the Nazca created these enormous images is that, as for the peoples of Central America, communicating with the gods was at the heart of everything that mattered. The night sky was their audience chamber and the arid ground their advertising board. Pictures of monkeys, spiders, hummingbirds and lizards were all gifts to the gods, offered in exchange for sufficient quantities of water so their crops could grow.

The Moche people lived at the same time as the Nazca. They were farmers who left an excellent record of their way of life via the vivid pictures painted on their pots. Scenes of hunting, fishing, war, punishment, sexual acts and elaborate religious celebrations are all clearly illustrated. Pyramids consecrated with the remains of human victims have also been found – yet more attempts to secure divine approval.

The apex of South America’s ancient coastal civilizations came with the rise of the Incas. Once just a tribe in the area of Cuzco, they rose to dominance during the twelfth century AD. Strong leadership and a cult that worshipped their rulers as representatives of the gods on earth helped these people build a federal tribute empire in which other city states and kingdoms submitted to their overlordship in return for protection and assistance during times of trouble.

Unlike the Central American peoples, the Incas benefited greatly from a domesticated mammal large enough to be useful – the llama. The presence of this pack animal caused them to build an extensive network of more than 20,000 kilometres of roads and trails, some of them crossing the Andes at heights of up to 5,000 metres. There were no carts or wheels, but human runners, posted at intervals of approximately twenty-five kilometres on each main trail, meant messages could be sent quickly by relay, covering distances of more than 200 kilometres in a day. Instead of paper, parchment or clay, these runners carried pieces of rope which bore messages encoded in an elaborate series of knots that represented numbers and even phonetic sounds. This has still not been fully deciphered.

The roads built by Inca emperors converged on their capital city, Cuzco, regarded as the navel of their world. In 1438 the Supreme Inca, Pachacuti (‘world-shaker’), mounted an ambitious expansion programme, and with the help of his son Tupac brought most of modern-day Peru, Ecuador and Chile under Inca rule. They divided the empire into four main regions, each with its own governor. Most people accepted Inca rule willingly, since it provided them with a range of powerful paternalistic services to bail them out when times got tough.

No one ever went hungry in the Inca Empire, and there is no evidence of poverty. If roads were damaged or houses fell down, the region’s governor would immediately send troops to repair and rebuild them. A national workforce was manned by males between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who were obliged to spend five years serving the state and its people. State storehouses were kept in every major town and city, and were opened to the people in times of emergency to provide food and clothing. People were able to pay their taxes in kind by weaving cloth or providing food. Each village had a record keeper whose job it was to monitor the production of goods by the inhabitants, some for use locally, some for dispatch to central stores.

Marriages took place at village festivals. It was the responsibility of neighbours to build newly-weds a small house in which to live. Married couples enjoyed a year without having to pay tax, to help them get off to a good start. When they had children they were entitled to another two years of tax-free living. Older citizens paid less tax as their productivity waned, and when they could no longer provide for themselves they were given food, help and clothes from the state’s central stores.

Inca Emperors were fastidious about their bloodline, insisting that male heirs marry their sisters. In this way the belief in an unbroken line from the gods to the rulers could be preserved. Pretty and talented girls were chosen by state inspectors to be sent to court to join the acllahuasi, the House of the Sun Virgins. Maize was chewed by these virgins to help ferment a sacred Incan brew, drunk by thousands at annual religious festivals in an effort to please the gods, who they believed would then look down on them and be satisfied to see that their grateful people were happy. Apart from his queen (and sister), every emperor was allowed to choose as many wives as he wished. This meant that by the time of the eleventh Inca Emperor thousands of children had been fathered by him and his predecessors, forming a unique administrative aristocracy which tightly bound the state to its people.

As with the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt (see page 107), the Inca Emperor was a god on earth. His currency was gold, which was regarded as the droppings of the gods. Gold was divine – its colour the same as the shining sun. It was easy to craft, and unlike iron, or even silver, which eventually tarnishes, it stays pure and lasts for ever. In the end this is what attracted the sixteenth-century European conquistadors, whose appetite for other people’s treasure had no limits.

Neither the religious fundamentalism, which reached its peak in the practice of human sacrifice, nor the idea of a benevolent state that looked after all its citizens in times of need survived the onslaught of the European invaders. Mayan, Olmec, Aztec and Inca beliefs rapidly diffused into a new mixed culture, while their cities were lost in the mountains and jungles. Within a generation of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of what he thought was the east coast of Asia in 1492, the awesome power of both the Aztec and Inca Empires had been destroyed by just a handful of Spanish adventurers (see page 235). How these invaders crossed the world, what it was they were looking for, and why they were so quickly able to conquer these empires are some of the most extraordinary stories in modern human history. They began in one of the most unlikely, inhospitable places on earth – deep in the dusty deserts of Arabia.